On Sunday 28th January, Community Solidarity Stroud District held a series of events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. On this page you can find videos and text of speeches made at the different events. These are listed in chronological order. You can watch all videos in succession via a YouTube playlist at this link.
Clips from the introduction, prayers, and music
The video below features only some clips of the introduction and prayers made by Steve Saville (Curate, Stroud Parish Churches), Baron Mendes da Costa (3 Counties Liberal Jewish Community, Imam Hassan MG (Masjid-E-Noor Mosque), and performances of the songs Dona Dona by The Grove Singers, and Einheitsfrontlied by the Stroud Red Band.
Speech by Jeremy Green, Community Solidarity Stroud District
My name is Jeremy Green, and I want to welcome you to this event on behalf of Community Solidarity Stroud District. CSSD was formed for Holocaust Memorial Day 2022, and exists to oppose the hatred of minorities and oppressed people arising from false and harmful information.
Holocaust Memorial Day is held annually in many countries on 27th January, because that’s the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945. It commemorates not only the Nazi slaughter of Europe’s Jews, but also other genocides. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur are specifically referenced, but it’s understood that other genocides are also commemorated. The Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews is foregrounded, in part because – unlike other mass slaughters motivated by racism – this was the first time that the full force of a modern industrial state – its administrative and bureaucratic capabilities, its industries, its science and technology – were deployed with the purpose of destroying an entire people.
We mark this day in the hope that memory and understanding will help to prevent such slaughter in the future, and to give courage to those who resist.
There is always a tension between wanting to make the commemoration more inclusive – to recognise the similarities between different episodes of mass murder, and wanting to learn from the specific history that gave rise to each of them. There’s a risk that a shopping list approach to genocides works against understanding.
So it’s with a great deal of trepidation that I, as a Jewish person, raise the subject of Gaza at this event.
This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day presents even more challenges than most. We see a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia around the world. We are living in the fallout from the Hamas attack into Israel on October 7th last year – involving the largest killing of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust itself – 685 civilians, including 36 children. 132 Israeli citizens are still held hostage. 25 have died in captivity.
We are also living in the fallout from the retaliation ordered by Netanyahu’s Israeli government, which has killed tens of thousands – including thousands of children.
Other Holocaust Memorial Day events around the country have deliberately avoided raising this, understandably concerned that it would cause hurt to Jewish Holocaust survivors and descendants of victims.
The creation of the state of Israel was intimately connected to the Holocaust. Many people, movements and states that had previously been hostile to Zionism and to Jewish immigration to Palestine changed their minds as the full horror of what happened to the Jews of Europe became known. Israel was created with tragic consequences for the Arabs of Palestine. But for many – perhaps most – Jewish people it held out a kind of promise that the trauma would not be repeated. No more helpless, stateless Jews desperately seeking exit routes and refuge in a world where they had no place.
Two generations on, Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. For me this is heartbreaking. I don’t much care whether what is happening meets some formal, technical or legal definition of genocide or not. Around a third of buildings across Gaza have been destroyed, around 85% of the population has been displaced. More than 200 schools and the Islamic University of Gaza, the first higher education institution established in the Strip, have been destroyed. Gaza’s oldest mosque, originally a fifth century Byzantine church, has been destroyed. The oldest church in Gaza, St Porphyrius church, believed to be the third oldest church in the world has been damaged. The entire population faces malnutrition if not starvation, diseases such as diarrhoea are rampant.
I’m heartened, though, by those in Israel – including families of those taken hostage – who have taken a stand against what the government and state is doing. Today I’d particularly like to call attention to a declaration by a group of Holocaust scholars at universities in Israel and elsewhere, who have written an open letter to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center. Their letter asks Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan to voice an “unambiguous moral call condemning” incitements to genocide made by Israeli officials and personalities, and a “public discourse calling for extermination and the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.”
