Holocaust Memorial Day matters more than ever
The rise of anti-Semitism after the 7 October pogrom shows that we need to remember what genocide really means.
In recent months, we have witnessed open and explicit anti-Semitism in the West. This has been accompanied, perversely, by denials that the anti-Jewish pogrom took place in Israel on 7 October at all, alongside a minimising and relativising of the historic Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Historical reality is being bastardised in the process.
In the wake of the International Court of Justice in the Hague issuing a less-than-definitive judgement yesterday, and however much some may worry about civilian casualties in Gaza, it is worth noting the problem that opponents of the war use the Genocide Convention – brought in following the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews – against Israel, the country in which many descendants of those Holocaust victims now live. Such trends mean that this year, in particular, Holocaust Memorial Day is worth focusing on.
This Substack features an essay by Mo Lovatt on the topic, as well as a filmed recording of a recent conversation between Austin Williams and author Jake Wallis Simons about his new book, Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It.
Claire
Saturday 27 January is international Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). In the UK, and in many other countries around the globe, people will come together to remember the victims of the Holocaust: the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, as well as the millions more who belonged to other persecuted groups.
In 2010, I directed the National Holocaust Memorial Day at London’s Guildhall on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the ‘theme’ for the commemoration, we focused on the story of The Oneg Shabbat. It is a remarkable story of a courageous group of men and women, led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who worked together in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940 to 1943 to chronicle the atrocities being committed by the Nazis against the Jews, as well as to record the history of European Jewry and to document their culture.
By this time, many Jews were aware of the Nazi concentration camps, had heard rumours or even confirmed eye-witness reports of the mass executions of Jews.
Realising the Nazis were intent on erasing not only the Jews as a people, but destroying evidence of both their history and their culture, Ringelblum and his associates went to extraordinary lengths, in the face of great personal danger, to collect information by day, from the underground press, clandestine school groups, the resistance and others, writing up their notes and collating artefacts by night.
Testimonies were recorded in diaries, school essays, from official German documents like posters and ration cards. Poems, stories and songs were preserved. But testimonies also came in the form of notes scribbled on theatre tickets, milk cartons and chocolate wrappers. The documents were hidden in three large milk churns and 10 metal boxes and buried deep in the ground.
After the war, the boxes and two of the three milk churns were unearthed, containing around 6,000 documents which can be found today at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Ringelblum did not survive the war, but he knew that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was unprecedented in history, and he understood the importance of creating a historical record for posterity.
For other contributors, it was more personal. One young contributor, 19-year-old David Graber, while burying the archive, managed to place a message on the top of the container, it read:
One of the streets next to us has been already blocked. The moods are horrible. We expect the worst. We’re in a hurry. […] Goodbye. I hope we will manage to bury it. […] What we’ve been unable to shout out to the world, we buried in the ground. I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may know all. […] But no, we shall certainly not live to see it, and therefore I write my last will.”
David Graber, 3 August 1942
David did not live to see it. But he contributed to one the most valuable documents of the Holocaust, proof of the intellectual and spiritual resistance of the ghetto residents.
I am reminded of this today, when disinformation and misinformation reign supreme in the current Israel-Hamas war. Social-media silos and TikTok streams have become syphons for propaganda, with each side releasing graphic images of atrocities and documenting the plight of innocent civilian deaths. It is increasingly difficult to have conversations with those on the ‘other side’ because you are debating against a one-sided narrative.
When Hamas launched its barbarous pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October, it shocked many of us to the bone. Whole families mutilated and murdered, often with parents forced to watch their children slaughtered first. The rape of women, sometimes after they were dead, children beheaded and burnt in ovens. Messages sent by gleeful killers to their parents in Gaza, like ‘Dad, Dad, I killed 10 Jews’. Footage filmed on GoPro cameras and using their victims’ phones, so that their families would first encounter their loved ones’ hideous deaths on Facebook. Killers – butchers – laughing, jubilant.
