Holocaust Memorial Day 2009

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) is the international day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust.  It takes place on 27 January each year – the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945 by Soviet troops.  HMD was established in the UK in 2000 with the first commemoration taking place in January 2001.  Since then councils, schools, colleges, faith and community groups have developed their own programmes of remembrance.

HMD is distinct from Yom HaShoah which is the Jewish day of remembrance for Jewish victims of the Holocaust.  Yom HaShoah will be on 21 April in 2009.

HMD aims to educate, to commemorate and to prompt action against discrimination and hatred in our own communities today and remembers the lives of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust and other victims of Nazi racial and social policy including Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Gay men and Lesbians, Disabled children and adults, Black Germans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons and political opponents of the Nazi regime. HMD also remembers the victims of genocide since the end of the Holocaust including those in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda and the ongoing atrocities in Darfur.  HMD encourages us all to learn from the past to address prejudice and discrimination in the present day.

The theme for HMD09 is Stand up to Hatred and explores the expression of hatred in speech and propaganda; how hatred can be enshrined in legislation; the impact of hatred on those who are regarded as different; hate crimes in Britain today and what we can all do to stand up to hatred in our own communities.  Britain today is not Nazi Germany.  Nor is it Cambodia, Rwanda or Bosnia where genocides have taken place in the past 35 years.  However, the hatred which fuelled the Holocaust and subsequent genocides do still exist in our society and it is the duty of us all to recognise hatred when it occurs and stop its development.

I am writing this entry on the Greek island of Kefalonia (Cephallonia, Kefallínia, Kefalloniá), the largest of the Ionian islands, in a week that has seen a second bulldozer attack in Jerusalem, suicide bombers in the Iraqi capital Baghdad and the northern city of Kirkuk, a series of explosions in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, bombings in Istanbul and the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in Belgrade.  Karadzic now faces extradition to the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. He faces 11 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities in the Bosnian war of the 1990s.  The charges relate to several events, including his alleged part in the July 1995 shelling of Sarajevo during the city’s siege, in which some 12,000 civilians died.  He is also alleged to have organised the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosniak men and youths in Srebrenica. We do not need to look far to see the effects of hatred.

I am also reminded of events that took place during World War II as I drive around this rugged, mountainous and beautiful island.  Kefalonia was taken over by the Germans in World War II in a particularly gruesome fashion.  The island had been seized by the Italians, who controlled it briefly prior to the fall of Mussolini and Italy’s capitulation in September 1943. At this moment of administrative confusion, with contradictory orders both to surrender and to repel the Germans, the Italians were left helpless and hopelessly outnumbered. Rather than herd them into POW camps, the Germans, according to Ionian historian Arthur Foss, “decided in cold blood to massacre their former allies”.  In villages on the slopes of Mount Énos, and out near the sea mills of Katovóthres at Argostóli, over 5,000 Italian soldiers were shot and their bodies burnt.  The massacre, of course, is a key event in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.  Their memorial is on the peninsula behind Argostóli.

Anton Riley (Assistant Head of Business and Computing)