“All forms of hatred must be resisted”, leaders tell Holocaust remembrance event

Today, councillors, clergy, and academics met outside The D-Day Story museum to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) is an international day of remembrance for the six million Jews murdered under Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945. It also commemorates those killed in subsequent genocides, including in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

The Very Reverend Dr Anthony Cane, Dean of Portsmouth, told the story of Steven Frank, a Dutch-born Holocaust survivor who was sent to multiple concentration camps as a child before being liberated in 1945.

During his talk, Dr Cane said that the “incidental details” of Mr Frank’s story stayed with him, such as Steven and his brothers being fed a “kind of bread and water gruel from a saucepan by their mother who had gained some privileges by working in the laundry.”

“One spoon at a time into each of their mouths in turn until the saucepan was empty, surrounded by other children who, like them, were starving but not so lucky.”

Dr Cane said Mr Frank has, in recent days, had some “trenchant things to say about Minneapolis,” where two people lost their lives after being shot by federal immigration agents.

“As soon as I make a contemporary reference like that there is a danger that our vital remembrance today will become tinged with controversy.

“I’m also aware that the context for HMD shifts from year to year and that can’t be ignored.”

The theme for HMD this year is Bridging Generations, a reminder that remembrance does not end with survivors but lives on through future generations.

Dr Cane also referenced the Bondi Beach shooting in December last year, an antisemitic terrorist attack that took the lives of 15 people.

He said that the tragedy has “not united Australians as might’ve been expected” because “it is a more divided society than in the past”.

In closing, he said: “Awareness and understanding of the holocaust has never been more important than it is now.

“All forms of hatred driving people apart must be resisted and overcome.”

Christine Berberich of the University of Portsmouth and Tony Cooper, President of the Portsmouth and Southsea Hebrew Congregation both read poems by Elie Wiesel, a Romanian-born American writer and Holocaust survivor.

Rev. Burns, Minister of the Portsmouth and Southsea Hebrew Congregation, said the Holocaust did not begin with violence or the camps, but with everyday acts of dehumanisation.

He warned that it started with people “calling names”, “shouting”, and “swearing at members of their own community”, and by “showing others they are different”.

He said the lesson for future generations is that while “we are all different”, “we are all human beings” and must “respect and love one another”.

In closing, the Lord Mayor councillor Gerald Vernon-Jackson, called out the idea that the UK was on the side of the Jewish people, pointing out that few were granted access to the country after the Second World War.

He added people can choose to do the “difficult thing and be on the side of people that are persecuted” and that if we “just look to the past and not the present HMD will lose some of its reverence”.