Holocaust Memorial Day: A terrible reminder of the danger of dehumanising minorities and foreigners

Monday 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day, a day that marks 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. It is a day of commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, but also of education about the nature of genocide and historical memory.

Last week, as we have done for the past 25 years, the University of Glasgow hosted its annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture. Long supported by the Association of Jewish Refugees, this is – as far as we are aware – one of the longest-running series of its type in the UK, with only a few comparable series internationally.

This year, the University of Huddersfield’s Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls spoke to a crowded lecture theatre about the physical remains her forensic archaeology team had unearthed at the site of the Treblinka extermination camp.

These remains are meagre: the Nazis went to great lengths to cover up the camp after it was taken out of use in 1943. Nevertheless, the few, everyday objects they found eloquently attest to the humanity of the camp’s victims, as well as to the continuing need to remember the individual and collective human tragedies and failings that brought about the Holocaust.

Survivors of the Nazi's Auschwitz-Birkenau camp are led through its infamous gate in 1945 following its liberation by Soviet troops (Picture: Wojtek Laski) | Getty Images

Resisting divisive politics

Viewed in this manner, Holocaust remembrance is a profoundly unifying act. Holocaust Memorial Day brings us together annually in the UK to mourn, to remember, and to remind ourselves of the atrocities that human beings are capable of inflicting on our own kind. This annual memorial becomes all the more vital as the last survivors of the Holocaust pass away.

Reflecting this role, Holocaust Memorial Day underlines the importance of resisting those who would seek to divide rather than unify us when faced with formidable social and political challenges. This applies, of course, to those who use the language of populism at home or abroad to dehumanise minorities or foreigners of one stripe or another, but also more generally to the dangers of seeking to turn some elements of society against others.

Holocaust Memorial Day also cautions against the devaluation of the language of genocide, and the need to be wary of the instrumentalisation of that term to serve divisive political agendas.

Liberal values

It is possible – indeed, vital – to come together in remembrance, to lament together the Holocaust and the genocides in Cambodia, Srebrenica, Rwanda, and of Yazidis at the hands of Da’esh. Yet it is also important to take great care in the messages we impart to one another in such acts of remembrance: to remind ourselves, perhaps, of the need to preserve liberal values of tolerance and mutual respect against those who would test that resolve for their own ends.

Remembrance and education are integral to Judaism, intertwined in building and maintaining our communal Jewish identity. In the same fashion, Holocaust Memorial Day provides a moment to bow our heads and to remember and learn together about and from the Holocaust and subsequent genocides.

Such acts of remembrance are more than education for its own sake; rather, they are steps towards preventing such tragedies from recurring in the future.

Dr Henry Lovat and Dr Mia Spiro, University of Glasgow