The statement includes the following:
“We, the undersigned, know from Jewish and human history, especially from studying the Holocaust and its memory, that incitement to extermination and to commission of grave crimes, using language that creates dehumanization and an incrimination of all members of a rival group within a conflict, are in many cases a first step in committing crimes that can reach the stage of genocide,
“This is a key lesson learned by humankind from the Holocaust. It has been included in international conventions, some of which were signed by Israel. This is also part of the call ‘Never Again,’ in the spirit of which commemoration organizations, led by like Yad Vashem, conduct their education.”
This call must be a guiding light, especially in the wake of the detestable crimes committed by Hamas on October 7.”
The call that goes out from each Holocaust Commemoration event is “Never Again”. Let’s pledge that this means never again for anyone. The Jewish experience of racism and our liberatory traditions impel us always to fight against oppression and act in solidarity with the oppressd.
Speech by family carer, Jacky Martel
Hello my name is Jacky and I am mum to 3 young men. My eldest, Tomas is autistic and has a profound learning disability and the reason I am here today to remember the hundreds of thousands of disabled people exterminated by the Nazi’s who are so little talked about.
The exterminations started with children well before the war building on a social Darwinism movement not just in Germany and not just the far right – it was secretive but legally sanctioned – parents were told they were lucky – their children were being accepted into hospitals to help and perhaps cure them. Doctors and nurses were paid for each child they registered as feebleminded or defective. Parents were then told their child had been moved to another more specialist hospital – they couldn’t visit. The children were usually killed the day they arrived but a “condolence” letter would not be sent for some months. They were told they had died of perhaps pneumonia or influenza and they had needed to cremate the body for infection control. They could have an urn with their ashes delivered for free but some parents found girls hairclips in their boys ashes. The letters always reiterated that the parents should find consolation in that their child was relieved from the suffering of its defective life.
The children were being experimented on – how to kill them most effectively – what gas at what dose, inhalation chambers became fake shower blocks, children’s brains were injected with different drugs to see what would keep them calm, brains that were then sold for research – one collection in Germany only finally laid to rest in 1990 (it reminded me of Alder Hey when I read that).
The law authorised the Destruction of life unworthy of life – which proposed the killing of people with congenital mental or physical malformation – I think most people will assume due entirely to meet the obsession with a pure Aryan blood line but this wasn’t the whole reason. It was stated that “such creatures required costly long term care, aroused horror in other people and represented the lowest animal level”
Have we come far enough away from these views? I don’t think so. Most parents of disabled children will tell you the hardest part is fighting for the support and resources your child needs to live an ordinary life. We still see lives valued in terms of contribution – disabled people are othered, especially if they aren’t a paraolympian or climbing mountains – but that isn’t most disabled peoples reality. It showed its ugliest head during Covid when thousands of “Do Not Resuscitate” notices were put on disabled people’s records for no good clinical reason and unknown to the person or their family – hospital resources were scarce – why bother with them?
2-3,000 people who are autistic and have learning disabilities or mental health issues are currently locked up in this country – some fed through hatches and sent from hospital to hospital hundreds of miles from family as the hospitals don’t want the families seeing them. The hospitals put gagging orders of parents to stop them going to the press.
Bristol City Council is as we speak trying to get a policy through which would make disabled people who are costing more than the average move out of their own homes into care homes where they have little choice, control, freedom or rights.
Denise [Needleman, from Community Solidarity Stroud District] told me about a conference she went to in Europe 10 years ago or so and the chilling moment when the Germany attendees said they didn’t have any data for over 65 yr old disabled people as there were none………………. None. I don’t even know how to describe that gap – its more than a generation lost – it’s a community, a vital part of our soul and its how I feel about the statistic that over 90% of babies found to have Down’s Syndrome in the womb are aborted – we are the poorer for that loss.
My friend was asked 15 times if she wanted her pregnancy terminated because her baby had a deformity – I am not anti-abortion but that is not choice it is pressure – a consultant offered a termination 2 days before the birth. We have got to start valuing all life equally – we must remember the ¾ million disabled people’s lives extinguished by the Nazis because they were deemed to be lives unworthy of life.
