People with hopes and dreams, anxieties and insecurities, humour and resilience people who loved, were loved and are still loved by those who are living today. In my opinion, the best way to remember is to immerse yourself in the stories of people who were there. And with the rising tide of antisemitism and fascism around the world, it feels more pertinent than ever to remember those whose lives were stolen (both physically and mentally), to ensure such hatred never seeps so deeply into society again. In fact, some survivors are still alive to tell the tale – memoirists like Dr Edith Eger and Eddie Jaku can still recall the horrors with burning clarity. So although the Holocaust is history, it’s really not so distant. For many second- or third-generation survivors, the trauma lives on inside our hearts. It’s hard to find a Jewish person living in Britain today who doesn’t have their own story to tell often, like mine, it’s a story of luck that their family tree still exists at all.
Or my colleague, who has no extended family past her grandparents, because they all perished in Auschwitz. Or my cousin’s grandparents, who managed to flee Vienna for the United States, after they lost their basic human rights in the place they had called home. He kept the yellow star he was forced to wear until he passed away in Israel in his nineties. Like my grandfather, who ran away from a forced labour camp in Bulgaria in 1945. Of course, you’ll already know what the Holocaust was – the genocide carried out by the Nazis during World War II, in which six million Jews were murdered – but you won’t necessarily know the myriad stories behind those numbers, and the stories of millions more people who managed to survive. Yet, the devastation and destruction it caused lives on today, which is why remembering it is so important. It’s easy enough to think that the Holocaust is simply a relic of the past that it belongs only in history textbooks or in museum displays.
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