Be the light in the darkness is an affirmation and a call to action for everyone marking HMD. This theme asks us to consider different kinds of ‘darkness’, for example, identity-based persecution, misinformation, denial of justice; and different ways of ‘being the light’, for example, resistance, acts of solidarity, rescue and illuminating mistruths.
https://www.hmd.org.uk/what-is-holocaust-memorial-day/this-years-theme/
For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Amanda Gorman, ‘The Hill We Climb’
The darkness that overwhelmed Europe’s Jews under Nazi persecution has engulfed so many since then, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Cambodia and Darfur. And today in China and in Myanmar, Uighur and Rohingya Muslims face the threat of genocide. We’ve been here before, again and again, and every time, when it’s over, we pledge that we will never again allow hatred to triumph. But at the point when the world could make that pledge real, could stop genocide in its tracks, then we hesitate, fatally. Now is that point, yet again, when we need to name what is happening, with all of the implications and responsibilities that carries, to shine a light on what is happening now, rather than afterwards.
And the darkness creeps back again too, when far right activists wear their Holocaust denial openly. We’ve seen the swastika flag flown in Charlottesville. The ‘Camp Auschwitz’ T shirt in the Capitol Building. The British Union of Fascists banner in Trafalgar Square. It’s not that we haven’t seen it in daylight before – it has never really gone away. But the murky corners of the internet have proved to be the ideal environment for conspiracy theories to grow, to be shared, to ensnare more and more people. People who start off as 9-11 truthers, anti-vaxxers, Covid-hoax activists, almost any conspiracy theory you care to mention, will find Holocaust denial thriving on the websites and forums. And it spills out, and where it isn’t opposed, it gains confidence and feels emboldened, legitimised, empowered. It is, as David Baddiel says, ‘the archetypal lie in our culture, from which all the other lies fan out’. It is so very hard to counter. Facts, evidence, personal testimony, all seem to bounce off without leaving any mark. But we have to speak the truth anyway, we have to offer the facts, the evidence, the personal testimony, the common sense to counter the fantasy, the rigour to expose the lies. We have to call it out whenever and wherever we encounter it. Baddiel’s superb documentary did just that, with passion and clarity.
I don’t have my own story to tell. So I will carry on reading and sharing both the scholarship and the personal testimonies, of those whose accounts shine light not only on what happened at those other times and in those other places but what is happening now.
My 2020/21 Reading List
- Susi Bechhofer – Rosa’s Child: One Woman’s Search for her Past
- Miriam Darvas – Farewell to Prague
- Saul Friedlander – Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination
- Anna Hajkova – The Last Ghetto: An Every History of Theresienstadt
- Heda Margolius Kovaly – Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968
- Eva Noack-Mosse – Last Days of Theresienstadt
- Michael Rosen – The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II
Passing Time 