The Holocaust, or Shoah, was the Nazi genocide perpetrated from 1941 to 1945. Jews were the primary targets, with six million losing their lives. But the Nazis also murdered around five million other people: European Roma, Sinti and Lalleri Gypsies, Poles, Slavs, black and multiracial people, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with disabilities, Communists and people deemed “asocial”, including sex workers and people with substance misuse issues.
This year, the theme for the day is Ordinary People. You can read more about it on the website here.
I’m not a member of the Jewish community but I have spent some time learning about the Holocaust. Only in small chunks and over a number of years, as it’s truly harrowing to learn how wicked humans can be when stirred by ideology and hatred.
For many Jews, the Holocaust is still a raw wound despite it having ended over 70 years ago. There are still a few living survivors and almost every Jew today lost a family member or knows someone who did.
For some, the sheer horror of the Holocaust overwhelms any attempt to find “lessons”. For others, the only real lesson is that evil exists and God probably doesn’t. For many, the Holocaust implies that Jews can never again rely on other nations for protection.
For me, the Holocaust is so overwhelming, so unbelievable, that there is no single clear lesson to be learned. I think it is most important simply to remember it, despite the fact that it is probably more natural, and comforting, to forget than to face a horror which is, thankfully, so alien to our lives in the UK today.
But if I were to pick a lesson, it is that the Holocaust is clear proof that humanity is not on an inevitable path to enlightenment. People knew all about the rights of man, democracy, equality and justice in the 1930s. The Weimar Republic, the cradle of Naziism, was lauded as a perfect democracy. Its constitution was a model of equality and individual rights.
And yet, the Holocaust happened. Liberalism lost and evil won. Why so? Perhaps it was because good people did nothing. Or maybe because by the time they came for the Jews, the gays, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, too many people had remained silent.
For me, the lesson of the Holocaust is that it is comforting to think, complacently, that we have reached the end of man’s wickedness and spite to one another, but the reality is that every era contains evil and some of the fault has to be those who stand by and do nothing.
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was drafted mostly by British lawyers in 1950 and signed by the UK in 1953. Some of the rights reflected those contained in instruments that pre-dated the Holocaust by hundreds of years: for example, the British 1689 Bill of Rights, the French 1789 Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen, and the 1791 Bill of Rights in the United States.
But the ECHR also incorporated wisdom gained from the horrors of the 1940s. It was an attempt, along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to create an international standard which would, if enforced, prevent a repetition of events such as the Holocaust.
What was new about the ECHR was that it was enforceable. It wasn’t just nice words; there was an actual mechanism, the European Court of Human Rights, to give people a way of claiming their rights. And the states which signed up to the ECHR agreed to abide by it.
The ECHR, like its UK equivalent the Human Rights Act, has done a huge amount of good.
It is also regularly criticised by MPs who don’t like judges interfering, and the tabloid press, who don’t like immigrants and the right to privacy. We hear continually at the moment that the UK is walking away from the ECHR and doing our own things: changing the law to stop the boats, making anyone who enters the UK without a visa or refugee status a criminal. Effectively ending legal routes.
But the ECHR has been by far the most successful international human rights law in history. That success was built, in part, on the still-raw memory of the Holocaust. European leaders, for a while, remembered that Nazi tyranny began not with the death camps but with a million tiny cuts to liberty.
As Pierre-Henria Teitgen, one of the founders of the ECHR put it: “Democracies do not become Nazi countries in one day. Evil progresses cunningly… one by one freedoms are suppressed, in one sphere after another. Public opinion and the entire national conscience are asphyxiated. And then, when everything is in order, the ‘Führer’ is installed and the evolution continues even to the oven of the crematorium. It is necessary to intervene before it is too late.”
Today, freedoms are being suppressed all over the world, as well as at home.
Human rights are not going to prevent another Holocaust. But they are a blueprint for a fair, just and equal society.
It is for every generation to build a rights-based society based on that plan and to protect it. To be a little bit more up to date. In the words of the Manic Street Preachers: “If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.”
We’re not perfect here at P3. We’ve got work to do to make sure that we are as robust as we can be when challenging discrimination of all kinds. You’ll see over this coming year there will be a much greater focus on being anti discriminatory in all that we do. It’s a bit more than not discriminating but it’s about challenging discrimination when we see it.
Mark Simms
