Holocaust memorial day.

Holocaust memorial day.

Across the decades the grief and ever present sense of mourning hangs over today's generation like the darkest of all cloaks. The pain and suffering can still be felt and touched even though the passage of time should have healed broken souls and torn hearts. There can be no explanation for today because today represents something far more hurtful than any of us can possibly imagine. It is a day for sombreness, deep reflection, raw contemplation and all of those emotions that some of us believe should never leave us

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day or Yom HaShoah, a day to gather our thoughts and think deeply about the criminal loss of  six million Jewish lives, the cold blooded murder of families and children, the destruction of hope, the dashing of dreams, the brutal death of millions of ambitions, the complete elimination of  a  generation and the unforgivable sins perpetrated by evil and barbaric minds.

Personally, as the grandson of a Holocaust survivor the savagery and callousness of it can only leave me with the weeping scars of loss that can never be fully erased. How to understand and reason those abominable acts of torture, those vile and disgracefully reprehensible beatings, the gas chambers, the humiliations, the stripping of clothes in readiness for death, the tears and heartache followed by the unbearable silence.

They tell us that we should show compassion and consideration for those Germans who are living their lives now because they were not the ones who were actively involved, complicit in the horrendousness of it all. And yet 74 years after the end of the Second World War these are the harrowing images burnt onto our minds because they, quite understandably, had yet to be born.

But it should be told immediately and clearly that what happened back then can still be seen, recalled, vividly described and documented because the sights we were exposed to 70 years ago do, to some extent, live in our subconscious. I can still see my lovely and wonderfully affectionate grandmother being terrorised quite cruelly by the nightmarish images of Nazi stormtroopers threatening to smash down the front door of their home and trying to kill my grandparents pitilessly and ruthlessly. They didn't witness what I saw with dumbfounded eyes because the Holocaust deniers simply refuse to believe.

They didn't see my delightful grandmother screaming hysterically at the top of her voice because in her poor, tormented mind the Nazis were still directly behind her, taunting her, attacking her, pushing and shoving her with unreasonable force. The whole terrifying ordeal that was the Holocaust can only serve as a salutary reminder to all of us that if we stop praying, remembering and crying, then the horrific tragedy of the Sho'a will just be another chapter in the history of our lives.

So it is that we settle down in our offices, warehouses and shops for the daily work duties and the schoolchildren try desperately hard to both comprehend the gravity of what happened and the reign of terror that held all who perished in the Holocaust in their grip. This has to be the right time to bow our heads, a time for soul baring solemnity and hoping that one day we will wake up in the morning without the ear splitting sound of gun fire and yet more death.

For today alone it may be advisable to just stop for a while dwelling on those who were never allowed to live because they were different. Quite inexplicably they had to die for their belief systems and their religious traditions. Holocaust Memorial Day is today and for those who were permanently traumatised it has to be the right time to think back to a period of history when those who were deprived of life can still be loved and cherished. Never ever forget the Holocaust.