On 27th January, 60 years ago, Russian troops entered the little Polish town of Auschwitz, and saw sights we still find it difficult to comprehend. It was their first glimpse of the final solution: the planned extermination of every Jew in Europe. It's hard to sense the sheer scale of the destruction. On 11 September 2001 history was changed by a terrorist attack in which 3000 people died. During the Holocaust, on average 3000 Jews were killed every day of every week for five and a half years. And not just Jews: the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, gypsies, gays, murdered because they were different; not like us.

Each year we weep for the victims. But at today's memorial ceremony we'll be thinking about another group: the survivors. We tend to take survival for granted. You walk through the valley of the shadow of death and you continue. But there are times when survival takes courage. After the flood, says the Bible, Noah became drunk. Looking back at the destruction of the cities of the plain, Lot's wife was turned to salt. There are sights that break the will to live. How did the people liberated from Auschwitz and the other factories of death carry on, knowing what they knew, seeing what they saw? For me getting to know w Holocaust survivors has been a living tutorial in what Paul Tillich called the courage to be.

For sixty years they've carried the burden of memory. The victims knew that an attempt would be made to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, and their last message to the living was: remember us. We're being robbed of life; don't let us be robbed even of our death. And so the survivors have told their story, not in hate or the desire for revenge but the opposite. In Judaism we remember for the future and for life. The word zakhor, remember, appears in the bible 169 times. We hold memory as a sacred duty: because what we remember, we can avoid. What we forget, we can repeat.

Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, says the Bible, so that you will always cherish freedom. Remember death so as to sanctify life. Memory is the moral tutor of mankind. Forget, and you allow other genocides to happen: in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur. The survivors kept their faith with the dead but they've also taught us, the living, that the road that begins in hate ends at the gates of hell. That is why we must never forget.

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