Every year, on January 27^th, the world pays tribute to the approximately 11 million victims of the Holocaust, over 6 million of whom were Jewish.  International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazis’ extermination camps where approximately 1.1 million people were systematically murdered.  Seventy-seven years after the camp’s liberation in 1945 it is still critical that humanity reflects upon history and remembers the perils of hatred and racism.

The further removed we are from such events, the easier it becomes to dismiss or re-write history.  And as more and more members of the Greatest Generation pass on, we lose the voices of the men and women who experienced these horrors and give testament to what happens when antisemitism and ethnic, racial and political hatred fester unchecked.

Since 1945, these hatreds have continued to upend our global community.  In the 1990s and early 2000s, genocides collectively killed millions of people in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan.  Uyghurs are being persecuted and systematically annihilated in China.  The Rohingya are being murdered and displaced in Myanmar.  Genocide is unfolding in Ethiopia.  And those are just a handful of examples.

Antisemitism is on the rise in Europe and North America and political hatred is reaching a fever pitch on both continents.  Vilifying “the other” has become political strategy and when rhetoric turns to violence the politicians stay silent – or worse, they excuse it.  Recently, politicians have invoked and manipulated the memory of the holocaust to advance political agendas against Covid-19 measures. 

People have long denied, and even idolized, the Holocaust.  Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pushed salacious conspiracy theories that the Holocaust “wasn’t a real event” for his own political gain.  Several European and Eastern European governments and politicians have distorted and even denied the facts of the Holocaust.  As public figures distort history and engage in discourse that veers further from the truth, we risk future generations growing up without knowledge of these disturbing events in history.  As each year passes and we lose more survivors who can attest to the truth we lose the important lessons forged from despair.

As Winston Churchill said in 1945, to paraphrase George Santayana (1905), “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”  If we cannot collectively learn the facts of history and reflect upon them to create more efficient policies and definitively act in the face of similar threats, then we are doomed repeat them.  For as much as society condemns the Holocaust and agrees to never again allow such horrors to occur again, we have largely stood by and allowed the subsequent horrors of Bosnia, Rwanda and many other conflicts unfold with minimal response.  

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, take time to learn about the history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism to ensure that the voices of the past will never fall silent.  Learn about genocide and ethnic cleaning that continues to exist.  Advocate for humanity to keep its promise to never forget and demand intervention for hate and genocide.