Speech by Andy Woolley, Stroud & District Trades Council
My name is Andy Woolley and I am a delegate to the newly formed Stroud & District Trades Council from the National Education Union. I spoke at this event last year on behalf of the Gloucester Trades Council which then covered this area.
My Union, the NEU, was formed in 2017 from a merger and one of its predecessors the NUT (National Union of Teachers) and the new Union have produced a large amount of age appropriate material in conjunction with the Holocaust Educational Trust, which is available on both organisations’ websites as well as materials suggesting how teachers can deal appropriately and sensitively with issues about Israel and Palestine and I commend them to anyone working with young people of any age.
I wish to approach my contribution today by concentrating, as last year, on the impact on trade unionists and socialists and on the current move towards extremism and intolerance in our society. Yesterday I attended a large march in Cheltenham to protest against attempts to restrict trade union rights and to remember the people who were dismissed for being trade union members at GCHQ.
Many, if not most of you will be or have been members of trade unions and I recognise a number of active members here today. We take this for granted but in 1933 onwards people found themselves imprisoned for this sort of thing. I remind you that Dachau concentration camp, whilst not an extermination camp as such, was built mainly to imprison political prisoners and trade unionists and some 200,000 were imprisoned there from 1933 until the camp was liberated by the Americans in 1945 when only 67,000 remained. Of those remaining 43,000 were trade unionists and political prisoners and 22,000 of these were Jewish. It should be remembered that the various groups who suffered at the hands of the Nazis were not mutually exclusive, some trade unionists were Jews, some socialists were gay and so on. The people represented here today were like a big Venn diagram overlapping with each other – you can tell I was a maths teacher, can’t you!
Throughout my life the call has been that this should never again come to pass just as the call after the First World War was that it was ”the war to end all wars”. Sadly, as Jezza has referred to, there have been many other instances of genocide since 1945 and there are still wars going on today.
In the specific area I represent today, Colombia is the most dangerous place in the World to be a trade unionist with many killed purely for doing what many of us do in our working lives and despite this the British Government has supplied arms to
successive Colombian governments whilst, despite a recent left wing government being elected, right wing death squads continue to kill trade unionists and leftists and to disrupt civil society.
You may feel that this is just South America where coups and right wing governments have been more common but, sadly, Europe is seeing an increasing growth in right wing ideology scapegoating minorities, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers just as the Nazis demonised and scapegoated Jews. This is happening in Hungary, Turkey, the Netherlands, Finland, supposedly liberal Sweden, sadly once again in Germany with the so called Alternative für Deutschland and, along with othersto many to mention, our own country of Britain.
The Jewish poet and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen has written:
I sometimes fear that people think fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the NazisFascism arrives as your friend.
it will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house
give you a job
clean up your neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you …
It doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments,
transportations, war and persecution.”
and indeed here in Britain today we have prominent politicians demonising refugees fleeing from conflct, wishing to deport them to a country from which we ourselves are accepting asylum seekers despite their rights to seek asylum here and keeping them constrained without freedom of movement. They claim Britain is “full’ and talk about economic migrants with scorn, even though many of those who try to divide us like this are the descendants of economic migrants, and they talk of restoring Britain to Great Britain even though Great in this context is a geographical term. They talk of the threat to our culture, but what is our culture, we are Welsh, Scots, Northerners or Southerners and from the many communities that have lived here over the years. Are we all to be demonised too in the name of returning Britain to its supposed glory when we colonised the World and supressed people’s rights in other countries?
When they take away the right to protest peacefully, constrain the right to strike, plan to criminalise rough sleeping instead of eliminating it, pack our legislature with their unelected friends in return for favours and demonise the media as “woke”, how far along the road are we to more extreme persecution.
As Michael Rosen says,
Fascism doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments,
transportation, war and persection.”
So let us be vigilant, let us oppose a move to the far right here, in Europe and in every country in the World, however dear it is to our hearts, and let us do all we can to end conflict, the deaths of innocent men, women and children and let us work for peace so people can co-habit in harmony and mutual respect.
