Bill Edmonds
For Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022, Nottingham student Bill Edmonds, who is a Regional Ambassador for the Holocaust Educational Trust, reminds us why almost a century on from the Holocaust, it’s vital to keep its memory alive.
I had just turned eighteen when I first visited Auschwitz. Although nearly four years have now passed, the memory of everything I saw and felt remains as clear as ever in my mind. However, of all my feelings as I walked through the camp’s infamous gates, the one that remains strongest to this day was how fortunate I was to be able to enter as a free man.
Despite the amount of time that has passed since my visit, I still continue to learn as I develop my understanding of what I experienced that day. In few places can the horrors of the Holocaust be appreciated as well as at Auschwitz, and it is here that I first understood the scale of the atrocities, all of it only possible because of such extensive collaboration and indifference.
so many people were complicit in allowing hatred to manifest in its most extreme form
Across Europe during the Second World War, many people actively contributed to the murder of millions of Jews: camp guards, soldiers, even those we often overlook such as those who drove the trains to Auschwitz. Of course, each collaborator played a very different role in the Holocaust, but what is even more striking is the much greater number of bystanders. These crimes were only possible because so many people were complicit in allowing hatred to manifest in its most extreme form.
In the time that has passed since I visited Auschwitz, I have not stopped learning about the Holocaust and more generally about Jewish history and culture. It’s extraordinary that seventy-seven years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, the lessons learnt from the Holocaust still seem as relevant as ever.
the Holocaust may well be slipping further into the past, but the anti-Semitism from which it stemmed is not
A course at Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Israel) and numerous visits to key Jewish sites in several European countries have only made me realise more how important it is that we remember the Holocaust as it fades from living memory into history.
The Holocaust may well be slipping further into the past, but the anti-Semitism from which it stemmed is not. I recall too well walking past a street graffitied with numerous Swastikas only a few hundred yards from the Louvre during my year abroad in Paris. In the UK, I hear of anti-Semitic incidents almost every day to the point where they barely feel like news.
It’s both unsettling and unsurprising that one of Britain’s leading anti-Semitism watchdogs, the Community Security Trust, recorded a record number of incidents on university campuses in 2019-20 (the most recent data available). This included two cases of anti-Semitism perpetrated by University of Nottingham staff. It is, however, only when these views are allowed to circulate unchecked and unchallenged that they become normalised. And it is only when they are normalised that discrimination starts to find a place in our society.
only if we speak out will we truly be able to say the words ‘Never Again’
The Holocaust did not begin with the deportation and murder of millions of Jews, but with a broad acceptance of racist ideology. And it is only when we stand by that history can be allowed to repeat itself. Only if we speak out will we truly be able to say the words ‘Never Again’.
Bill Edmonds
Featured image courtesy of PixaBay via Pexels. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
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