My name is Ian Duguid and I am an Ambassador of the Holocaust Education Trust. I am writing this in an effort to reflect on this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, that being the 27th of January.
I started off as a participant in the “Lessons from Auschwitz Project”, which saw an educational visit to the former death camp. What I learned on that trip is something I consider worth “reflecting” on. I wouldn’t say I learned something new in terms of statistics or specific facts. I didn’t learn any new names of German officers who inflicted atrocities I hadn’t heard before. But I learned the true meaning of the word “humanity” when referring to the Holocaust.
My primary example is Jannine Webber. Mrs Webber is someone I got the magnificent opportunity to meet and speak with at an Edinburgh Conference last November. She herself had not actually seen a death or concentration camp, but she spent time in the Lvov Ghetto, where her mother and brother died. She spent time in a convent hiding with the local Catholic community. And that is humanity, the fear, the need for strategy in times of crisis, the need to survive. And of course, the humanity of those few Catholics in the community who would likely have known her true identity, but chose to protect her. That she was by nature a criminal under Hitler’s Europe, she was guilty only of being Jewish.
But of course the word humanity is not always a positive word. Humanity can sometimes be cruel, unfair and deeply prejudicial, this is shown particularly in Jannine’s story which included her brother being buried alive. I find her story to be both heartbreaking and also vital in understanding that not all suffering in the Holocaust circled around a camp.
That being said, I don’t think I will ever forget going to Auschwitz, and a couple hours alone in that place is enough to squash the opinions of any genocide denier. The bit that stuck with me, and I haven’t fully been able to shift it from my thoughts, was the nail marks. Because if you look carefully into the walls of the gas chamber, you will see nail scratches. It’s enough to either make you cry or to make you feel violently sick, or in my case, to make you silent in shock. What happened in that room, and many rooms like them is simply unimaginable to me or you. What they would have gone through in their final minutes is unnatural and monstrous. With that in mind, however, we can describe the Holocaust as monstrous, barbaric and the worst example of human behaviour, without dehumanising the perpetrators. Originally this was not something I understood. It was said by a guide at Auschwitz 1 that we can’t see the Nazis as monstrous: I really did not sympathise with this to begin with if I’m honest. But that’s because being told that Rudolf Hoss was not a monster is a difficult thing to stomach after having just walked through a gas chamber. However, I think I understand it now. Because if you paint perpetrators as demons, you rob them of what they actually were. They were human. They were the worst example of humanity, but they were still human. Hoss would kill innocent people in their hundreds and then proceed to go home and play with his children, like a normal dad. And the issue with saying that Nazis are monsters is that you make them seem unique. You make them seem like a scary nightmare that couldn’t possibly happen again because “society is more understanding now”. I’m afraid to say it simply isn’t. Anti-semitic attacks in some areas of this country are up 1350%, and it is certainly not my business to make any intellectual view on the conflict in Gaza. However, we need to understand as a society that no one people are responsible for the acts of a terrorist group, or of a country’s government. And that, and that alone is the reason we have Holocaust Memorial Day events. And why we send children in bulk to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Treblinka.
Any one of us would like to think that we are above such things as propaganda brain-washing. But we are not, we are like ordinary Germans in the 1940s, we are human, and therefore deeply flawed creatures. I hope this is a message that the Trust, and I, have been able to deliver in big ways like speeches at Parliament, right down to writing an article like this. Because God help us if we don’t make an effort to stamp out the inhumanity of humanity.