Today is Yom HaShoah, which translates from Hebrew as the Day of the Catastrophe, the day when Israel, the United States and Argentina commemorate the Holocaust, a day that coincides with the start of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. (Most countries commemorate January 27th, the day Auschwitz was liberated in 1945). For those of us connected to this history personally, these national days of remembrance are always solemn and sobering moments.
By elevating the commemoration to the status of a national day of commemoration there remains a lasting hope that, among the youngest generation, the history of the Holocaust will be acknowledged and marked. From earnest politicians we hear the need for lessons of history to be learned.
But can the mantra of ‘learning the lessons of history’ ever be anything more than a glib platitude? Have we ever learned lessons from history and, if this hugely complicated question cannot be answered positively, then why do we bother memorialising the Holocaust at state level and should people in my position simply keep our grief private?
This year, the war in Ukraine gives Yom HaShoah a particularly contemporary significance. That a cruel, unjust war is being waged by a dictatorship on a democracy on land that claimed one and a half million victims of the Holocaust still seems unimaginable for most of us. The murders of two Holocaust survivors in their 90s is especially perverse, their lives bookended by the very worst of circumstances. The bombing by the Russians of Babyn Yar, a ravine outside Kiev where almost 34,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis over two days in 1941, has brought awareness to the wider world of that site of horror, with yet more horror.
While it’s often said that if you invoke the Holocaust in any debate you’ve immediately lost the argument, the appalling vista in Ukraine of mass murder, the indiscriminate and targeted bombing of civilians, the rape of women and the stream of frightened and bewildered refugees bears a resemblance to events 80 years ago. Replying to the question, “What have you learned from the Holocaust?”, Elie Wiesel, holocaust survivor and Nobel prize winner, said: “That it’s possible to get away with anything.”
Failure of geopolitics
For those of us in northern Europe for whom events in Syria, Libya and Myanmar are too remote, both geographically and culturally, to affect our lives, the reality of undiluted misery visited on a Ukrainian population on our border has brought the failure of geopolitics into our homes. Memorialisation of the Holocaust is supposed to act, in part, as a reminder to individuals and governments of the responsibility of protecting the vulnerable and checking the powerful. One man has caused untold misery to millions and caused global instability. It cannot stand in a post-Holocaust world. Or can it?
What does neutrality offer the victims of Putin's naked aggression?
When I remember my own family consumed by the Holocaust, I cannot now unhitch their fate from the suffering of those in Ukraine. I feel the same outrage for the victims of conflicts further afield but, because of the location, the horror in Ukraine resonates more intensely. I see a world bullied by a dictator and terrified to go to war. I see an alliance of countries traumatised by a war, still in living memory and of which the Holocaust was the worst act, refusing to accept that we are now at war again. Worse still, instead of fighting a rampaging warmonger with a fraction of the military power of Nato, we will allow Russia to flatten Ukraine and wreak misery on its population forever. So long as the conflict does not spill into another European country.
At this year’s Yom HaShoah, I will think about the United Nations and how it was created out of the ashes of the Holocaust, designed to prevent a repetition and, with the advent of international human rights legislation, to put on trial those accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. But with Russia a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council what power does that body have against a Russian veto of sanctions against it? Any talk of bringing the Putin regime to trial for war crimes seems just that, talk. While Ireland’s seat on the Security Council is an important voice, an expectation that the soft power of diplomacy will bring peace to Ukraine is wishful thinking.
Neutrality
And now the question of Ireland’s neutrality has come into sharp focus. As we honour the victims of the Holocaust formally today and again make the pledge ‘never again’, what does neutrality offer the victims of Putin’s naked aggression? Elie Wiesel again: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides.” Ireland is certainly not silent on the matter of Ukraine, but against an enemy hellbent on war, neutrality can sound like silence.
As for learning the lessons of history, events in Ukraine show that cruel dictatorships are not yet consigned to the past in Europe. Whatever the reasons for remembering the Holocaust, today’s ceremonies will have little bearing on the besieged souls in Mariupol and Kharkiv. Their experience resembles too closely the blood-stained history of my inheritance. Perhaps this year’s Yom HaShoah should be a call for urgent action. Are we prepared to witness the gassing of civilians and the use of concentration camps again? What will next year’s ceremony mean, then?
Beyond sending aid to Ukraine, taking in refugees and urging our governments to take more direct military action, those of us lucky enough to live in liberal democracies must ring-fence our values and reinforce the institutions that uphold them, so that those who wish to dismantle them cannot come to power. What we learn from history is that we don’t easily change our behaviour; warmongering and cruelty are part of our make-up. We can, however, protect us from our worst excesses.
Oliver Sears is founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland