Holocaust Memorial Day.

 Holocaust Memorial Day.

The images have now become painfully familiar, the memories horrifically permanent and the faces tortured with pain, suffering, heartbreak, poignancy and unimaginable trauma. This is not a day for blame, anger, recrimination, hatred, intolerance or slanderous accusations. We have heard this mantra over and over again, the one where the social commentators insist that we never seem to learn the lessons of history. We know this to be true because surely this is stating the obvious. 

Today the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, that seminal moment in time when the Holocaust officially came to an end. After six years of punishing, excruciatingly unbearable death and destruction, the world finally breathed an enormous sigh of relief. As the years and decades have gone by, the questions seemed to multiply and the post mortem reflections and reminiscences grow louder and even harder to explain. Of course the Holocaust may be completely beyond our understanding and rationale but, for a vast majority of us, we can but pray that it may never happen again. 

Once again, the yearly gathering of  prime ministers, religious leaders, presidents, dignitaries, ambassadors and political figures of every denomination will be present in Auschwitz. They will be there not out of any obligation or necessity because that would be regarded as an outrage. They will be there as benevolent members of humanity, as caring, compassionate individuals, people who are there to pay their deepest respects for the one of the most despicable violations of man's inhumanity to man, woman and child. 

When Adolf Hitler, accompanied by his evil henchmen, Goebbels and Eichmann, had finally surrendered in 1945, damage limitation had been accepted as an inevitable consequence for a global catastrophe that nobody could have predicted. But once again the world unites under a huge canopy of shared mourning, spine chilling solemnity, grave prayer, introspective thoughts, quiet privacy and just being in the moment. 

There will be hours of haunting silence, stunned stares into the middle distance, rivers of tears and a generation whose lives were torn and paralysed by fear, terror and constant apprehension. There will be a gruesome sense of loss, desolation, desperation and deprivation, an aching sensation that may never go away. And then there were those who lost mothers, fathers, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, children and those who will remain irreplaceable. 

And yet we will never forget those filthy, pinched faces, the millions of adults and children wearing the now tragically distinctive striped clothing, the grubby pyjamas, the weak and lifeless, the drawn and haggard, sunken cheeks, the weeping, sobbing, crying multitudes. They stood by the electrified barbed wire that history will never forget for all the wrong reasons, thin, petrified, trembling, pleading for mercy and stretching out wasted muscles and arms to anybody who may have been listening and watching. 

The Holocaust is now frozen in time, long forgotten by those who would rather bury their heads in the sand. But the reality is that six million Jews were murdered in the gas chambers, mercilessly locked away in disgusting squalor. Of course there were the gypsies, the gay community and those who were dismissed as supposedly imperfect, totally unconnected to the Aryan ideal of mental and physical supremacy. 

But for those of us who remain steadfastly proud members of the global Jewish population, we should never forget those grey and dark buildings, the terrifying lamps by the side of the Auschwitz rail line and the cattle car that carried millions to death and annihilation. Of course we should always remember those vividly obscene chimney stacks where the black smoke of mutilated bodies would provide the Holocaust with its most horrendous backdrop. 

Of course we should never eliminate from our minds the humiliation, degradation, starvation, the endless beatings, the bloodthirsty savagery, the evil dehumanisation. For those of us who are grandsons of Holocaust survivors, this is much more personal than any could ever hope to imagine. The gory details have been endlessly documented and recounted over and over again. Time has been a great healer but every so often you are reminded of the grief and ghastliness of losing loved ones helplessly. You could be filled with resentment but you slowly realise that the crimes of our ancestors have to be put into some semblance of perspective. Never ever forget the Shoah and the Holocaust and never, ever, ever again.