I suggest that only if we call for peace, tolerance and an end to the loss of innocent lives can we truly honour the memory of those who died and suffered so cruelly, needlessly and wastefully in the Holocaust.
Resources for teachers and young people as mentioned in Andy Wooley’s speech:
- A comprehensive set of teaching resources on the Holocaust and Nazi persecution, produced by the NEU and the Holocaust Educational Trust
- Advice on dealing with the reactions of pupils and the wider community to the Israel/Palestine conflict, produced by the NEU
- Explore life stories of survivors and those who were murdered, virtual activities, schools materials, films, images and more resources collated by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
Speech by Caroline Beattie, Stroud District Together With Refugees
The policy by one people to exterminate another people is at one hideous end of a spectrum. The loss of a single life due to the action of someone else is also a tragedy, unbearably painful to family, friends, community. Each is a crime. We always yearn for the truth of the crime to be recognised.
Which its why its so important to keep being here each year. To keep telling the truth of what happened and is happening, from our own experience, and from listening to others who know it from their own experience and their own history. And those who are struggling to comes to terms with inherited trauma, of victims or perpetrators.
Yesterday, I was with a small group of people seeking sanctuary in the UK, from 9 different countries. An extraordinary day when with the help and inspiration of Sam – who himself knows the experience of fleeing again and again for his survival within Uganda, our friends were making clay models of people to put in a boat – to symbolise something of their terrifying journeys to find safety. Mostly their experience was in images, but some were also then able to speak about their journeys. No-one could doubt the truth of their stories.
It isn’t so easy for this voice to be heard. Government narrative, in its own interest, spreads continous lies about people seeking asylum, and maintains that UK population do not want refugees here – is irresponsible and incredibly dangerous. We see the way such rhetoric feeds division, fear of other people, hate crime and far right activity. For example locally, on the strength of one allegation which was acutally found to be false and withdrawn, our MP ensured that the one hotel for asylum seekers in our District was closed. Leading to evictons and huge disruption for individuals. A hotel which had been an amazing success story in terms of warm, lasting, relationship built with the local communites around Dursley. Nothing like direct contact to create an impact.
This is the good news – much less often heard. Opinion polls repeatedly show that UK population amongst the most positive towards refugees, internationally. Locally from the point of view of those of us campaigning and advocating for refugee rights, this is also our experience. We saw a huge response to Homes for Ukraine locally and work still goes on two years later to support Ukrainian refugees in the area. Now Gloucestershire County Council with particular input from Stroud District Council are far-sightedly extending the scheme to those who have been evicted at short notice from hotels on receiving full refugee status, so that people can start their lives inside a welcoming community. I say far-sighted because, we need the welcome and need the resources to support it. A point made very clear in a report from a German protestor against the far right AFD on the Today programme this week. In Germany there has been a big welcome to refugees but not enough resources put into local communities to realistically support that welcome.
What does this day invite us to do here in Stroud? Three possible things
1. To do whatever we can to keep talking, keep listening, keep stretching our imagination to hear, to understand and take in other people’s stories. As we are doing here in today’s memorial gathering. Keep telling the truth as we know it and hear it about the experience of being marginalised for any reason, disbelieved, discriminated against. Not to let historical conflicts and experiences divide us here and now in Stroud.
2. To help and properly support the current generation of all those who are fleeing to the UK to escape violence (in which UK has so often been historically and shamefully implicated) or in the future fleeing unliveable consequences of climate change.
3. And to keep enabling the voice of lived experience to be heard, despite the effort of those with power and money to suffocate it. As we are today, we must go on using our own voice, and supporting each other to use theirs, to maintain and celebrate a tolerant, inclusive, fully diverse, including neurodiverse, and anti-racist community.
Speech by Midge Purcell, Stroud Against Racism
Thank you for inviting SAR to participate in this remembrance of The Holocaust; a monstrous crime that is still beyond comprehension.
A crime that involved the full mobilisation of the industrial, political and military capacity of a world superpower directed towards the annihilation of six million Jewish people, for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews.
