Never again

Why would a young person born at the turn of the century be interested in the Holocaust?
Why would young people give up time to learn and to teach about genocide?
What possible relevance have the events in Belsen to the lives of those people today?


Bill Edmonds reflects on his time as an Ambassador for HET and what he sees as so important for us in 2020:

We have now been confined to our homes for over ten weeks. This has been a difficult time for many of us, as our daily lives have been disrupted, forcing us to live in new and often creative ways.

During these weeks, the nation has commemorated two landmark anniversaries: the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of the NAZI Concentration Camp, Bergen-Belsen in April and of VE Day in May. Due to the current global situation, the country was forced to celebrate these anniversaries without the usual processions. Many of us flooded onto our driveways, Union Flags hanging from our windows for ‘stay at home’ street parties to celebrate VE Day. Yet for me, it was the perhaps less stated anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen that was more striking. Those who marked the day did so from home, whether through means of social media, simple reflection or otherwise. While we may feel a range of emotions when thinking about any NAZI Concentration Camps and by extension, the Holocaust, the one overriding emotion for me was gratitude: the thankfulness that even during this lockdown, when the confines of my own home can feel incredibly restrictive, the sanctuary of a home is something I have.

In February 2018, I visited Auschwitz as a sixth-former enrolled on the Holocaust Educational Trust’s ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ programme. In the week prior to my visit, I had the privilege of hearing the first-hand testimony of Holocaust survivor, Rudi Oppenheimer, who was himself imprisoned at Belsen with his family. Like so many other Jews in the Second World War, several members of his family lost their lives. His testimony was a stark reminder of the importance of the individual loss in the Holocaust and that the number, six million, is more than a mere statistic. Over my time involved with the Trust, I have had the honour of hearing from nine different survivors first-hand. Each story is of course different. However, in every testimony, the level of suffering described and the lack of a sense of home have been unimaginable.

Hearing so many testimonies put my visit to Auschwitz into perspective as what remained of the prisoners’ belongings, from their shoes and glasses to their hair, lay before my eyes, their owners now practically anonymous. As the Rabbi who accompanied us on our visit observed, Auschwitz is a place of many emotions. Yet, the one emotion we never felt upon our visit to that camp was the fear the inmates at the camp experienced. In truth, we were fortunate being able to walk through those infamous gates as free people, fully in the knowledge that we would be able to come back through them and leave the camp.

It has now been over two years since I visited Auschwitz and in that time my understanding of the Holocaust has only deepened as I have heard yet more survivor stories, taken part in more of HET’s workshops and most memorably, taken part in a course at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. I won’t go into depth here about the many ways my perspectives on the Holocaust were challenged and even changed over my time in Israel but would like to highlight one thing. Throughout my time in Israel, I had the privilege of visiting major sights of Jewish history, including the Western Wall and the other key sights in the Old City of Jerusalem and the ancient fort of Masada, where the Jews made their final stand against the Romans. However, the most memorable place I visited during this trip was a modest synagogue, smaller than even my village hall and whose architecture was underwhelming to say the least. For it was at this synagogue where I took in a Shabbat service with members of the synagogue’s local community. As an anglophone Christian, it was very difficult to follow a Jewish service conducted entirely in Hebrew but that did not matter. The service gave me the opportunity to observe and appreciate contemporary Jewish culture and its richness.

Gregory Stanton published a paper in 1996 arguing that there are eight stages of genocide, a number that some have updated to ten. I won’t define and explain each of these stages now but would like to underline a few of them. The final stage of genocide according to this paper is denial. After all the persecution and suffering inflicted comes the claim that none of it ever happened. Thus, a culture or a people is wiped from the face of the earth with no trace left of the fact that they even existed. Visiting the cultural sights of Jerusalem and participating in the service at the synagogue was a reminder that in each genocide, not only are individual lives lost but also potentially an entire culture and a rich part of human history.

I would secondly like to highlight the earliest stages of genocide to help us realise that the Holocaust did not start off with a programme of mass extermination. The very first stage of genocide according to Stanton is classification, or in other words, the idea of ‘us vs. them.’ It is the mentality that another group is inherently inferior to everyone else or even a burden to society. According to Stanton, the fifth stage out of eight is polarisation, the spreading of propaganda by hate organisations about the so-called inferior groups.

In the age of the internet and social media, I personally believe this stage happens far earlier in the process of genocide than Stanton claimed. I see, to some extent, both of these stages, classification and polarisation, unfolding on a day-to-day basis in our society, whether online or elsewhere. Prejudice towards minorities undeniably continues in today’s society, feeding the mentality that they are inferior for being different. However, in the case of the Holocaust and all genocides, the early stages such as classification were only allowed to progress into the advanced stages of genocide such as persecution and extermination because they were allowed to do so. 

Out of fear, people idly stood by and allowed the events to unfold, choosing what was easy over what was right. 

Only if we speak out against the wrongs in our society can we truly be able to say the words, ‘Never Again.’