We gather this evening with solemnity and gravity, conscious that the Holocaust occupies a unique and terrible place in human history. On Yom HaShoah, you come together as a Jewish community – and with friends of the community – to honour the six million Jewish people murdered in the Shoah: lives extinguished not by chance, not as an accidental by‑product of war, but as the deliberate outcome of hatred, ideology, and systematic dehumanisation.
Six million can dull rather than sharpen understanding. Our task tonight is to resist that temptation – to remember that the Holocaust did not happen to a statistic, but to individual human beings: each with a name, a family, a profession, relationships, ambitions, and a future that was violently taken from them.
Yom HaShoah holds a particular moral weight because it is anchored not only in catastrophe, but in resistance. It falls on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews – starved, besieged, abandoned by the world – chose dignity over submission and moral courage over silence. The day’s full name: the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and of Heroism – reminds us that Jewish history in this period cannot be reduced to victimhood alone.
This day exists because memory matters. Memory hosts truth.
But memory on its own is not enough.
Yom HaShoah was never intended to be comfortable. It exists not to console us, but to confront us. It demands reflection not only on what happened, but on how it could happen; not only on the dead, but on the living; not only on history, but on ourselves.
Because the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It did not begin with death camps or mass murder. It began earlier, and far more quietly. It began with language that reframed human beings as problems to be managed. It began with laws and institutions that made exclusion appear reasonable, even necessary. And it began when ordinary people – people not unlike ourselves – chose not to stand up while standing up still seemed possible.
History rarely announces catastrophe.
History whispers long before it screams.
One of the greatest dangers facing Holocaust remembrance today is ritual without responsibility.
Ritual has its place. Ceremony can bind communities together in shared memory and collective mourning. When remembrance becomes routine, it risks losing its capacity to disturb, to challenge, and to warn.
The central lesson of the Holocaust is not simply that evil exists. Humanity has always known that. The deeper and more uncomfortable lesson is that evil flourishes when good people fail to act – when silence is reframed as prudence, caution mistaken for wisdom, and delay justified as restraint.
The Holocaust did not require universal hatred. It required acquiescence. It required millions of small decisions to comply, to adapt, to adjust expectations, and to wait for clarity that never came.
The trains did not run on time by accident.
There is a temptation – deeply human, and deeply dangerous – to imagine that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were fundamentally different from ourselves. We tell ourselves that they were uniquely cruel, uniquely hateful, uniquely aberrant. We do this not because the historical record supports it, but because it comforts us.
The Holocaust was carried out largely by ordinary people: clerks who stamped documents; teachers who altered curricula; railway workers who scheduled deportations; police officers who enforced new rules; doctors who abandoned medical ethics; civil servants who followed procedure. These were people with careers, families, ambitions, routines.
The machinery of genocide ran on bureaucracy, obedience, conformity, institutional loyalty, and professional self-interest. It ran on the gradual outsourcing of moral judgement – the quiet persuasion that responsibility lay elsewhere.
If we imagine perpetrators as monsters, we absolve ourselves too easily. Holocaust remembrance loses its most threatening and necessary lesson when we refuse to recognise that ordinary people, placed in ordinary roles, can become agents of extraordinary evil when conscience is subordinated to authority.
If perpetrators carried out the crimes of the Holocaust, history is clear about something even more challenging to confront: bystanders made them possible.
There were millions who did not pull triggers, operate camps, or sign deportation orders. Yet there were millions who knew – if not everything, then enough. Enough to notice neighbours disappearing. Enough to see Jewish businesses confiscated. Enough to observe Jewish doctors dismissed, Jewish children removed from schools, Jewish families forced into ghettos. Enough to see synagogues burned, homes sealed, trains departing.
They were not all driven by hatred. Some were afraid. Some were indifferent. Some calculated the risks. Many persuaded themselves that injustice was temporary, that events would stabilise, that intervention would be dangerous, that resistance would be futile, that discretion was wisdom.
What united them was not cruelty, it was their ability to adapt.
That pattern of adaptation is not confined to the past.