While antisemitism was at the core of the Nazis’ ideology of hate, others were caught in the spiral of persecution and death, Roma, Gays, trade unionists, people with disabilities… and including 24,000 Black Germans – many from German colonies in Africa. All denied the most basic human rights, often sterilised, tortured, experimented upon before being murdered in camps.
It’s not a surprise that the Nazis borrowed heavily from American anti-black, anti-native policies and narratives about racial superiority, apartheid segregation and eugenics.
Despite the vows to never allow such crimes against humanity to occur again, since the Holocaust, other genocides have occurred and are occurring. Today we remember not just the victims of the Third Reich, but all victims of genocide.
In 2024, have we learnt the lessons? Are we doing all we can to prevent genocide and fascism from happening again?
Before the killing there was a long process of dehumanisation.To unleash atrocities on such a massive scale, you have to render a people less than human; animals.
While we shouldn’t exaggerate the comparisons to the horrors of the 1930s we shouldn’t ignore similarities either. Once again we see racist lies, stereotypes, and dog-whistle propaganda fuelling far-right parties and policies.
Views that we hoped had become peripheral, unacceptable, have come back again into mainstream political discourse.
We have national media that describes refugees as cockroaches who should be met with gunboats. Asylum seekers face deportation to a country of a recent genocide, Rwanda.
The person who may retake the US Presidency talks about immigrants polluting the bloodline and calling them criminals with low intelligence, to the cheers of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. This sounds like eugenics and the language of the 1930s.
The result is a rise in racism, Anti-semitism, and Islamophobia here, in the US and across Europe. We’ve seen attacks on synogogues, mosques, temples and, in the US, Black churches. Attempts to rewrite history and turn back the clock on gains in civil and human rights.
If we are to heed the lessons of history, of The Holocaust we must keep memory alive.
I am mindful that I am just one generation away from those who perished in The Holocaust. As a young activist one of my mentors, Sadie Doroshkin, who became like a surrogate grandmother to me, was a holocaust survivor. An early partner and still dear friend’s mother was sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz and only survived because of a malfunction on the day.
It falls to us to carry their testimony to future generations.
One of the things that I learned from Sadie was her unwavering belief in internationalism as a response to oppression and fascism. It was a decisive force against fascism then and it must be a force against oppression now.
Anti-racism and anti-facism is the last line of defence to protect human rights and the dignity of all. We must be ready to take action against discrimination persecution, and genocide wherever it happens.
It also means addressing the roots causes that make people susceptible to populism, demagogery, and hatred for the other, – the anger, deprivation, poverty and inequality.
It means ensuring that the Holocaust Memorial Day pledge of “Never Again” becomes a reality for every man, woman and child, everywhere.
Stroud Red Band and Karen Coldrick perform Zog Nit Keyn Nol (“Never Say”)
Closing our ceremony, Stroud Red Band performed Zog Nit Keyn Mol – sung by Karen Coldrick. The lyrics of the song were written in 1943 by Hirsh Glick, a young Jewish inmate of the Vilna Ghetto. Sometimes known as the “Partizaner lid” (Partisan Song), Zog Nit Keyn Mol is a Yiddish song written for the Vilna Jewish United Partisan Organization (FPO), and considered one of the chief anthems of Holocaust survivors. Karen Coldrick sang in both Yiddish and English, thanks to StroudTimes for filming this.
Speech by James Beecher, introducing Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and The Saved”
This speech was given as an introduction to the Stroud Radical Reading Group discussion held after the ceremony. This was not filmed.
Stroud Radical Reading Group meets monthly to discuss a ‘radical’ text. By radical we mean things that either help us to go back to the roots of problems, or which propose drastic/urgent changes to society. As well as books, essays and academic journal articles, we’ve also looked at graphic novels, Chartist poems, and political Haiku. We don’t expect people to attend every session or to read the book for a session in full – we encourage people to come along and listen to the discussion even if they have not read the book.
