There may have been as many as 15,000 concentration camps operating at one time or another across Nazi-controlled Europe during World War II. For me, however, when the Holocaust is mentioned I envisage that evocative image of the gateway into Auschwitz I declaring Arbeit Mach Frei.
Those gates - and others like them - through which millions of Jews, Roma and Sinti were forced: Socialists, Communists, Catholics, pacifists, LGBT people, and any others who failed to conform. The industrialised mass-murder of those whom the powerful deemed ‘other’ on a scale never seen before.
Monday marked 75 years since Auschwitz was liberated, the day which since 2001 the UK has marked as Holocaust Memorial Day. It commemorates the six million murdered by the Nazis, along with the victims of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. It seems a sad failure that for 75 years we have declared “Never again” while Khmer, Tutsi, Twa, Bosniak, Croat and Darfuris have added to the numbers we commemorate this week. And this fails to mention all those who have been massacred, but whom politics refuse to label as genocide. The Rohingya, Uigyher and Yazidi are in most recent memory.
Never Again
On this 75th anniversary, the talk has been about memory. As those who remember the death camps pass away, there is a fear that we will forget the lessons of history. One of the images circulating social media shows the Auschwitz gates superimposed with the words:
“Remember, it didn’t start with gas chambers. It started with politicians dividing people with ‘us vs. them’. It started with intolerance and hate speech and when people stopped caring became desensitized and turned a blind eye.”
Never Again
I saw that quote again this week on Twitter. Sadly, also in my feed was a story reporting yet another attack on a business with anti-Semitic graffiti. Another tweet came from a man who had been harassed and assaulted walking home with his boyfriend in Glasgow. Another announced the government’s latest plans to restrict migration. The latter declared that only “the best” will be “allowed” to come to the UK.
I know I’m not the only one who is seeing such tweets and recalls the history of the picketing of Jewish businesses and the smeared graffiti leading up to Kristallnacht in Germany in November 1938. That “night of the broken glass”, when synagogues were torched, Jewish homes, schools and businesses were vandalised and some 100 Jews were killed. In the aftermath, around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Never Again
The detention of gay men, who were used for target practice and medical experiments in the concentration camps. Never Again
The MS St. Louis refused safe harbour in America, Canada, and the UK, returning many of its refugees to the hands of the Nazis they were fleeing. Never Again
We declare Never Again. Yet just last week young refugee children were denied a safe passage to join family in the UK. We declare Never Again. Yet Roma and Traveller communities are to be stripped of their rights.
Never Again…until the next time.