Always remember, never forget
On Holocaust Memorial Day, it is vital to remember the genocide of the death camps, and the lasting impact it had on the world
Holocaust Memorial Day marks the anniversary of the day Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by allied soldiers.
Approximately 1.1 million people were murdered at the camp, 90% of these were Jewish. The camp was a symbol of the death camp network which was contracted by the Nazis during the Second World War.
On Thursday it was 77 years since this liberation day. Stories of those who survived the horrors of the death camps have been told again and again almost every year since.
This is exactly how it should, and needs, to be.
Being able to hear the words of these people directly from their own lips is the most powerful way to keep their memory alive.
It is also through these words that we can see how society was warped into thinking the people who were sent to the camps were the problem.
The Nazis had conquered large swathes of Europe by the time they started the mass deportation of Jews and other ethinic groups.
The almost total control they had on the German population allowed them to carry out the atrocities, but it started with them dividing society into ‘us and them’ and then being voted in on these policies.
It didn’t start with death camps, but the camps were a conclusion of an evil regime convincing a population that all of their nation’s problems had been caused by people who lived among them.
Remembering this is almost as important as remembering images of the death camps and those who were sent there.
The Nazis didn’t take power in a bloody coup; they did so with swathes of public support behind them. The scale of their industrial slaughter was only truly realised years later.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the charity set up to organise the memorial day,
They outline that on HMD, they remember all victim of the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and persecution of other groups, and those killed in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
“Together we bear witness for those who endured genocide, and honour the survivors and all those whose lives were changed beyond recognition,” the charity have said.
Many of the survivors have a sense of not understanding why they survived. They were dragged into camps by a murderous regime with the intention of being slaughtered; but the Nazis failed to kill them all.
Hearing the memories of the Holocaust survivors in their own words is one of the greatest tools to defend the world from the hell of what was carried out by the Nazis.
The events of the Holocaust can never be erased, but learning from how a country was able to be convinced that putting people into camps and slowly wiped from the face of the earth is integral in preventing it from ever happening again.