Yet despite this objective documentation, from the killers themselves, what we witnessed in the West and around the world is almost as shocking as the attacks themselves: pogrom denial. Worldwide, spontaneous mass demonstrations – against Israel and supporting the Hamas terrorists (even before Israel launched its counter-offensive). The tearing down of hostage posters, anti-Semitic chants in the street, graffiti daubed on the walls of Jewish homes and businesses. Only last week, three Israeli tourists were attacked in Leicester Square, a Jewish woman in Lyon was murdered, a swastika graffitied on her home. For the first time in my life, I understood the stories of bystanders and those who turned a blind eye in Nazi Germany, that we had talked about at Holocaust Memorial Day events; back then, we believed the words, NEVER AGAIN.
Yet, despite such evidence, and despite Israel taking the unprecedented decision to show a 43-minute video of the gruesome events of 7 October, the denial continues. The video itself, these critics maintain, is propaganda, used to justify Israel’s attacks in Gaza. Many still believe it was Israel itself that murdered its own people as a justification for the war.
What accounts for such denialism? What has led many in the West to side with barbarous terrorists, rather than the only democracy in the Middle East?
On Thursday evening, I attended a Bookshop Barnie, hosted by Austin Williams, interviewing the author Jake Wallis Simons about his new book, Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It. You can watch the video here.
Published a month before the pogrom, Wallis Simons explores the rise of anti-Semitism in the West, his main thesis suggested in the title of his book, which is fascinating and illuminating. But, in understanding the reaction to 7 October, I think we need to look further than the idea that modern anti-Semitism is expressed through hatred of the only Jewish state. We need to explore the Western context in which this expression has manifest itself.
The first clue lies in the post made by journalist Najma Sharif who took to X/Twitter, while the pogrom was still underway, to say to her followers: ‘What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Paper? Essays? Losers.’
Through the decolonisation agenda, modern leftist identitarians have been steadily progressing the idea that the West is inherently bad. There has been a systematic attempt to re-write Western history as uniquely evil, to remove great Western works from the literary and musical canons, a rebranding of museums and national institutions as having been previously too white or European-centric, an erosion of the idea that culture is universal and transcends background and race. Since 2020, nearly every institution in the country has had to be seen to have its ‘Black Lives Matter moment’.
But, the Culture Wars, that Keir Starmer so unconvincingly denied last week, claiming they were simply a Tory-manufactured distraction, have been raging for quite some time. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in the workplace and in universities promulgate the idea of White Supremacy. Selected victims in history, such as black people descended from slaves, are held up as morally virtuous because of their ancestors’ plight. European slave traders are the villains. African and Ottoman slave-traders are strangely absent from the narrative.
In this re-reading of history, the Jews have assumed an odd position. The most persecuted minority on the planet is now deemed ‘white’. That many Jews have reached positions of power and influence means they have joined the ranks of ‘oppressors’ in this distorted narrative. Jewish privilege is an extreme version of white privilege. And thus, attacks on Jews are not only tolerated but celebrated.
Back in 2010, in London’s Guildhall, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gave a speech in which he recounted that the history of the rise in anti-Semitism is one that almost always goes hand-in-hand with civilisational collapse. He called it ‘the canary in the coalmine’. Journalist Bari Weiss recently made the same point in her speech to the Federalist Society. In which she argued that the Jews were ‘the last line of defence’.
Unlike Keir Starmer and the identitarian left, Ringelblum and his associates in the Warsaw Ghetto understood the importance of their culture, their history and the truth. This Holocaust Memorial Day, it is incumbent on us to continue to defend those things too - to take inspiration from the courage of the Oneg Shabbat.
And, no matter how difficult and distressing it can be to stand up to the false narrative being promoted right now, we must ensure that the stories of those who fell on 7 October are told. That their names are never forgotten. In the battle between Barbarism and Civilisation, we must resolutely stand up for the latter. And in doing so, firmly stand with Israel.
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