Today, we are discussing “The Drowned and The Saved”, marking Holocaust Memorial Day as we have done in previous years. Last year we read “We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain”, which tells the story of the Jewish ex-servicemen who fought against Oswald Mosley after World War II. The year before we read a chapter in Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg’s Revolutionary Yiddishland, which addresses “the image of the Jew in the face of Nazism that history has retained”, one “not that of the Resistance fighter but that of the victim”. Before that, we read Primo Levi’s answers to the most common questions he was asked about “Survival in Auschwitz”, the US Title for his first book about his experiences in Auschwitz known in the UK as “If This is a Man”. On another occasion, we also looked at an essay by Jurgen Habermas on how “postwar Germany [has] attempted to come to terms with its ‘unmasterable past’”.
I’ll give a biography of Levi, provide a sentence long summary of each chapter, and end with a few quotes.
Primo Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, into a liberal Jewish family – the same year Benito Mussolini established himself as Il Duce of Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (an ultranationalist paramilitary organisation that became the National Fascist Party), just over three years before the coup which saw Mussolini installed as Prime Minister, and around five years before Mussolini’s government became a dictatorship.
Levi’s parents were well educated, and he excelled academically. At the equivalent of secondary school, he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest, as well as being the only Jew. Only two boys there bullied him for being Jewish, but their animosity was traumatic for him. In 1933, as was expected of all young Italian schoolboys, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for young Fascists. In 1937, he was summoned before the War Ministry and accused of ignoring a draft notice from the Italian Royal Navy. His father was able to keep him out of the Navy by enrolling him in the Fascist militia (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale). He remained a member through his first year of university, until the passage of the Italian Racial Laws of 1938 forced his expulsion. Italian Jews lost their basic civil rights, positions in public offices, and their assets. Their books were prohibited.
In 1943, after Mussolini was deposed and the new government prepared to cooperate with the Allied countries, the Nazis occupied northern and central Italy, liberated Mussolini from imprisonment and appointed him as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy. The situation for Jewish people had dramatically worsened, and Levi’s family fled to an area known for partisan resistance activity against the Nazis.
Levi and some comrades took to the foothills of the Alps, and in October 1943 formed a partisan group. Untrained for such a venture, he and his companions were arrested by a Fascist militia in December 1943. When told he would be shot as an Italian partisan, Levi confessed to being Jewish, and was taken to an internment camp under the control of the Italian Social Republic.
The camp was then taken over by the Nazis, who started arranging the deportations of the Jews to eastern concentration and death camps. On the second of these transports, in February 1944, Levi and other inmates were transported in twelve cramped cattle trucks to Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. Levi spent eleven months there (aged 24 and 25) before the camp was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. Before their arrival, people were sorted according to whether they could work or not. An acquaintance said that it would make no difference, in the end, and declared he was unable to work and was killed immediately. The average life expectancy of a new entrant at the camp was three to four months. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, Levi was one of twenty who left the camps alive.
Although liberated on 27 January 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until 19 October 1945. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, he embarked on an arduous journey home in the company of former Italian prisoners of war. His long railway journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany.
In 1946, while staying in a factory dormitory during the week due to a limited train service, Levi wrote what became If This is a Man, recounting his experiences in Auschwitz. Initially rejected by publishers, 2,000 copies were published in 1947. It was translated to English in 1958 and published in the UK in 1959 – and in the same year translated into German – which Levi discusses in the book we will discuss today. Together with ‘The Truce’, it has become one of the most widely read accounts of the Nazi slave labour and death camps.
Levi had a successful writing career, including fiction and a book related to his career as a chemist, The Periodic Table, widely regarded as one of the best science books.
The Drowned and the Saved is his last work, written in 1986. Though referring to his autobiographic work on the Nazi Genocide, it takes a more analytic approach [numbers following quotations are page numbers from the edition sold by the Yellow Lighted Bookshop].