Earlier this year, the Union of Jewish Students published a report based on testimony and polling from across British universities. It describes a climate in which antisemitism has become normalised: Jewish students avoiding particular spaces, concealing their identity, withdrawing from discussion – not because they lack conviction, but because the personal and social cost of visibility has become too high.
One in four students surveyed had witnessed behaviour targeting Jews for who they are. Nearly half had encountered language that justified or celebrated the murder of Jews elsewhere. Many reported not outrage from institutions, but hesitation – delay justified as balance, silence excused as complexity.
What is unsettling is how ordinary this now feels. Universities debate context. Committees are convened. Statements are issued. Processes multiply. Intervention is postponed.
This is not how societies fall into moral catastrophe.
It is how they adjust to it.
This is how silence learns to sound reasonable.
Again and again, testimonies repeat the same refrain: “I did not realise it would go this far.” But genocide never declares its final destination at the outset. The moment for resistance is almost always earlier – when danger still feels exaggerated and intervention premature. By the time certainty arrives, choice has narrowed or vanished entirely.
Genocide depends less on cruelty; It depends on indifference.
This truth is uncomfortable because it implicates societies, not just villains. Catastrophe requires only the steady erosion of moral limits.
And this question is part of our present
On October 7, Jews were once again murdered with explicit and documented brutality. The evidence was immediate. And yet, across much of the world, the response was hesitation rather than horror; explanation rather than condemnation. Clarity was deferred. Language softened. Moral precision was replaced by qualification.
This is not a comparison of suffering. It is a comparison of response.
Once again, outrage was told to wait. Grief was told to contextualise itself. Condemnation was told to balance.
History teaches us to be wary of that pause. Silence may feel neutral.
It never is. Neutrality in the face of dehumanisation is permission.
The Holocaust was centuries in the making.
Antisemitism endures because it adapts. It absorbs the anxieties of each generation and presents Jews as their cause. It moves easily between theology, race, politics, and conspiracy.
In medieval Europe, it spoke the language of religion.
In the 19th century, the language of race and pseudoscience.
In the 20th, nationalism and totalitarianism.
Today, it often disguises itself as selective outrage, obsessive scrutiny, or the denial of Jewish collective legitimacy altogether.
But its core remains constant: Jews depicted as uniquely dangerous, uniquely manipulative, uniquely undeserving of belonging.
I speak here also as former Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. One lesson from that work is unmistakable: antisemitism flourishes most effectively when societies refuse to define it clearly.
That is why the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism matters – not as a weapon, but as a diagnostic tool.
These warnings are an ever present danger
The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitic incidents and provides security and support to Britain’s Jewish communities, has recorded sustained and historically high levels of antisemitism in recent years. These include harassment, abuse, threats, criminal damage, and violence.
These figures describe a climate: one in which Jewish institutions require security as routine, where visibility carries risk, and where antisemitism is not episodic but ambient.
When history warns us what to watch for, this is what it looks like.
Yom HaShoah is a test of civic health – of whether societies can recognise hatred even when doing so is uncomfortable.
Survivor testimony refuses to allow genocide to be reduced to numbers or categories. It insists that what was destroyed were lives.
Ben Helfgott spoke of the disbelief that discrimination could lead to annihilation. Zigi Shipper taught that hatred does not need to shout to be lethal. Manfred Goldberg showed how antisemitism numbs moral response long before violence begins.
Their voices converge on one truth.
The Holocaust was not inevitable.
It was allowed.
Again and again, survivors describe a slow narrowing of moral space. What shocks most is not that violence occurred, but how much happened before violence became unavoidable.
As survivors now pass from us, responsibility does not diminish.
It intensifies.
This is not simply because their voices are precious. It is because their presence has functioned, for decades, as a moral interruption. They answered distortion by existing. They disrupted denial simply by standing in front of an audience and saying: I was there.
Soon, no one will be able to do that.
The Holocaust was also an assault on memory: on names, identities, relationships, and trace. Human beings were reduced to administrative residue, meant to vanish without record, as though they had never existed.
