Bath Inter Faith Group partnered with B&NES Council in commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day with an event in the Guildhall on Thursday 26 January.
The day marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945. As the last generation of Holocaust survivors disappears, the need to remember and draw lessons from those terrible events becomes ever more important. Sadly, the lessons remain unlearnt: we have once again witnessed terrible crimes in our continent in the past year, atrocities have continued in so many other parts of the world, and the seeds of division are constantly being sown among us.
The theme chosen by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for this year is “Ordinary people”. The victims of genocide are ordinary people; so are the perpetrators; so are the onlookers who look away out of choice or fear. Many different stories can be found on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Available in our libraries are recent books relating family histories through the Holocaust such as Michael Rosen’s “The Missing” and Hadley Freeman’s “House of Glass”. Reading these both brings history to life and helps in understanding what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”, in a way no academic treatise can.
Addressing longstanding divisions between Christians and Jews, which helped to pave the way to the Holocaust, has been one of the great challenges of the past 80 years. Much progress has been made but much more is still to be done. Similarly there are people of good will working to bring the other world faiths more closely together, even as the forces of division and hatred so often seem to dominate. As the Catholic theologian Hans Kueng pointed out, there can be “no peace among the nations without peace among the religions”.
So, for the past 32 years the Bath Inter Faith Group has had among its aims to “enrich the spiritual life of Bath and the surrounding district by promoting harmony between people of different faiths”. As we invite you to share this Holocaust Memorial Day with us, please visit our Facebook page @bathinterfaith and connect with our ongoing programme.
David Musgrave, Chair, Bath Inter Faith Group.
This article was first published in 2023.