After a preface exploring the ways in which “testimony” can form “an act of war against fascism” (10), and raising the questions “How much of the concentration camp world is dead… How much is back or coming back”, Levi look then looks at Memory – exploring self-deception and drift, and describing the history of the Third Reich as a ‘war against memory’. In “The Grey Zone” he looks at various forms of collaboration and explores in detail why ‘it is imprudent to hasten to issue a moral judgement’ (40). He then looks at ‘the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another’ (75), how ‘the hour of liberation was neither joyful nor lighthearted [as] for most it occurred against a tragic background of destruction, slaughter and suffering’ (73) and the numbers of suicides among survivors, contrasting this against the rareness of suicide during imprisonment.
These remarks have an added significance, as Levi died in 1987, a year after publication of the book, from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, but some have suggested that the fall was accidental because he left no suicide note, there were no witnesses, and he was on medication that could have affected his blood pressure and caused him to fall accidentally.
In the next chapter, Communicating, Levi argues that ‘To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can” (95), and discusses the degradation of the German language to a distinct language of the Third Reich, and the even harsher language of the Lagers or camps: “where violence is inflicted on man, it is also inflicted on language” (106)
In Chapter 5 he explores the Nazi regime’s particular focus on what he calls ‘useless violence’: “an end in itself, with the sole purpose of creating pain, occasionally having a purpose, yet always redundant, always disproportionate to the purpose itself” (116).
He then looks at the distinct experiences of “The Intellectual in Auschwitz”. He writes that “Reason, art, and poetry are no help in deciphering a place from which they are banned” (160). Nonetheless, he also feels “The Lager was a University; it taught us to look around and to measure men” (159). He notes his “habit of never remaining indifferent to the individuals that chance brings before me. They are human beings, but also ‘samples’… food for my curiosity… that certainly contributed to keeping a part of me alive and which subsequently supplied me with the material for thinking and making books” (158).
In Stereotypes, he details the extensive repression and power of totalitarianism in providing answers to three questions “formulated with ever increasing persistence, and with an ever less hidden accent of accusation… Why did you not escape? Why did you not rebel? Why did you not avoid capture ‘beforehand’?” Examples of each type of response are also provided (170).
In Letters from Germans he discusses the process of having his book translated into German, and quotes from some of about forty letters he received from Germans between 1961 and 1964 – all but one of which from young people, which attempt to answer his question of “whether it is possible to understand the Germans”. He writes that he “had written the book in Italian, for Italians, for my children, for those who did not know, for those who did not want to know, for those who were not yet born, those who, willing or not, had assented to the offence; but its true recipients, those against whom the book was aimed like a gun were they, the Germans. Now the gun was loaded.” (190-191)
Finally, Levi offers conclusions, most starkly that the Nazi torturers “were made of our same cloth, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save for exceptions, they were not monsters”.
I’ve spoken for some time, but I’d like to draw attention to two final quotes before we move onto discussion.
Firstly, by way of explaining why I continue to allocate one of our monthly readings each year to Holocaust Memorial Day. In short, this is because I feel we should be acutely aware of the horrors humans are capable of, in particular because of the justifications people are able to create for themselves that allow them to continue to think of themselves as good, or in pursuit of a grand vision, even as they behave in monstrous ways.
As someone much younger than the generation of survivors or even children of survivors – and with no family connection to the Holocaust myself (though my mum is Jewish), I feel it is important to close what Levi calls “the gap that exists and grows wider every year between things as they were down there and things as they are represented by the current imagination fed by approximate books, films and myths. It slides fatally toward simplification and stereotype… it is part of our difficulty or inability to perceive the experience of others… we are prone to assimilate them to those ‘related’ ones, as though hunger in Auschwitz were the same as that of someone who has skipped a meal” (178)
Secondly, the theme of this year’s events as set by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is the ‘Fragility of Freedom’. So I want to close with something optimistic that Levi says, in a book that is otherwise profoundly troubling in many ways. He says this to explain the prevalence of the questions he addresses in the chapter on Stereotypes:
“In countries in which the elementary needs are satisfied, today’s young people experience freedom as a good that one must in no case renounce: one cannot do without it, it is a natural and obvious right, and furthermore, it is gratuitous, like health and the air one breathes. The times and places where this congenital right is denied are perceived as distant foreign and strange. Therefore, for them, the idea of imprisonment is firmly attached to the idea of flight or revolt” (170-1).
