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Frank Dabba Smith

January 27th, 2022

Holocaust Memorial Day 2022: Seeking Critical Understanding and Overcoming the Weaponisation of a Genocide

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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Frank Dabba Smith

January 27th, 2022

Holocaust Memorial Day 2022: Seeking Critical Understanding and Overcoming the Weaponisation of a Genocide

0 comments | 11 shares

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

January 27th marks Holocaust Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for the atrocities of genocides. In this post, Rabbi Dr Frank Dabba Smith of Leo Baeck College London writes about how the Holocaust can be unfortunately weaponised in today’s world but also how, through critical understanding, we can honour the legacy of Holocaust Memorial Day in our everyday lives. 

For readers in the UK, you can find you local HMD event taking place here

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin | Photo: Andrea Nardi, Unsplash

Seventy-seven years ago today, the vast network of over forty concentration camps coupled with sites of forced labour plus industrialised extermination facilities, referred to collectively as ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau’, was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. The barely comprehensible scale of this operation soon came to symbolise the methodical destruction of innocent people, victims of the Nazi imperial conquest designed to increase material prosperity for the Third Reich and to create a racially pure world.  Of the estimated seventeen-million people who were murdered by various means, the largest single grouping consisted of six-million Jews – there were millions more including non-Jewish Slavs, Sinti-Roma, mentally ill, physically disabled, gays, lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political opponents plus others deemed undeserving of a place in the Nazi rose garden project. Although the Nazi paradise for aryans would have entailed a never-ending process of racial purification through murder, the genocide of Jews was of the highest immediate priority. Hence, the ‘Holocaust’ may be especially associated with Jewish victims, but, certainly not exclusively.

Arising out of an increasing sense of urgency internationally concerning the ageing of Holocaust survivors as well as the occurrence of further genocides, the date of 27th January became established as ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ (‘HMD’) in the UK beginning in 2001. Each year is delineated by a theme reflecting on the Holocaust and subsequent genocides  – such as in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur –  invoking aspects of remembrance, knowledge and humanitarianism ‘to learn from the past in order to create a safer, better future’. For this year, the theme is ‘One Day’, to encourage students and other participants to focus on the particular micro or macro events of one day in the past or present ‘in the hope that there may be One Day [sic] in the future with no genocide’.

Unfortunately, both in its origins and until today, HMD also suffers from a conflation between purely educational aims and the potential politicisation of commemoration. With respect to the problem of conjoining the teaching of history and memory, Andrew Pearce notes:

“As a philosophy and practice, the education of memory can be criticized on multiple grounds. Memory is not, as it assumes, a uniform, monolithic entity, able to be molded [sic] and manipulated according to the will of the state; pedagogy is more than a simple transmission of predetermined meanings; and experiential approaches to teaching, learning and remembering cannot guarantee buy-in or consensus.”

Furthermore, when it comes to the teaching of the history of such an emotive subject as genocide, it is all too easy to lose sight of the nuanced ‘grey area’ concerning the complex, inconsistent and paradoxical aspects of human behaviour. Even those who stood courageously outside the crowd and helped the persecuted engaged in contradictory behaviours due to acute pressures of living under Nazi rule, for example. There is the risk, too, of creating rigidly binary categories of ‘victim versus perpetrator’ as well as ‘rescuer versus bystander’ thus relegating the study of genocide to a rather irrelevant realm that does not serve to challenge complex individual and cultural behaviours with respect to the daily exercises of power that marginalise vulnerable people in the present.

The Holocaust is a subject that can be weaponised both discreetly and vociferously in the service of all manner of abuses. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a prime example. Right-wing Israeli politicians routinely invoke the Holocaust to conflate eliminationist antisemitism with any criticism expressed by non-Jews (and by oppositional Jews, too) against their government’s policies with respect to perpetuating the occupation and deepening the subjugation of Palestinians. On the other hand, extremist Palestinians have engaged in Holocaust denial or in accusing Zionists of having aided and abetted the Nazis to create the State of Israel.  In truth, as Jacqueline Rose writes, ‘…unless we can hold [the Holocaust and the Naqba] in our hearts and minds as part of the same story, there can be no moving forward in the seemingly unmovable conflict that is Israel-Palestine’. How can we struggle to engage deeply with Hannan Hever’s characterisation of the Holocaust and Naqba ‘…as an acute aporia of comparison and distinction, simultaneously impossible and essential?’

To engage in such a task necessitates dialogue guided by an understanding of the role of victimhood in perpetuating a seemingly intractable conflict. Unresolved trauma and suffering elides into the justification for revenge, either directly against the perpetrator or projected onto an unrelated Other that is perceived to be a threat to one’s survival. In this sense, the Nazis projected the trauma of Germany’s defeat in World War One onto the Jews. Still unable to cope with the unspeakable trauma of the Holocaust, a cycle of repetition occurs vis a vis the Palestinians by Israelis who have convinced themselves that they, too, will inevitably face genocide.

So where does all of this leave us on the 27th January 2022?

Perhaps, on this ‘One Day’ set aside in the UK for the tasks of remembrance, knowledge and humanitarian pledges it might be helpful to: acknowledge that each of us is anxious about the precarious state of the world not to mention our place and purposes within it; feel a sense of gratitude for what goodness we do have and share with each other; listen to the Other, no matter how uncomfortable; distinguish between evidence-based reality and fallacious alternatives; exercise kindness rather than power; consider how little we actually understand about ourselves and others because to be human, if we are honest, is often to be confused.  

Note: This piece gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Religion and Global Society blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

About the author

Frank Dabba Smith

Rabbi Dr Frank Dabba Smith is a Lecturer at Leo Baeck College teaching a course on the Holocaust to rabbinic students. He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at UCL and serves as Co-Chair of the International Advisory Committee of EcoPeace-Middle East, as Advisor to the Inter-religious Committee of the World Methodist Council and as Vice-Chair of the Brent Multi-faith Forum. Publications include My Secret Camera (Harcourt and Frances Lincoln, 2000) and Elsie’s War (Frances Lincoln, 2003).

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