Why Holocaust Memorial Day is also about modern-day politics

At around 8pm today, I will stop whatever I am doing and take a moment to think about this day 80 years ago. Across the world, people will place lighted candles in their window in remembrance.

Because January 27, 1945, was the date on which the world began to discover the truth about the greatest crime against humanity perpetrated in the 20th, possibly any, century. The liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army revealed murders on a scale beyond imagination – more than a million.

It led to the association of that place with the worst type of human cruelty and the date was recognised internationally as Holocaust Memorial Day. This year the anniversary has a particular poignancy as it will very shortly pass from living memory into history.

The handful of survivors who remain from that horror may not be alive by the next major anniversary to share their personal testimonies and remind us how easily evil can take control if we let it.

A group of child survivors at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp, on the day of its liberation by the Red Army, January 27, 1945 (Picture: Alexander Vorontsov) | Getty Images

Jews and others dehumanised

We will always have reminders in those haunting pictures which gave us, gives us, a glimpse of the trauma which lay beyond the fences and the watchtowers. Grey-and-blue-striped clothes clinging to the frames of those whose lives used to be something so much more not too long before.

Auschwitz itself of course has been preserved as a reminder. But we must also be careful to recognise the warning for our own times that it represents, and not delude ourselves into thinking that we are somehow immune to it happening again.

Each year parliament holds a special Holocaust Memorial Debate and this year I was struck by the number of people referencing the time before the Holocaust in which Jewish people, as well as homosexual, Romany and disabled populations, were dehumanised. The creation of attitudes which made the Holocaust possible.

Since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, we have seen an exponential increase in the number of antisemitic attacks across the UK. Incidents more than doubled in the first six months of 2024 from the same period in the previous year, with a 246 per cent increase in damage to Jewish-owned property.

Rising Islamophobia

Islamophobia too is increasing on a frightening scale with online hate speech, assault and threats against Muslims up from 600 to more than 2,000 in a year.

We are also hearing demeaning and dehumanising language being used about other groups. I am increasingly concerned at the number of people I meet who are afraid for their safety: immigrants, the LGBT+ community and women, as well as Jews and Muslims.

We have always been a society proud of its diversity and inclusiveness. The word refugee was coined here to recognise the Huguenots who fled from France to live in a place in London called the Refuge. We welcomed people fleeing from Nazi persecution and offered them a home, so too with generations before and since.

When I pause this evening, it will not just be to remember those who have been victims, but to commit myself to preventing others becoming victims in the future. We must keep alive the flame of remembrance, freedom and the right of every human to a life lived in respect and tolerance which, for me, those Holocaust candles also represent.

Christine Jardine is Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West