Holocaust Memorial Day 2009

 

Before I start, I want to recognise how difficult it is for you to sit and listen to one voice droning on at you for ten minutes on a Monday morning. I know I find it difficult to concentrate when I can’t see illustrations or take notes. So what I’ve done is to make the text of this assembly available on the school website for you to read if you choose to do so.

Tomorrow is our National Holocaust Memorial Day. On this day, we remember the deaths of around 10 million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, disabled people and other minority groups in Europe under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi rule in the 1930s and 1940s. The word Holocaust usually refers to the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe before 1945.

 

This became a systematic campaign of extermination. As German troops swept through Europe at the beginning of World War II, SS groups called the Einsatzgruppen rounded up Jewish civilians and killed them. Many were buried in mass graves near where they lived. Over a million Jews died in this way.

 

Later, the killing of Jews became like an industrial process. Six extermination centres were set up in occupied Poland. Jews from all over Europe were taken to these camps by train, crammed into cattle trucks. On arrival, they were not expected to live for more than a couple of hours. Most were taken straight to specially built gas chambers. After this, their bodies were burned in large ovens or they were piled into mass graves.

 

The names of these extermination camps are now the stuff of nightmares:

 

Chelmno

Belzec

Majdenek

Sobibor

Treblinka, and the one most people have heard of …

Auschwitz.

 

At Auschwitz, more than a million Jews were murdered between 1940 and 1945. Last year, two of our sixth form students, along with other students from the East Midlands, flew to Krakow and visited Auschwitz. You might remember the assembly they gave in the summer term where they described their experience.

 

A visit to Auschwitz is not like a visit to a museum. When Jacob and Charlie returned, they thought that it would be impossible to explain to other people what they had experienced. They were confronted with evidence of one of the most horrific episodes in the history of humanity.

 

At the end of their assembly, Jacob and Charlie repeated a plea that has been heard many times over the last 60 years. “This must never be allowed to happen again.” But in Cambodia in the 1970s, in Bosnia in the early 1990s, in Rwanda in the late 90s and in Darfur, Sudan in this decade, one group of people has set out to exterminate another group of people because they are different in some way. We call this genocide – the deliberate and systematic destruction of another group of people because of their race or religion.

 

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “Stand up to hatred”.

 

As a Psychology teacher, I have problems with the concept of hate. It’s one of the first things we study on the Psychology A-level course. It’s an issue that psychologists have worked hard to understand during the last 50 years. Why did ordinary Germans and Poles do these things? How is it that one person can behave in this way towards another person? The answer has more to do with human frailty than with hate.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see “The Reader”. In this film, Kate Winslett plays a German woman who was a prison guard at Auschwitz. She is arrested 20 years later and charged with the deaths of Jewish prisoners in her care. When she is confronted with the evidence, she admits to what she’s done and says, “It was my job. What would you have done?”

 

What would you have done? This question came back to me yesterday when I heard Rabbi Lionel Blue speaking on the radio. As a young boy in a Jewish family, he escaped from Germany before the Holocaust. As the first openly gay British rabbi, he knows something about hate and prejudice. Yesterday he was describing the thought that had tortured him for many years. If the Nazis had only murdered the gypsies and the communists and disabled people, but had left the Jews alone, would he have been brave enough to stand up against the hatred? Would he have risked his job and his family to stand up to the tyranny of the Nazis? He is brave enough now to say that he doesn’t know the answer, and this is what has tortured him for years.

What would you have done? Take a moment to think about the person you are sitting next to right now. It’s possible that this person is a friend, or just someone you know quite well. If I ask you whether you would be capable of deliberately harming this person, or whether you would stand by while other people abused or hurt this person, what would you say? I am sure that the vast majority of you would say that you would not let either of these things happen. But psychological research has demonstrated what we know to be true. If a group of people in your year is tormenting your neighbour or friend, it is very difficult to stand out in the crowd and to say stop. It is much easier to do nothing, to say nothing or even to protect yourself by appearing to join in.

 

My belief is that this does not make you an evil person. It does not mean that you are acting out of hatred. As I said before, I believe that this has more to do with human frailty than with hate.

 

One of the questions that has haunted humanity since the Holocaust is, “Where was God in the Holocaust?” Visitors to Auschwitz come back and say that he is there in the stillness and in the silence. So where was humanity in the Holocaust? Again, perhaps, the answer lies in stillness and silence and in the choices we make not to act as individuals.

 

What starts as bullying, prejudice and discrimination has its ultimate expression in genocide and the Holocaust. So be aware of what’s happening around you. Be more self-aware. Learn to recognise the language of bullying and don’t stand by while others around you are being picked on or being bullied … and do report what you’ve seen. When confronted with their bullying behaviour, most people regret it and say that they wouldn’t normally harm people in that way … and usually that’s true.

 

Thank you for listening.

 

 

AVM, 26^th January 2009