Diary of a Chief Rabbi

Shared Memories of Genocide is Shared Humanity

What a moving occasion it was. The first ever National Holocaust Memorial Day could have gone so wrong. In the event it went magnificently right, and marks a new stage in the place of the Holocaust in collective memory.

For more than half a century the Shoah has been kept alive in Jewish consciousness. How could it not have done? It was, in human terms, the worst tragedy ever to have befallen our people, and we are no strangers to suffering or persecution. Over the past few weeks, as we have been reading yet again the story of slavery in Egypt, we have been reminded that attempted genocide against our ancestors goes back to the very dawn of Jewish history. On Purim, in a few weeks times, we will recall yet another moment when a decree went out to "destroy, kill and annihilate" all the members of the nation that would not bow down to tyranny. No people has insisted so consistently on the right to be different, and we have paid a very heavy price for that courage. The story of Jewish suffering has no counterpart. Others have been persecuted, but none for so long or by so many different regimes.

The Holocaust, though, was different. Never before had the entire resources of an advanced industrial power been harnessed to the effort to destroy an entire scattered people and wipe it and its spiritual heritage from the face of the earth. As Emil Fackenheim has pointed out, at the height of the destruction, the Nazi regime diverted trains desperately needed by the German army, in order to transport Jews to the extermination camps. This was "evil for evil's sake." As long as humanity has a conscience, Auschwitz and the other factories of death will stand as the supreme symbol of man's inhumanity to man.

So traumatic were those events that for years, most people did not speak of them. Primo Levi once noted that when he published his recollections of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, in 1946, he had difficulty in getting the book published, and very few copies were sold. Not till years later did it become a classic best seller. In 1995 I read the memoirs of a non-Jew, an Australian, who had been present at Auschwitz. He was sent there as a prisoner of war who had escaped and been recaptured. He was in no danger of death. He merely helped to stoke the ovens that turned thousands of bodies, every week, into ash. Yet even so, his memories were so traumatic that for half a century he had revealed to no-one - not even his wife and children - that he had been there. There are things we want to forget.

That is why humanity as a whole owes a vast debt to the Holocaust survivors who, with unimaginable courage, kept memory alive by telling their story, often to groups of schoolchildren, thus serving as living witnesses to the great destruction. Ultimately it was they who defeated the revisionists (Nazi sympathisers and others) who have tried ever since to deny the historical record of the 'Final Solution'. It would have been so easy for them to have kept their pain to themselves, but they did not. Because of them we have been able to fulfill the great command of Zakhor, "Remember." Not because we live in the past, but precisely because we have to learn from it if we are to shape a future in which the words "Never again" are real and not an empty slogan.

But in the intervening years it has become clear that not everyone has learned the lesson. Terrible catastrophes have taken place, involving racial rivalry or religious conflict. It is simply not enough that Jews remember the Holocaust - which we do every year on Yom ha-Shoah. That day remains an essential part of our calendar. There will always be a difference in kind between Jewish grief and universal recollection. The victims were our people, members of our immediate or extended families. There never was nor ever will be a suggestion that a National Day, meant for everyone, should replace our own Yom ha-Shoah.

But learning the lesson of the Shoah is something each of us must do, whether we are Jewish or not, and whether or not we belong to a group that has suffered persecution. As I wrote in the national press, the Holocaust did not teach us what it means to be a Jew. Judaism is about life, not death; about holiness not desecration; about being loved by God, not about being hated by anti-semites. The Holocaust teaches us not about Jewish identity but about what it is to be a human being, recognising, and being prepared to fight for, the humanity of others. Its pain is particular, but its message is universal.

That is what made January 27th a great leap forward. Without minimising or trivialising the uniqueness of the Holocaust, it brought within its ambit other tragedies, other attempts at ethnic cleansing and genocide. For me, one of the most powerful moments came on the day before the ceremony when, at the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, survivors of the wars in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, thanked us as a community for giving them a platform on which they could speak of their own experiences and gain a hearing. Like the Holocaust survivors, one of their deepest traumas was the feeling that "the world had stood by," watching and doing nothing, while their people perished. They too wanted to add their voice to the cry, "Never again."

So the Holocaust has become not just part of Jewish memory, but part also of our collective conscience. On January 27th it did so with great emotional and moral depth. The battle for freedom and tolerance never ends. But it can be won - if we never forget, and never cease to teach our children, that human life is sacred, and that God when God created mankind, He made not uniformity but diversity. Judaism is about the dignity of difference. That is a message not just for us but for the world.

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