PM: "We must not forget the Holocaust"

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We must not forget the Holocaust - Telegraph

Article written by Gordon Brown

magine, Remember, Reflect, React: together, these words define tomorrow's Holocaust Memorial Day. Why imagine? Because the sheer scale of the Holocaust numbs us to its individual realities: the captivity, suffering and death of six million people, 1.5 million of them children, each with family, a history and unique emotions.

But there are images that somehow link the vast numbers of the lost, however faintly, to individual experience and suffering: grainy pictures of the young and old being herded into trains, huge heaps of suitcases in a concentration camp, thousands of pairs of spectacles reduced to bales of crushed wire.

Suddenly the sheer horror of the Holocaust becomes personal.

As a boy, I was well aware of the struggle and sacrifices of the Jewish people. My father, a Church of Scotland minister, led parties of visitors to Israel twice a year for more than 20 years and wanted me to understand what the Holocaust meant. I discovered how, as so much of the world stood by and did nothing, incredibly brave men and women who were not Jews were moved to take incredible risks to help people they had never met escape from the Nazi slaughter.

As Holocaust Memorial Day approaches, I would like to remember two such men and women: Charles Coward and Jane Haining.

Charles Coward joined the Army in 1937 at the age of 32. Three years later he was a Quartermaster Battery Sergeant Major in the Royal Artillery: a post requiring leadership, authority and a rascally ingenuity in getting things done. He could never have imagined using these qualities to engineer escape from the death camps for several hundred Jews.

After a series of escapes from POW camps, he was one of the few British soldiers sent to Auschwitz. He became a Red Cross liaison officer looking after the welfare of his fellow prisoners: slave labourers in an adjoining industrial complex. He discovered the appalling conditions in which they were held, so terrible he later recounted that prisoners would stand their dead colleagues up for roll call so they could collect their rations.

He devised an audacious scheme to obtain non-Jewish documentation for some of these men, bribing susceptible guards with chocolate to secure the corpses and documentation of any non-Jewish casualties. At night, when Jews judged no longer fit for work were marched to the gas chambers, Coward helped healthy Jews hide among the group and sneak into a ditch. He then lay the non-Jewish corpses on the road as though they had died on the march, and smuggled the escapers out of the camp with their new identities. By such gruesome ingenuity, more than 400 lives were eventually saved.

Coward survived the war, and died at 71. His daring humanity is commemorated in Jerusalem, on the Avenue of Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem.

Jane Haining trained as a missionary in Glasgow in the late 1920s. In 1932 she was appointed matron of a girls' home attached to the Church of Scotland Jewish Mission in Budapest, with 400 girls in her charge. In a letter home she wrote of "one nice little mite, who is an orphan and is coming to school the first time. She seems to be a lonely wee soul and needs lots of love. We shall see what we can do to make life a little happier for her."

When war broke out and many of her missionary colleagues were recalled, she chose to return to Budapest from leave in Scotland. She wrote home that if the children she looked after had needed her "in the days of sunshine", they needed her more "in the days of darkness". In 1944, the arrival of Adolf Eichmann brought new and unimaginable darkness to Budapest.

Jane Haining defied Nazi orders that all remaining Scottish missionaries leave the country and, as Eichmann organised the mass deportation of Jews to Poland, she was arrested by the Gestapo and charged with "Working among Jews". Included in the evidence against her was that she was seen weeping while sewing on her girls' uniforms the yellow Star of David. She was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, tattooed with the number 79467, and in August 1944 went to the gas chamber.

The Church of Scotland said of her: "Typical of all that is best in the Scottish tradition of missionary service, she gave the best years of her life to enhancing that tradition, and at the last gave life itself."

Why remember? Because, more than 60 years after the liberation of Belsen, Treblinka and Auschwitz, and as the last of the survivors now grow old, we simply cannot afford to forget. Each generation must learn and understand the dark forces and culpable failures that allowed prejudice, discrimination and persecution to lead to a vast programme of mass slaughter that spanned a continent.

And as we reflect again on these events, we must react to them too, to ensure that "Never Again" is not just a slogan, but a reality.

Only by systematic efforts - such as the Holocaust Educational Trust's Lessons from Auschwitz programme and compulsory teaching about the Holocaust in secondary schools - can we maintain a common knowledge of what happened, celebrate the courage of the few who fought it and learn the lessons for the future.

That is why we have provided funds to encourage hundreds of pupils from every school in the country to visit Auschwitz and learn of the tragedies that follow when people do not stand up. Last year 3,000 pupils travelled to Auschwitz, this year 4,000 - every secondary school offering at least two pupils the chance to see its dark truths.

In the words of the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks: "We can't change the past, but each of us, by challenging prejudice and intolerance, can help change the future."

Some of the readers' comments are sad (and some are just pathetic)

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Renewing............