THE TELEGRAPH – BLOG: I have spent the last week wondering how to mark Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) on my blog and have failed to come up with a coherent idea. It’s a subject that plays tricks with the psyche.
So please excuse me if I just spill some ideas out on the page, pieces of my unfinished Shoah jigsaw.
- Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated internationally on 27th January each year. This date was chosen as it is the anniversary of the day in 1945 on which the Soviet Army liberated the largest Nazi concentration camp.
HMD aims to raise awareness and understanding of the events of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides as a continuing issue for all humanity, based on a recognition that it could happen again anywhere and at any time, unless we ensure that our society opposes discrimination, persecution and racism.
- If you have the opportunity, go to Auschwitz. It’s the great anti-wonder of the world. Part pilgrimage, part journey to the heart of darkness: apocalypse then. Wander its tombs, its mansions of horror.
There is the ‘room of hair’, great rotting mounds of the stuff, shaved from the 1.1m heads.
Another door opens on a pile of human spare parts. A grotesque, twisted sculpture of wooden legs, prosethic arms, trusses, metal hands, neck braces, rusting callipers, clunking fists – all hinges and brackets – that the crematoria could not devour.
There is the ‘playroom’, no nursery rhymes just ghost stories, no sweet dreams just nightmares. It stores the toys of all the ‘lost boys and girls.’
There among the broken animals and forgotten battalions tin soldiers sit forlorn teddy bears, last cuddled by tiny arms in a stinking cattle truck heading east one freezing night, while glassy eyed dollies stare into the abyss waiting for ‘mummy’ who will never return. >>> Julian Kossoff | Wednesday, January 27, 2010