That is why one of the most profound acts of Holocaust remembrance today is the work of name restoration.
I speak here as a former Chair of the International Tracing Service, now known as the Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution. The Archives hold the world’s largest collection of documents on victims and survivors of Nazi persecution: tens of millions of records relating to camps, ghettos, forced labour, deportations, flight, and displacement.
Their work confronts a stark reality.
Around one million murdered Jews remain unidentified by name.
Each recovered name is an act of moral repair. Each identified fate restores individuality to someone the Nazis intended to erase entirely – not only physically, but historically.
Families who search the archives are seeking the dignity of knowing the truth
Genocide thrives on anonymity. Resistance continues with naming.
In an age of denial and distortion, the Arolsen Archives insist on evidence. They remind us that Holocaust remembrance is not simply commemorative. It is documentary. It is verifiable. And it is human in scale.
When I first became involved in Holocaust remembrance, there was a widely shared belief that once the last survivor was gone, empathy would become our central task. That our responsibility would be to ensure future generations could still feel what had happened.
I came to realise that this was not enough.
Empathy is powerful, but it is also fragile. It depends on attention, imagination, and emotional openness. It is easily exhausted, easily displaced, and poorly equipped for the age we are now entering.
Because I believe we have entered an age of indifference.
This is not an age of ignorance. People know the facts. They know that six million Jews were murdered. They know the Holocaust happened.
They simply do not care.
I have been in schools where pupils have asked, without hostility, “Why are we still talking about this? People died in the Black Death. People died in the Spanish flu. These are just people who died a long time ago.”
That response is not denial. It is something colder.
It reflects the truth of Stalin’s observation: the death of one person is a tragedy, while the death of millions becomes a statistic. Statistics do not demand moral engagement. They ask only to be acknowledged and then set aside.
This is the danger of the post‑witness world: the Holocaust acknowledged, but domesticated; remembered, but emptied of moral demand.
What makes the post‑witness world uniquely dangerous is not only the absence of survivors, but the presence of something else in their place.
Distortion today does not operate at the margins. It is organised, professional, and international. Denial no longer always announces itself crudely. It often presents as historical scepticism, as debate, as “rethinking the narrative”.
Some deny the Holocaust outright. Others accept it in outline while hollowing it out – minimising scale, relocating blame, denying intent, or stripping it of uniqueness through endless comparison. Some concede mass murder but deny genocide. Others concede genocide while insisting it has no relevance for the present.
Truth is blurred. Responsibility is diluted. Memory is weakened.
And into this environment enters a new and deeply troubling factor: technology that can fabricate authority itself.
Artificial intelligence can already generate persuasive texts, false documents, synthetic images, and plausible testimony that looks authentic. In a world without living witnesses, the danger is not simply that lies will be told – but that they will be told fluently, confidently, and at scale.
Pseudo‑history no longer needs to sound extreme. It only needs to sound reasonable.
This changes the challenge we face. The question is no longer only how to remember, but how societies decide what counts as truth.
Survivors once settled arguments by speaking. Soon, no one will be able to do that in the room.
That means the burden shifts – away from feeling, and towards verification; away from presence, and towards proof.
Archives are no longer merely repositories. They are infrastructure of truth. They must be accessible, searchable, connected, and international. When falsehoods are spoken, evidence must be available not months later, but immediately. Memory delayed is memory weakened.
Institutions, too, must resist a familiar temptation: the urge to manage controversy rather than confront untruth. The instinct to soften language, to defer judgement, to wait for consensus before speaking is precisely how distortion succeeds.
Holocaust denial does not need endorsement to flourish.
It needs hesitation. Silence will once again present itself as neutrality. We know where that leads.
Denial does not recognise borders. Memory must now learn to travel.
Distortion networks cooperate internationally, sharing material, language, and tactics across platforms and countries at speed. National approaches are no match for global falsehoods.
Holocaust remembrance was never a national story. It cannot be defended nationally.
Evidence, testimony, and educational resources must be shared across institutions, countries, and generations, so that truth reinforced in one place strengthens truth elsewhere.