Speech by Adam Horovitz, ahead of screening of the film “Denial”
The full text of this speech is below, the video misses the start of the speech
Good evening and welcome to the opening event of Stroud Film Festival, a special presentation for Holocaust Memorial Day of the film Denial, based on Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. My name’s Adam Horovitz, and I have been asked by Community Solidarity Stroud District, who organised the events marking Holocaust Memorial Day in this hall today, to introduce the film.
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We live in an age of denial, twenty four years into a century of refutation, in which a growing number of people, overwhelmed by the internet and its maelstrom of ever-increasing amounts of information, disinformation, distortion, clarification, truths and lies are all too often turning away from what we as a species collectively know to be fact.
Increased communication has made the world seem at once much smaller and terrifyingly large, thanks to the multitude of voices on social media shouting and shouting at one another, without any human face to give context to what thoughts, if any, lie behind the screams.
More and more often, frightened, overwhelmed and confused people are allowing themselves to be swayed by carefully curated corruptions of basic truths, seeded amongst straightforward lies and facts freighted with the deep-seated, emotionally manipulative language of propaganda.
More often than not they are listening to tales told by demagogues and populists, or by invisible seeders of falsehoods, dressed in what seems at first like common sense, who make it seem as if the little nuggets of information they dole out are entirely the discovery of the reader, rather than a carefully laid trail of breadcrumbs with designs on the exhausted readers’ emotions, hopes and fears.
In this way, the long-debunked Protocols of the Elders of Zion have found their way back into common parlance. Reintroduced by David Icke 30 years ago, they are now spreading relentlessly, used once again as a rod to beat Jews with, in much the same manner as the Nazis used them. In certain circles, the Holocaust continues to be denied – though these days such denial is more often than not dressed up as ‘having an opinion’ – watching this film, you will understand why that position has shifted a little.
Denial is an important film to watch now because the act of denial has spread beyond the Holocaust; though that atrocity remains the great tentpole of deniers, there is now quite a smorgasbord of things that people are being encouraged to deny. For example, some people will tell you, with an alarming earnestness that brooks no facts, no evidence to the contrary, that climate change CANNOT be real, because it’s ‘so cold here right now’. They will bring up dubious proofs that have little or no back-up in the scientific community, as has happened with MMR vaccination and more. Others will attempt to deny the call to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter because they believe that they have no power or say themselves.
In America, the presidency could be won once again by arch-denier of all that does not serve him, Donald Trump, despite the exposure of much that lead to the January 6th insurrection he incited and the slew of criminal charges against him and his inner circle. His followers – faithful, afraid, and in a frenzy of denial – believe that the more the state pushes against him, the more he must be telling the truth. They are even denying, now, that Trump et al were involved in any insurrection – all the blame for that is being laid at the door of anti-fa. We swirl in circles upon circles of denial.
There are too many other examples of this all-too-human ability (driven by fear of change, of death, of things that are different, of simply being left behind) to batten down the hatches of the mind and assume that someone else out there is to blame for all your ills. That the people who are different from you can’t be suffering as much as they say they are because they’re getting all the attention. That if you ‘do your own research’, whatever you find must be right.
What the film you are about to watch proves beyond doubt is that if people work together to assiduously research a subject, and they calmly and carefully interrogate the poison of propaganda that is being spread as if it were snake oil medicine, the facts, difficult though they may sometimes be to hear, tell a better, truer story than the ones told by propagandists and bigots.
In a century of refutation, of propaganda, of war, terror and climate change, it is time to stop screaming on the internet and stop denying others a voice. The world is too crowded now to be able to run on tribalism, instinct and fear. It is time to look and listen hard and carefully to people and things and ideas, as the lawyers in this film do – even to those people and things and ideas we loathe – before anything too monumental and unchangeable is decided upon, or anyone or anything is decried, denied or disappeared again.
Watch a trailer for “Denial”
See resources about the David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt trial
Community Solidarity Stroud District 