To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has written a powerful opinion piece for the Jewish News giving his views on why the Holocaust must be remembered.
As long as I am Prime Minister, I will never allow this country to forget what happened 75 years ago. I will do all I can to see that we continue to learn the lessons of the past. #HolocaustRemembranceDay https://t.co/wp7t49CPfr
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) January 27, 2020
The Prime Minister wrote the following:
“The time will inevitably come when the Shoah slips beyond the realm of living memory.
That is why it is so important that those of us who remain continue to remember.
Why we as a nation must always mark Holocaust Memorial Day. And why I, as
prime minister, am absolutely committed to building the National Holocaust Memorial and Education Centre right in the heart of Westminster.Because even though the Shoah was a crime so unprecedented it required the creation of a new word – genocide – simply to describe it, its perpetrators wished for it to be left unnoticed by the history books.
As the Red Army’s 322nd rifle division closed in on Auschwitz, retreating Nazis destroyed the gas chambers and crematoria in a desperate attempt to cover up their crimes.
Despite their enthusiastic participation in the slaughter, they didn’t want the world to know what they had done.
They wanted us to forget.
Today, a growing number of antisemites seek to continue that dismal work.
They downplay the scale of the killing, draw false equivalence with the contemporary world, even outright deny that what happened, happened.
We cannot let them gain a foothold. Because if we allow the likes of Buchenwald, Belsen and Babi Yar to become simply obscure names on a map, we not only betray the memory of those who died there.
We will, in airbrushing the Holocaust from history, succeed where the Nazis failed and offer succour to the thugs and bigots who are the modern-day bearers of that twisted ideology. So we must remember. But we must also act.”
To read the full opinion piece, please click here.
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