This year marks some grim anniversaries: on January 27th 1945 the Auschwitz-Birkenau site was captured by the advancing Soviet army, and on April 15th 1945, the British army liberated the camp at Bergen-Belsen. The 80th anniversary of these events reminds us that the Shoah is irrevocably moving into and blending with Jewish history, and the number of surviving witnesses is dwindling and soon they will all have gone.
I can’t easily explain why I have been fascinated by the Shoah in all its horror since I read Lord Russell of Liverpool’s The Scourge of the Swastika as a teenager, but it has been a subject of study for me ever since. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, the field of Holocaust Studies has been revivified by the opening up of previously sealed archives and great caches of information. The change between the books written before and those written afterwards is clear, and perhaps explains why 80 years out from 1945 new books on the Shoah and aspects of it continue to be published.
The survivors who found homes in a variety of countries knew that a time would come when they would no longer be able to stand up as actual victims of the Nazi death cult and those who sought to portray the Shoah in dishonest and dishonourable ways would become ever harder to discredit.
Many of the survivors said nothing about their experiences for decades afterwards, but then, a catalyst like the arrival of grandchildren made many feel they needed their families to know what had happened to them in Nazi-occupied Europe. Once they had started, however, they made it their mission not just to tell their relatives but to offer their services to schools to share their experiences with new generations.
Over the five decades of my work within the Jewish community I have been privileged to know many refugees from Nazism, some who were on the Kindertransport, and a smaller number of survivors of the camps themselves.
In the former category I think now of Bob and Ann Kirk, zichronam livrachah, and in the latter, particularly, of Tomi Reichental, who was a child in the Belsen camp and who has been a tireless speaker and educator in Ireland about the horrors of the Shoah. I know Tomi because he is the father of one of my congregants, and great friend, in Dublin.
Tomi is a naturally humble man, but in moral terms he is a towering figure. He did not lose all the members of his family but he still knew that some 30 members of his extended family were murdered. What we know about the Shoah, and particularly about the camps, makes it mind boggling to think about how children would have coped with the daily round of suffering and bestial brutality, and what their survival says about them.
Tomi was 10 when Belsen was liberated and he is now old and frail, but the fire stills burns inside, and all who know him should feel a responsibility to continue his work to tell the truth about the Shoah, and to refute the lies and distortions from every malign source which issues them.
We are all aware that we are living in momentous times, indeed in some respects so momentous that there is no obvious road map for us to see a way through. We witness daily convulsions in the Disunited States which are mind-blowing, we witness the far right using antisemitism as a means of attacking those they hate even more than they hate us, we witness antisemitism rife in our own country, and in the world, to a degree that makes us shake our heads in disbelief.
In such a context, and in this 80th anniversary year of the liberation of two of the most infamous death camps, and the ending of the Second World War, there is one thing we can do and I believe we must do. We need to take onto ourselves the mantle of those now unable to fulfil their duty of telling the truth about the Shoah and the Nazi Endlösung, and to do that we must read the best of the recently published works and educate ourselves to the level we need for advocacy. This is not an undertaking to commence lightly, for it will be taxing for our hearts and minds, but I believe it is essential, especially for those who will lead our part of Anglo-Jewry in the coming decades.
I have long felt that the words of Avraham Shlonsky, in his poem, Nadarti neder, I have taken an oath, spoke for me, and they still do:
I have taken this oath: to remember it all.
To remember – and never to forget.
Forgetting nothing of this, till ten generations pass,
And the grief disappears, and all the pain,
And the punishing blows are ended for good.
I swear this night of terror shall not have passed in vain;
I swear this morning I’ll not live unchanged,
As if I were no wiser, even now, even now.
Zakhor, remember, lo tishkach, do not forget.
Amen
Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh
Yom HaShoah 2025
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.