That is why the Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre beside Parliament matters – not as a monument alone, but as connective tissue. Linking archives, memory institutions, educators, and democratic values at the heart of national life.
Our opponents cooperate. So must we.
The post‑witness world willl be more demanding. It will test whether remembrance is habit or commitment; ceremony or obligation.
If memory is the warning bell of history, then education is how warning is transmitted. Schools stand on the front line of Holocaust remembrance. They are where historical knowledge first becomes moral understanding, and where indifference is either challenged or quietly learned.
That is why institutions that educate with seriousness, integrity, and courage matter so profoundly.
I want to speak here of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, and in particular of its leadership under Henry Grunwald OBE KC. During his time as Chair, the Centre exemplified what responsible Holocaust education looks like – not the exhibition of horror for its own sake, but the cultivation of judgement.
The Centre’s programme, The Journey, is a model of this approach. It begins with normality. It shows, step by step, how ordinary life can be reshaped by authority; how institutions adapt; how professional judgement erodes; how conformity is encouraged long before violence becomes visible.
It was during The Journey that I learned something that has never left me. Like many people, I had assumed that Adolf Hitler’s portrait was placed at the front of classrooms – staring down at pupils as a symbol of intimidation.
In fact, it was often placed at the back of the classroom – facing the teacher.
A constant, silent reminder of where authority truly lay, and of the cost of independent judgement. That single detail captures how moral collapse occurs – not dramatically, but incrementally, under pressure that still appears survivable.
Alongside this, the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust has ensured that this seriousness reaches classrooms across the country. Through survivor visits, teacher training, and especially through Testimony 360, the Trust has used technology not to dilute memory, but to preserve it as dialogue rather than relic.
Testimony 360 does not replace survivors. It recognises the gravity of their absence. It insists that future generations still encounter voice, presence, and moral challenge – not passively, but in relationship.
These institutions demonstrate something essential: Holocaust remembrance can adapt without losing its depth. Education, when done properly, does not soften history. It sharpens it.
And that is why recent developments in schools should concern us so deeply.
For several years, participation by British schools in Holocaust Memorial Day grew steadily. More than 2,000 secondary schools marked the day in 2023. It had become part of civic education, not controversy.
Since then, that engagement has collapsed. Fewer than 900 schools marked Holocaust Memorial Day in 2025 – a drop of nearly 60 per cent.
This reversal did not happen because the Holocaust became less relevant. It happened because teaching it has become more uncomfortable.
Educators have spoken openly of anxiety, of fear of controversy, of choosing what has been described as the path of least resistance. Avoidance framed as prudence. Silence justified as professionalism.
When remembrance flourishes everywhere except where children learn, memory has not been defeated. It has been sidestepped. And once truth is avoided, its place is taken by distortion. That is precisely the moment Holocaust remembrance was created to resist.
Holocaust remembrance is not only personal. It is institutional.
The Holocaust unfolded within functioning states, professions, legal systems, and bureaucracies. What failed was not law, but judgement. Not order, but conscience.
Institutions rarely collapse overnight. They fail through small abdications of responsibility – through silence, delay, and the substitution of procedure for principle.
Words spoken on memorial days are easy. Principles upheld on ordinary days are not.
The test of remembrance is not how we speak when gathered together, but how institutions behave when no ceremony is taking place – when decisions seem technical, local, or merely administrative. None of this diminishes remembrance. It tests it.
Yom HaShoah asks more than memory. It asks reckoning.
Every generation faces its own test – not of identical events, but of familiar decisions: whether to name hatred plainly or soften it; whether to act while action still matters, or explain later; whether to bear discomfort now, or carry guilt afterward.
The post‑witness world will not excuse us for failing to know. We do know. It will ask what we did with that knowledge.
Yom HaShoah teaches us that remembrance is far from passive.
It binds. It obliges. It costs. To remember is to accept responsibility forward.
So let us honour the dead with vigilance, not sentiment.
Let us protect the living with clarity, not delay.
Memory is sacred. Responsibility is what gives memory its weight.
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