Remember The Past And Be The Change We Need For A Better Future
Both the perpetrators and the victims of genocidal events are ordinary people. The Holocaust Memorial Trust asks us to consider how ordinary people “perhaps play a bigger part than we might imagine in challenging prejudice today.”
In this blog, BASW Project and Volunteer Engagement Co-Ordinator, Gabriella Zavoli, reflects on the poignant significance of Holocaust Memorial Day as a way of remembering and paying respects to the people who were lost during the Holocaust and for serving as an important lesson to the global community to ensure these atrocities never happen again.
When I was approached to write something for Holocaust Memorial Day so many things came to mind, as a Jewish person I was brought up understanding what the Holocaust was and what it had done not just by my family speaking about it but by the people I had in my life, the people I knew that still held the physical and mental scars of the Holocaust. I remember asking my mother one day at Schule (Synagogue) why a friend of my grandparents would always take his food at Kiddish (ceremony of a blessing over food and wine) and eat alone. My mother said ‘he was a child when he was in Belsen, food was not something he had, he nearly starved. He does this because he once had to and we understand, we all do’. I could not have been more than 6 years old, but I understood. It is something we hear, we learn, we learn never to forget to remember, to remember innocent lives lost to the horrors of the death camps and the ghetto’s. This year more than ever when I remember I will also think about the present, we say ‘human beings need to learn, we need to learn so that these horrors never happen again’ but horrors continue. In the world today we are seeing innocent lives lost all over the world. I have recently made friends with a woman from the Ukraine. In the summer she had to go back home for a family funeral because of the war. She sent me a video sitting in her garden with her parents, and among the beautiful summer flowers I could hear a siren and a pre-recorded voice in Ukrainian telling people to get to shelters. It echoed the second world war. I realised that we are now witnessing atrocities live on the news and social media channels as they happen. I see my families faces when they watch this, my mother calls me and cry’s ‘why do people kill each other? haven’t we seen enough in our lifetimes’.
Today, this week and this month we need to remember, we need to remember lives lost, the cruel things people do to each other for political ideologies or what I like to call insanity. We also need to think about the ‘now’, about people that need our help now, refugee’s fleeing war, famine, political unrest, people that must leave their homes and lose their families because they are not deemed the right race, religion, colour, nationality, or sexuality. This is a time to think about what we can do, what we can teach the next generation and the peace that we can if we try create in the world in our own way. Change only takes one person and change is not always something that has to happen on a large scale, kindness and small gestures of kindness to others each day shows someone that might be struggling that we stand with them, we are allies and we care. Apathy and silence can be as bad as being a protagonist, if we do nothing when we see injustice then we let it happen all over again. I hoped when I was a child that by this point in my life the world would have changed, that we would have learned from the holocaust but since we have seen others, wars of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, refugees desperate for help coming to the UK from Syria, war, famine, hatred, othering, apathy, greed, they all feed each other but do nothing but create fear and pain. Understanding, listening, learning, sharing, and finding the things that unite us rather than divide us as a global community are the ways we can invoke change in our own lives for others around us.
As a historian I look to the past academically to see how we can inform a different future, learning from mistakes. To understand is to feel, putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes is the hardest thing to do. This Holocaust Memorial Day I would like to put a prayer out to the world to remember those lost and never forget. Make understanding and love part of your life, be kind, listen, learn and be the change for the future. We can all try to make today and everyday mean something and make it our lives truest journey to make sure this never happens again.