Every year, the Holocaust Educational Trust takes thousands of young people to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of them are not Jewish. Most have no family connection to the events they are about to confront. They come from every kind of school and every part of the country, and they arrive knowing, in outline, what happened there. But nothing prepares them for being there.
As they walk the tracks that carried a million Jews to their deaths, you can see them trying to grasp how such a place came to exist. How six million Jewish men, women and children could be taken from their homes while neighbours, colleagues and friends did not challenge it.
What has stayed with me, after more than 20 years of this work, is not their shock as they come to terms with what took place, nor the silence that fills a plane of teenagers on the journey home. It is what they do afterwards.
They come home having reflected. And then they act.
They speak in school assemblies, organise events for Holocaust Memorial Day, and lead discussions among their peers. Some go on to reach hundreds of fellow students, in school and later in colleges and universities across the country. Others may influence only a handful. What matters is not the scale but the willingness to begin the conversation, and to carry the lessons of the Holocaust beyond the classroom.
They challenge the joke that goes too far, the conspiracy theory shared without thinking, the slogan chanted without understanding. They become, in the truest sense, witnesses. They feel a responsibility, after all they have heard and seen, to stand up and be counted. We call them our Ambassadors.
This matters more than it ever has. We are living through a period of antisemitism unlike anything in recent memory. It is on our streets and on our feeds. Recorded antisemitic incidents affecting schools have risen by 59 per cent, to the highest number ever recorded, according to the Community Security Trust. The hatred has reached into the places that should be safest, including our classrooms and our campuses. Young people who take a stand against it are not always thanked for it. Some pay a price.
And yet still they choose to do it.
I find that extraordinary, and I do not think we say so often enough. It would be easy for a young person with no personal stake to look away, to decide that this is someone else’s history and someone else’s fight. These young people decide the opposite. They understand what every generation has to learn afresh: that hatred does not stay where it starts, and that silence is how it spreads.
This is what Holocaust education is for. Not only to teach the facts of what happened, essential as that is, but to build a generation who can recognise where it began and refuse to let it take root again. The survivors who gave their testimony to our students, many of them now gone, understood that they were placing the future in these young hands. They were not wrong to trust them.
The climate we work in is harder than it was. The number of survivors who can tell their story in person grows smaller each year, while the hatred we teach against grows bolder. Both are happening at once, and that is precisely why this work cannot wait.
But I remain hopeful, and the reason is these young people. I have watched them stand up where it would have been easier to stay quiet, and challenge friends online over what they have posted. Since we began the Lessons from Auschwitz Project, over 50,000 students have taken part and gone on to become Ambassadors. I meet them still, now working as teachers, police officers, lawyers, journalists and in public life, and I am always moved by how the experience has shaped them, and for some the path they have chosen. We will celebrate them at our Appeal Dinner next week.
Every generation decides what it will remember and what it will neglect. Nothing guarantees that the Holocaust will continue to be understood with seriousness and care. Remembrance is not automatic. It is an act of responsibility, renewed by people who understand that this history still has something to teach the present. That is why the commitment of these young people matters so deeply.
They are not carrying it because it is theirs. They are carrying it because they have understood that it belongs to all of us.
That is how “Never Again” is kept from becoming an empty phrase. Not through words alone, but through people who choose to take responsibility for one another. And that is how antisemitism is challenged: not by us alone, but by everyone.
Karen Pollock CBE is Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust
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