Never Again: we are losing our living connection to the Holocaust

Every year there are fewer Holocaust survivors alive to tell their story, to serve as a living testament to the horrors of the exterminationist Nazi regime.

A regime that existed, inside Europe, and killed 17 million people. That taught us that we must always remain vigilant lest it ever happen again.

Nie Wieder (Never Again) the world declared, as the horrors of the death camps became apparent. Then we proceeded to repeat the mistake again and again; at Srebrenica, in Myanmar, in Syria and in Cambodia.

Britain 2019. On the streets of Westminster crowds of unemployable thugs in high-vis vests frantically race around calling politicians fascists and Nazis, they stream themselves and post across social media, people reply in the comments calling them Nazis.

On Twitter political discussion inevitably descends to a childish race to prove that Corbynists, Tories, Zionists or Trump fans are the same as the Nazis.

But people walk among us with tattoos marked forever on their skin by the actual Nazis. We said we’d never forget, but we’ve killed the memory of a singularly unique event in history by reducing it to a crude rhetorical tool.

Many are now growing up with little knowledge of the deaths of 17 million people and the anti-Semitic rhetoric used to build the death camps is still leading to the deaths of Jews around the world.

In January 2014 I was dispatched to interview a Holocaust survivor named Martin Bennett. He had survived Auschwitz with his brother and dedicated his time to teaching young people about the horrors he had seen.

He told me his greatest fear was that some day he would be gone and that people would claim the events he lived through never happened.

I called Martin two years later to invite him to take part in a TV programme, he had passed away.

When I watched back the video of our interview, it carried a warning – the comments section was now closed due to the vile comments being made.