EVEN as someone who for 12 years has been immersed in personal testimony of the Holocaust, Dr Toby Simpson would never describe himself as numb to its horrors.
“I do have to keep a certain professional distance from it to do my job. But it still hits you sometimes, and sometimes unexpectedly,” Dr Simpson, the director of the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, told the JEP.
Dr Simpson, who was speaking in Jersey this weekend ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, says this anniversary year – which marks 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz – has been particularly challenging.
“It has meant I have had to engage more intensely with the history of Auschwitz, particularly as an extermination camp,” he said. “It is just so shocking. It is still, I think, profoundly upsetting. Even having worked here for 12 years, even knowing all these facts already, it still has that power.”
Located in London, the Wiener Holocaust Library was founded in 1933 by Alfred Wiener, a German-Jewish scholar who fled Germany to escape persecution by the Nazi regime. First settling in Amsterdam, he set up the Jewish Central Information Office before moving to Britain when war broke out in 1939 and the Netherlands faced the prospect of Nazi invasion.
In the early years of the project it was a resource for governments, academics and journalists seeking information about the antisemitism of the Nazi regime, gathering testimony, documents and photographs from inside Germany and the countries it occupied. After the war, the institution helped document Nazi crimes against Europe’s Jewish population.
Wiener himself, as a German speaker, also aided the Allies during the war and after at the Nuremberg Trials, where the evidence gathered by the library was used by the legal teams prosecuting leading Nazis such as Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess. Now, the library contains over one million books, periodicals and eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust from across Europe.
Eight decades on, and this material is still growing, Dr Simpson says, with at least 50 new collections being handed over each year, some consisting of a few documents, others several boxes. “It hasn’t slowed down,” he said, “I think that’s partly because of lot of these documents and photographs are stored in people’s attics. And now that generation is passing away.”
Each year, the library invites the families of those who have donated resources for a reception, and invites survivors or their family members to speak. Recently the speaker was an individual whose family was Belgian and had survived the Holocaust in France: “The room was captivated, and of course most of them were second and third generation,” he said.
“It was really lovely to see a room full of people with these stories passing down the generations. Some of the photographs were just fascinating. It was wonderful to think that this story would be preserved safely for future generations,” Dr Simpson said.
And even as the number of survivors alive diminishes as history marches on, survivor accounts remain one of the only ways to appreciate what happened during the Holocaust, he said.
“I think hearing the history of what happened from the perspective of survivors is still necessary – and will always be. It has to be part of our Holocaust education because it’s only through them we can appreciate the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust from a human perspective.”
One reason for Dr Simpson’s visit to Jersey is to publicise the fact that the library has resources that relate to Jersey’s Jewish community before and during the war, and that now those are available online as part of the Wiener Digital Collection. These include a post-war account by a slave labourer who was held in the Nazi camps in Alderney.
“What is powerful about these documents is on the one hand the story, but they are also a starting point for a conversation, I hope that teachers – whether in Guernsey, Alderney or Jersey – can prepare sessions where pupils can hear from local people who were there. Even if though fewer and fewer of them are still with us,” Dr Simpson said.
As the Holocaust recedes into the distance and fewer and fewer eye-witnesses remain, projects such as the Wiener Library become more and more important. But equally, Dr Simpson has not found that the fact that many young children have no physical connection with the events of the Holocaust – in that their great-grandparents are no longer alive – means they are not interested in it.
“There was a survey done recently by the University College of London that showed that the overwhelming majority of young people are curious to learn about the Second World War and about the Holocaust, and that they recognise how important it is,” he said.
“I don’t think we necessarily have an issue persuading young people that it is important and interesting and that they should learn about it.”
The Nazi era in the Channel Islands has always been a contentious issue in some quarters because of the question of collaboration, from Madeleine Bunting’s controversial book, The Model Occupation, right up to the revelations published by the Lord Pickles review last year that showed that a succession of cover-ups prevented leading Nazis from being punished for the deaths of hundreds of slave workers in Alderney during the Second World War.
As a historian and an archivist, Dr Simpson is understandably reticent to talk about the issue of collaboration and whether it should play a role in the conversation about the Holocaust in the Channel Islands. “I am absolutely enthusiastic about supporting those conversations wherever they take place. It is just important to me as a director of a library of records that I focus on my role, which is to provide people with access to evidence rather than take a view on it,” he said.
But Dr Simpson does acknowledge that in dealing with a sensitive subject such as wartime collaboration the tone of debate is crucially important. “We all know from our everyday lives that if you lecture or talk down to people, you don’t get a good response. We need to open a discussion and take it from there,” he said.
It is impossible to teach young people about the very real threat that antisemitism poses in 2025 – and the fact that it existed well before the Second World War and well after – without a discussion of the Holocaust, but at the same time it can be a difficult balance, Dr Simpson said.
“I do think it is important to talk about it. But there is a challenge with dealing with a disturbing, upsetting subject and creating a space where people feel comfortable talking about it is a challenge. But we have to do it. This is a subject that any thinking person needs to grapple with,” he said.
“The Holocaust [poses] difficult questions about human nature. These terrible events, this heinous atrocity, was on an unprecedented scale. We can’t turn away from that.”
But equally, Dr Simpson says, it is important not to suppose that just because we’ve learned about the Holocaust that we have finished learning about antisemitism. We haven’t.
“Antisemitism in our modern age has mutated, has taken on new forms, and been given new virality via the internet and modern media. It is as big a threat as it always was – and always will be.
“It’s not as though the Holocaust happened kind of overnight. There were various stages of radicalisation before we reached the mass deportations of Jews to Auschwitz,” Dr Simpson said.
Our age is no stranger to mass killing, and of the two major wars currently in the public consciousness – Ukraine and Gaza – one of them is between a Palestinian militia and a Jewish state. The war in Gaza has led to an increase in incidents of antisemitism in Europe, and the more radical voices of criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians have drawn comparisons with the experience of European Jews during the Second World War.
Such comparisons, Dr Simpson says, are not only insensitive, but dangerous.
“Making direct links between the Holocaust and present conflicts can often be deeply unhelpful because our best chance of learning from the past is to do so in the spirit of open dialogue and curiosity. [Those comparisons] cause people to shut down, to pick sides,” he said.
“We have to be conscious of how dangerous the present moment is and the risks that we face, [and] be wary of being too alarmist, of being insensitive, when we compare the situation today to the very different circumstances of the past.”
