Holocaust Memorial Day marked in Warwick

Buy photos » The Holocaust service was held at the War Memorial on Church Street. Picture by Jon Mullis 05.012.008.leam.jm1 (www.buyphotos247.com)

NATIONAL Holocaust Memorial Day was marked in Warwick on Friday (January 27).

Town mayor, councillor Trudy Offer, laid a wreath on behalf of townspeople at the war memorial in Church Street.

The mayor’s chaplain, Reverend Vaughan Roberts, then led a short service which included input from members of local schools and community.

The annual event is held in remembrance of the millions of victims who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazi regime and also the mass murder and brutal oppression of people in Cambodia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Darfur and other parts of the world.

MP Jeremy Wrght, reflecting on Holocaust Memorial Day, wrote: Every year, the Holocaust Educational Trust does a huge amount to remind us of the terrible scar on the history of 20th Century Europe that was the systematic extermination by the Nazis of millions of Jews. Every year, for example, Members of Parliament have the opportunity to sign a book of remembrance and pupils at local schools are given the opportunity to visit Auschwitz - Birkenau, where murder was carried out on an industrial scale. If you have visited the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem in Israel as I have, you will have found it a profoundly distressing experience and that of course is the point. Remembering the Holocaust is not supposed to be comfortable. This is not just because of the sheer horror of what occurred but also because we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of believing it was a historical aberration, confined to the particular circumstances of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The true purpose of Holocaust Memorial Day is to remind us not just that the Holocaust happened but that, perhaps on different scales and in different locations, it can and does happen again.

Around the world, racial, ethnic or tribal conflicts continue. Within the last 20 years, in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, people have been killed or persecuted not for what they believe or for actions they have taken, but simply because of what they are. It still happens today.

So Holocaust Memorial Day reminds us what can happen when we turn a blind eye to this kind of evil. It shows us how bad it can get and that is why it is important to remember, however uncomfortable it may be. Remembering becomes harder of course with the passing of time, as fewer and fewer first-hand witnesses survive to look us in the eye and tell us it was true. I do not believe the greater danger comes from an organised conspiracy of Holocaust denial, but rather from the collective erosion of our certainty that it really was that terrible. The Holocaust Educational Trust plays a vital role in resisting that erosion and they deserve our thanks for what they do.