“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest,” said Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor.

Public memory is an ephemeral edifice of all that has transpired. An epoch characterised by utmost brutality becomes just another paragraph or chapter in a history or any other social sciences textbook. We read and learn about it without wondering about or realising the social and psychological impact it had on the people who had to encounter it. Or how the trajectories of people’s lives were simply changed by the occurrence, forever. Much of the prevailing conflict in the world has got a lot to do with social amnesia. As a community, we fail to realise how so many losses could have been averted if we had been morally attentive to what history has always beckoned us to hear. Georg Hegel was undoubtedly right when he said, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” As we observe the current socio-political ecosystem across the globe today, 80 years on from the Holocaust, we see how not much has changed.

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The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is taken to be on 27th January, as the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in present-day Poland, the largest concentration camp under the regime of Adolf Hitler where an estimated 1.1 million were murdered, was liberated on this day in 1945 by the soldiers of the 100th Lviv Division of the First Ukrainian Front who opened the gates of the camp. The Holocaust was an institutional murder of six million Jews that occurred between 1941 and 1945 across German-occupied Europe. This systematic killing was the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’ in Hitler’s Third Reich. Even several minority groups were exterminated alongside the Jews. Hitler widely proclaimed the superiority of the Aryan race, which was the main tenet of Nazi ideology.

On 27th January 2025, Monday, a solemn ceremony was held at Auschwitz that was attended by the living Holocaust survivors as well as political leaders and dignitaries from around the globe, including King Charles III of Britain, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Emmanuel Macron of France. Piotr Cywinski, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum director, said at the event, “Memory is not only crying when you look to the past; it is not only empathy when you look to the victims. This is not enough. Memory, I think, is really the key for today’s time and the key for finding your position today.”

If we look at the movie “Jojo Rabbit”, it becomes easier to understand how ideological poisoning was implemented by the Nazi regime to secure their objectives. Disseminating propaganda against minority communities are becoming increasingly prevalent in today’s world as well, causing anxiety among such communities as they fear for their basic human rights.

Hatred on the lines of race, religion and gender are instrumental factors shaping global politics, to this day. Debates continue to exist among scholars about the genocidal intentions of the ongoing wars, namely the Israel-Palestine war that has begun since 7th October, 2023. As we watch on broadcast the transformation of civilisations into debris and rubble, it is too obvious how morally bankrupt we have become, as the world powers stand witness to the present-day demolition and massacre, barely lending a helping hand, or perhaps even protesting against the injustice to start with. There are anti-Semitic sentiments rising across Europe today, as scholarly and layperson debates rage about the Israel-Palestine war, notwithstanding the ceasefire.

However, what is most miraculous is how little acts of kindness have continued to exist even in the harshest of circumstances. As Elie Wiesel said in his speech at the opening of Yad Vashem’s Holocaust History Museum, “In those times, the heroes were martyrs, and the martyrs were heroes. It was heroic for a friend to give his piece of bread to his friend.” Perhaps a statement that reminds us of the endearing friendship between the two characters Bruno and Shmuel in John Boyne’s historical fiction novel, “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”, thus blurring the lines between reality and fiction in our perception. Times of crisis also stand witness to extraordinary instances of fearlessness and compassion, like that of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved over 1,100 Jews by employing them, mirroring Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s quote, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”