The importance of “zachor” (remembrance of the victims of genocide) –  the vital lesson that the mass murder of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews is not an abstract statistic. At moments of remembrance, in particular recalling that: “Whoever saves a single life it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.” We are, in essence, the guarantors of each other’s destiny.

An enduring lesson is that the Holocaust succeeded not only because of the systematic and industrial-level extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis, but equally, as a result of the state-sanctioned ideology of hate. It is the teaching of contempt, the ‘demonising of the other’ that is indeed the driver and source. As the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed, “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.” It began with genocidal incitement.​

If the Holocaust is a metaphor for radical evil, antisemitism (one of the oldest forms of race-motivated discrimination) is a metaphor for determined hatred.

The Holocaust denial movement-  the cutting edge of antisemitism - is not purely an assault on Jewish memory in its accusation that the Holocaust is a hoax fabricated by the Jews, it is more starkly, an international conspiracy to cover up the very worst crimes in history. Simply put, the intention of the Holocaust denial movement is to bury and whitewash the crimes and atrocities of the Nazis.​

An especially painful and poignant lesson is that the crimes of the Holocaust occurred through a combination of state-sanctioned incitement to hatred and genocide and crimes of indifference - “conspiracies of silence”. What makes the Holocaust - and more recently the Rwandan Genocide - so intolerable is that its full horror was preventable. Indifference and inaction in the face of evil is clearly acquiescence, if not complicity in the very evil itself.​

Few of the perpetrators - apart from those prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials - were actually brought to justice. Impunity emboldens and encourages war criminals and war crimes.

The Holocaust was enabled and advanced by the complicity of the elites, including physicians, church leaders, judges, lawyers, engineers, architects and educators. The Nuremberg crimes were indeed the crimes of the Nuremberg elites. It is our responsibility to ‘speak truth to power’ and to ‘hold power accountable to truth’.

It is revealing, as Professor Henry Friedlander noted in “The Origins of Nazi Genocide”, that the very first group targeted for killing by the Nazis were the Jewish disabled. As a society, we have a clear responsibility to give ‘voice to the voiceless’ and to ‘empower the powerless’.

Remember and recognise the rescuers (the “Righteous Among the Nations”) - of whom Raoul Wallenberg is both  metaphor and message, demonstrating that one person with compassion and the courage to act can confront evil, resist and transform history. The United Nations called Wallenberg the “greatest humanitarian of the 20th century”.

We must remember – and honour – the survivors of the Holocaust. They witnessed and endured the very worst of inhumanity, but found the courage to survive and rebuild their lives. Together with them, we must remember – and pledge – never to be indifferent to racial incitement and hate, to tolerate antisemitism, to ignore the plight of the vulnerable or to be complacent in the face of mass atrocity.