AROUND 100 people attended yesterday’s ceremony to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
After the traditional wreath-laying at the Lighthouse Memorial, commemorating Islanders who were victims of Nazi persecution, a ceremony was held at the Town Church.
Yesterday was exactly 77 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps.
But organisers stressed that the ceremony was not just to commemorate victims of the Holocaust but all other victims of genocide and ‘identity-based violence’ throughout the world.
Actor turned Labour peer Michael Cashman, a long-standing gay rights activist, was chosen to give this year’s address. He told the gathering that it was up to all of us to stand against racism and other forms of bigotry. Lord Cashman said Middle Eastern and African refugees in Calais were modern-day victims of misrepresentation and persecution in the same way that other communities had been in the past.
He said: ‘We should welcome them because that it was what all civilised countries must do.
‘It is our human duty, and our moral duty, to help each other. Have we not learnt that to misrepresent and dehumanise others is ultimately to dehumanise ourselves?’
He added: ‘Don’t think of the victims as a number, but as how you remember your loved ones. Think of those shoes and stand in them.’
The Dean of Jersey, the very Rev Mike Keirle, explained that the theme of this year’s event was ‘One Day’.
He said: ‘Holocaust survivors often speak of one day when everything changed, either for better or worse.
‘On one day Franziska Shwarz Mikus was sterilised by the Nazis because she was deaf, because they believed disabled people were imperfect and worthless.
‘From March 1942 to November 1943, 1.7 million Jews were killed as part of Operation Reinhard. The bulk of the killings happened between September and November 1942, with an average of 15,000 Jews killed each and every day.
‘On one day – 12 July 1995 – Bosnian troops entered Srebrenica, separating out the men and boys from the women, and 8,373 men and boys were killed over the next two days.
‘On one day, 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered the Cambodian capital to usher in a new era. Two million people were murdered.
‘On one day, on 30 August 2017, Rajuma, who lived in Tula Toli in Myanmar watched as the Army swept through her village, shooting randomly at people. She watched as 200 of her villagers were gunned down and the children killed and thrown into the river. Her whole family died that day – her two children, her husband and mother.
‘And on this one day, 27 January 2022, we come together as a community to commit ourselves afresh to playing our part so that one day, identity-based violence is a thing of the past.’
Doug Ford, chairman of Holocaust Memorial Day organising committee, added that Jersey had a long tradition of providing a safe refuge for those escaping persecution for their political and religious beliefs
‘In the 16th and 17th centuries it was the Huguenots – French Protestants fleeing religious persecution. In the 1840s and 1850s early socialists like Victor Hugo and his fellow French, Polish and Hungarian emigrés came here following the failure of the 1848 movement. Or there were the thousands of French royalists who came here escaping the French Revolution.
‘Sadly persecution and oppression are with us still, which is why we mark Holocaust Memorial Day – to remind us what can happen if we do not take personal and collective responsibility for tackling racism and other forms of bigotry.’
– Lord Cashman is the subject of tomorrow’s Saturday Interview.
