Holocaust Memorial Day

Academic-in-Residence Richard McMillan gave a talk to Senior House pupils on the Holocaust to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day, which occurs on 27th January each year, this date being the date of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp by Soviet forces in 1945. This year marks eighty years since the liberation and there are very few Holocaust survivors left alive. The survivors and others are rightly concerned that the lessons of this tragic event are in danger of being forgotten. Richard’s talk emphasised the ideological roots of Nazism and how a set of evil, dystopian ideas were taken up by a radical political party which came to power in Germany largely as a result of an ongoing political and economic crisis resulting from the Great Depression. The adoption of these ideas had tragic results, as is well known. The point was made that the abandonment of mainstream religion and its replacement by paganism, along with a belief that the supposed interests of the state could be placed above ethical considerations, had played a crucial part in producing such an outcome. The talk was delivered around a set of slides of key figures and events. Pupils were often able to identify these correctly and there was an opportunity at the end of the talk for them to ask questions. It hardly needs to be said that it was not an uplifting assembly, but it was nevertheless necessary to address this topic in order to guard against a repetition of such appalling events. The words of one holocaust survivor were quoted: ‘It happened to me; it could happen to you.’