Diary of a Chief Rabbi

National Holocaust Day Announcement - Stockholm

The international gathering at Stockholm to remember the Holocaust was one of the more remarkable moments of modern history. A thousand people came together from across the world: survivors, scholars and leaders of Jewish organisations. What made it different, though, from other gatherings was the presence of heads of state and senior members of governments. This was remembrance at the highest level of European politics.

It was astonishing to hear the leaders of Germany, France, Poland, the Czech Republic and of course Sweden itself, together with the British Foreign Secretary, commit themselves to an ongoing programme of Holocaust education, research and commemoration. At the same time, the British Prime Minister announced the creation of a national Holocaust Day each year on January 27th, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

And as if to remind us that such a day was necessary, came the news of the likelihood of an Austrian government involving a party of the far right, evoking bitter memories of events little more than sixty years ago. The Conference of European Rabbis, which was to have met in Vienna next month, has already decided to change the venue as a gesture of protest. The Israeli government has threatened to suspend diplomatic relations, and governments throughout Europe have expressed their concern.

How it will turn out, no one can yet say. But Austria is only one example of the disturbing rise of ultra-nationalist groups in today's Europe, for whom xenophobia is a central part of their appeal. Racism is a light sleeper, easily aroused. At periods of change and disruption, it is all too easy to project fears onto a scapegoat, and we are living through a period of change. The gathering at Stockholm was thus doubly important, not only as an act of remembering the past but also and more importantly as a commitment to fight racism in the future.

I have argued before in these columns, but it is worth doing so again, that there is a difference between our own Yom HaShoah and a national Holocaust Day. When we remember, on Yom HaShoah, we do so as Jews, as people linked by bonds of family or peoplehood to the victims. For us it is a direct expression of grief.

When others pledge themselves to do so it is for a different reason, not as the heirs of the victims but as people confronting one of the greatest crimes in the history of civilisation, perhaps the greatest. As Professor Yehuda Bauer reminded us in his eloquent speech at Stockholm, there have been other attempted genocides before and since. What made the Holocaust different was not simply the scale of destruction but its demonic madness. By transporting Jews to the extermination camps, Germany was directly weakening its own war effort. Mass murder was also, in German terms, a form of collective suicide. It robbed the country of human resources it badly needed. As Emil Fackenheim put it, the Holocaust was not just evil, it was evil for evil's sake.

But once a crime has been committed, it can be committed again. A certain boundary has been crossed; a taboo has been broken; a precedent has been created. That is why the Holocaust must never be forgotten - not only by Jews, but by non-Jews also. Hovering over the gathering at Stockholm were the famous words of Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are destined to repeat it." Memory is the greatest safeguard of humanity.

As Jews, rightly, we feel a special responsibility to remember. We remember all the great tragedies of our history, from slavery in Egypt to the destruction of the two Temples, from the exiles and pogroms of the Middle Ages to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Our ancestors were the only people in ancient times to see memory as a religious duty. Tenakh, the Hebrew Bible, is the first great work of history - not history as Herodotus wrote it, a record of events in the past, but history as a guide to the future, the accumulated experience of a people as it struggled with the terms of its own destiny.

But remembering must not be confined to Jews alone. Jews cannot cure anti-semitism. The victim cannot cure the crime. That can only come from a massive effort, endorsed at the highest levels of government, to educate future generations in the dangers of hatred and prejudice, and the knowledge of where it can lead. That is why it was so important to mark the beginning of the twenty-first century with a collective resolve on the part of Europe's leaders never to forget the greatest tragedy of the twentieth.

Jewish history is our story. But it has never been, nor was it meant to be, our story alone. The exodus has inspired the struggle for freedom in many ages and many lands. So too the memory of the Holocaust will be seen by future historians to have played a part - a major part - in changing the moral landscape of the world.

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