Holocaust Memorial Day.

 Holocaust Memorial Day. 

Today needs no explanation. Today is the most painful of all days. It is a day heavy with reflection, a sobering, chastening day, a day for raw reminiscence, a day of all days, the day the global Jewish population try desperately hard to collect their emotions together and just express their feelings in their own very personal way. 

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, a day that carries with it that heartbreaking solemnity, an indefinable gravity and the most dreadful of all realisations. Because today we are reminded of hellish suffering, man's inhumanity to man, torture and torment on the most barbaric scale and death as the inevitable consequence that can barely be comprehended. How was it allowed to happen and what kind of sick, twisted and murderous mind would think, even for a moment, that the death of six million Jews was morally acceptable? But Adolf Hitler, without a shred of remorse or compunction, shamelessly wiped out most of the global Jewish population and thought nothing of it. There were no regrets and besides who cared at the time? The world may well have seemed as though it had turned the other cheek but my grandpa knew every shocking detail.  

But this is my story and one that has to be told. It is not a cautionary tale because this would imply that humanity has to wrestle with its conscience. We know what happened and nobody can be at fault for any of the horrors and abominations apart from those who perpetrated these callous, disgusting and barely imaginable, abominable acts of genocide on the grandest scale. My plea is that this should never be allowed to happen again at any time in the passage of history in any generation. 

One day, at the height of the Second World War, my brave and formidable grandpa stepped out of the home he was living in with my lovely and adorably affectionate grandma and decided to buy some cigarettes in a local shop. He was going about his business and he wasn't hurting anybody. He was just living his life and looking after his family. But that world was about to be shattered into a million pieces of shrapnel, bloodshed, carnage and destruction. 

Around my grandparents, life was falling apart at the seams. Buildings, shops, homes and livelihoods were being irreparably destroyed, fires were burning and six million Jews were dying helplessly. On this one day though my dear grandpa would be the victim of the ultimate crime, the man who just happened to be Jewish in the wrong place and the wrong time. He almost paid the price for his religion and the persecution complex that has haunted all Jews since then is perfectly understandable. 

You can only imagine the aftermath of this brutal attack on my grandpa's freedoms, this knife in the back of humanity, this despicably violent violation. As he opened the door of his home, blood pouring from his nose and running down his sunken cheeks, my grandma must have greeted him with the shocked astonishment that any human being could descend to this most inhumane level. What on earth had happened to Jack, my proud grandfather? This had to be stopped because who knew what the Nazis were capable of doing and what further acts of savagery and manslaughter had they in mind? 

Still, both my grandparents and mum, with nothing left but the clothes they were wearing, shuffled wearily towards some far distant railway station and just jumped onto the first train. How they must have been mortified and inconsolable when they discovered that my grandparents family had perished in the gas chambers. But they were now in safe territory, a heavenly moment in their lives. 

Now that family would be bundled onto the cattle trucks and never heard or seen again. Their lives would be over, annihilated and the repercussions that the Holocaust would leave behind would be condemned to ashes and smoke. You apologise for using such graphic descriptions but how can you convey to today's children the unremitting misery, the torturous punishment meted out by those low life Nazis whose atrocities can never really be forgiven. 

Of course, deeply moral questions should be asked about German killing machines who must be shown just a little compassion and leniency. After all, the acts of our ancestors should not be held against them just because today's Germans possess entirely different mentalities. The point is though that the Far Right Nazi extremists are still prowling around the globe, spewing out antisemitic poison from their mouths,  hatred, vile vitriol, denial, an insistence that the Jews have just made this all up. 

Well, here's the frightening evidence. At the height of the Second World War these are the stories that must have haunted my grandparents and mum permanently. One morning my grandpa set out to buy a packet of cigarettes and by the time he'd got home his nose had been broken with blood pouring out and a horrified wife could only weep with despair. Presumably the Nazi stormtroopers had threatened to kill my grandpa with a rifle and threatened to take all of his worldly possessions. 

It took another 45 years for the full horror to register with my wonderfully affectionate and beautiful grandma. Having moved into their new home in Gants Hill, Essex in the early 1970s, my grandpa and grandma settled down to what they must have hoped would be a contented retirement. They were both approaching old age but still hopeful that life would resume normal service. 

For my poor grandma though it all unravelled nightmarishly. One day you suspect that she woke up and discovered that in 1976 the Nazis were still there. They were still hovering around my grandma and still ready to kill if they had to. Now my poor grandpa could only look on in stunned astonishment, as my lovely grandma started screaming hysterically, convinced that the Nazis were about to pull the trigger.

This is not to suggest that I've been psychologically traumatised by what I saw. But it wasn't pleasant. My poor grandpa started throwing my poor grandma across the living room, growling like a grizzly bear, boiling over with red-blooded anger and exasperation. Of course he didn't resort to physical violence because my grandpa adored my grandma and always would. 

So that's my Holocaust story folks. At some point during this day, you would like to think that all of the Holocaust deniers will just accept the error of their ways, becoming both ashamed of themselves and always guilty. But 76 years have now passed since the end of the Second World War and for some of us you doubt whether the sceptical naysayers will ever come to terms with what they believe is the truth. You would like to think that they will come to their senses. But you very much doubt it. Never ever forget the Holocaust.