‘Who’ll remember us in this climate of hate?’ A survivor voices her fears

In a searing keynote address, historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore set out the Holocaust’s historical uniqueness and wider significance, while warning of the dangers of Shoah inversion and of allowing terms such as “genocide” to be stripped of their meaning.

He said flippant comparisons of the Shoah to contemporary conflicts had damaged the “architecture of international human rights and law”.

Now that terms like genocide “have become so watered down and so meaningless,” he said, “how are historians to describe the murder of the Herero people, the Armenians in World War One, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Darfur genocides?”

He said Holocaust “denial, distortion, inversion and perversion, twinned with eliminationist rhetoric, have made a spectacular comeback, joined by a bizarre alliance of the extremist left, the Islamist right and Western decolonisation supporters”.

The importance of resisting Holocaust minimisation and distortion, therefore, and the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, was “urgent” and the “requirement to get the teaching right, essential.”

“Holocaust education needs to return to what happened in the Holocaust and not be a commemoration of what happened in other times and in other places to people elsewhere.”

He went on, “the Holocaust is unique, but genocides are unfortunately common. We pay little attention to genocides and democides across the world if those crimes don’t involve the West or people regarded as western.

“Around 200,000 Sudanese, including 40,000 in just a few days,” are reported to have been killed recently in the Sudanese civil war, he said, and yet “not just our NGOs and activists but many of our leading politicians in the West have said and done little about it. Less cynicism and more bravery are required to balance out the racket.”

Among the hundreds of attendees on Monday evening were several Holocaust survivors, now in their 80s and 90s, and numerous Peers and MPs including Lord Ian Austin, Baroness Luciana Berger, Lord Graham Evans, Preet Gill MP, Lord Eric Pickles, Jon Pearce MP, Peter Prinsley MP, Joani Reid MP, Lord John Walney, Mark Sewards MP and others.

HET Young Ambassador Ramisa Choudhury introduced Mahmood, who told the room that we “meet today at a time of profound concern within our Jewish community, when it feels like the lessons of the Holocaust are being forgotten”.

The Home Secretary said that today, “shamefully, British Jews are being forced to live a smaller life in this country. People are hiding the signs of their faith, parents are worried sending their children to school, and synagogues require round-the-clock security.”

In the face of the Heaton Park shul terrorist attack, which was “an attack on us all, an attack on what and who this country is,” and the “monstrous” Bondi Beach attack, the “oldest evil is still with us”, she said.

She went on: “As a government and across society, we must now redouble our efforts to fight it. We must ensure that there is no safe space for antisemitism. We must ensure that no one in this country feels they must live in a smaller Jewish life.

“What we are seeing in this country today is not who we are. It is not who we should be, and while there is much more work we need to do, it is not who we will be.”

Karen Pollock CBE, Chief Executive of HET, echoed concerns surrounding the misuse of the vocabulary associated with the Holocaust and said young people with limited knowledge are at risk of “losing sight of the term genocide.

“Young people are forming opinions on big issues based on trends from Tik Tok; some teachers tell us they are anxious about how their communities might respond when a Holocaust survivor comes to share their testimony; and survivors themselves are sometimes being asked to navigate questions about a contemporary conflict simply because they are Jewish.”

She said that despite the challenging environment, HET is “making a difference” by reaching some 100,000 people a year through its many educational programmes, a number which is set to increase this year thanks to increased funding.