Will we remember the Holocaust in 10 years

WILL the Holocaust be remembered in 100 years? Yes? No? Today was Holocaust Memorial Day, the day when Auschwitz was liberated. The best book I’ve read on the Holocaust is Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. When the heavy-hand of taught history has blunted the humanity with function and learning to order, and the facts have been reduced by time to flat statistics, stories and art will be what resonate. Levi’s is compelling. His was one of millions.

A neighbour of mine, of a certain age, never spoke to me of the horror. A talented seamstress she was a great fixer living an ordinary life in suburban London. And then one day I heard her story. She had been a young Jewish girl in Copenhagen when the Nazis came. Her best friend’s father – not a Jew – let her live with them. Still the Nazis came for her. The man was a photographer by trade. He had a dark room. Her memory is of hearing the call that Germans were coming. Her friend’s father took her to his studio, and hid her in a large vat of liquid. He closed the lid. The thick liquid was up to her mouth. It was pitch black. She survived. Her family didn’t. They were taken to the camps. And one day she’ll be gone. Who will tell her story of living in such fear? Who will believe it..?



Roses are placed in the Holocaust Memorial commemorating the persecution of the Jewish people during World War II, in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. There were some 50,000 Jews living in Thessaloniki at the start of World War II, and almost 45,000 perished at Auschwitz concentration camp, and Greece officially commemorates the Holocaust every Jan. 27. (AP Photo/Nikolas Giakoumidis)



Holocaust survivor Ben  Helfgott, Honourary President of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, poses with a candle on Millennium Bridge during an event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day



Italian Premier Mario Monti attends a ceremony commemorate the Holocaust in Milan, Italy, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi says Benito Mussolini did much good, except for dictator’s regime’s anti-Jewish laws. Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for siding with Hitler, saying the late fascist leader likely reasoned that German power would expand so it would be better for Italy to ally itself with Germany. He was speaking to reporters Sunday on the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan to commemorate the Holocaust. When Germany’s Nazi regime occupied Italy during World War II, thousands from the tiny Italian Jewish community were deported to death camps. In 1938, before the war’s outbreak, Mussolini’s regime passed anti-Jewish laws, barring them from universities and many professions, among other bans. Berlusconi called the laws Mussolini’s “worst fault” but insisted that in many other things, “he did good.” (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)


                                        In Warsaw, Poland, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. 


                         Holocaust memorial day in Berlin, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013.



A small shield shaped pin engraved with the place and names camps which Holocaust survivor Yakov Berkowicz was imprisoned, displayed on the pocket of a prisoner short during the opening display of “Gathering the Fragments” exhibit at Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem


 
Katerina Beranova, Silke Doerner and Robert Holzer, from left, perform during the opera ‘Spiegelgrund’ by Austrian composer Peter Androsch in the imperial council hall of the Austrian parliament in Vienna, Friday, Jan. 25, 2013. Androsch goes where few others have dared, with an opera depicting how Nazis methodically killed mentally or physically deficient children. The performance premieres to mark International Holocaust Day in the parliament of Austria _ a nation still atoning for its role in atrocities committed by the Nazis.