Some thoughts about Holocaust Memorial Day 2020

On the 25th of January I joined with my comrades from the Stroud Red Band to play at a Holocaust Memorial Day interfaith event in Rodborough Tabernacle. We’d played at last year’s event too - a couple of antifascist resistance songs including Bella Ciao and Zog Nit Keynmol, and the anthem of the Jewish workers’ Bund, Di Shvue. This year we didn’t get to play Di Shvue, but as a bonus we played ‘The Internationale’ as the congregation filed out.

We were pleased to be included, and we know it’s important to not only engage with our own left-wing ‘bubble’. I know that other band members found the event very moving, and we hope they’ll have us back next year. But there are some things about the event that I find unsatisfactory. This year, in the evening, I was fortunate to join a discussion about why and how we mark Holocaust Memorial Day at Stroud Radical Reading Group, and that helped me to clarify my thoughts as to why I was unhappy.

At the Group we discussed why we should commemorate the Holocaust. There is truth in the idea that failing to do so would dishonour the victims and would be in some sense a victory for the perpetrators, who would have been thrilled by the possibility that their crimes would fade from memory. But I think that there is another reason for commemoration - to learn from what happened, to understand it, so that we can be better prepared to prevent similar crimes in the future and to place roadblocks in the way of the Nazis’ successors.

I think that the event in Rodborough didn’t help that objective. The Holocaust - meaning the Nazi genocide, and other genocides, was commemorated, but in a way that was devoid of everything specific about it. Most of the commemoration was prayers - from a variety of denominations and religious traditions, to God about his loving kindness, and some injunctions that we should all show loving kindness to each other. There was a children’s choir that sang some uplifting songs including ‘Something Inside So Strong’, which I love, and a woman who sung ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ a capella.

I think there is something deeply problematic about all this. The Nazi genocide was not a personal challenge that needed to be overcome through personal resilience. It was not the result of a deficit of loving kindness, or a surfeit of cruelty. Most of the people who participated were not personally cruel, and even leading Nazis regarded the extermination as something that was personally difficult and for which they had to steel themselves. It was the culmination of a thousand years of European antisemitism, and a hundred years of scientific racism and eugenist thinking, and the specific ideology and mass movement of Fascism, to which was added all the power of a modern industrial state and its administrative capabilities. It did not begin with death camps but with small administrative steps of discrimination and separation. Many of the perpetrators were not monsters but people like us, drawn into a mass movement based on nationalism that gave them hope and made them feel good about themselves. If we don’t say these things then we haven’t learned anything that might prepare us to resist the next genocide-in-the-making.

Some of this is perhaps inherent in the way that the Nazi genocide is conceptualised as ‘the Holocaust’. Although this has become the generally accepted term, its use has been contested by some - notably Elie Wiesel. The word ‘holocaust’ means a religious offering that is completely consumed by burning. I think it is worth reflecting on the idea that the Nazi genocide was a ‘sacrifice’ - by whom? To what? And also on whether treating this genocide as primarily an event of religious significance obscures the role of human agency, and the political and historical context - and on what it means to do that.

I’d also like to reflect on the decision to make Holocaust Memorial Day about other genocides, as well as about the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate the world’s Jews. Again, doing this is largely accepted by all those who organise commemorations, and the arguments for doing so are obvious. The Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis. The Nazi genocide was not the first, and it wasn’t the last. If we don’t commemorate those other genocides on Holocaust Memorial Day, when will we? Having separate events for the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, and the Armenian Massacres, and the Africans murdered in the European-organised slave trade, and the many others, would mean that the entire year’s calendar would be full. 

The list of genocides presented at the Rodborough event was very partial and incomplete, as it must inevitably be. But it’s hard to avoid wondering about the basis for selection and for the omissions. Why nothing about the Germans’ extermination of the Hereros of South West Africa, the first genocide of the twentieth century? Why the victims of Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture but not the three million victims of the Bengal famine of 1943, which might be laid at the door of the British Empire? Once you begin to set out a list, then every inclusion and every omission becomes significant.

And by having a generic commemoration we lose sight of what was specific about each of them. The Nazi genocide of Jews was unique in its mechanisation and industrialisation, and in the thoroughness of the administrative organisation and its objectives. Informed by ‘race-science’, it was intended to eradicate everyone who was genealogically Jewish, whatever their religious beliefs or cultural identification. 

Relativising this particular genocide has long been part of the stock-in-trade of Nazi apologists; alongside outright denial there is also the suggestion that the Nazi genocide was not so special, that lots of bad things have happened in history...the suggestion that Soviet repression was equivalent is a frequent theme of those who want to whitewash the historical record of the Nazis and their collaborators, especially in Eastern Europe.

So I’d like to make a plea for Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations to be specific, not generic - about the Nazi genocide, and about other genocides too, when we talk about them. Because focusing on the historical context of these terrible events holds out the possibility of learning something, but emphasising the commonality of all of them brings us to a shapeless reflection on ‘inhumanity’ that doesn't take us anywhere.

The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was ‘Stand Together’. Let’s think about who needs us to stand with them now.