Holocaust Day: The lessons of the past

Andy Brooks and Dermot Hudson from the Metropolitan NCP lay flowers

 by New Worker correspondent

LONDON communists joined war veterans, diplomats and anti-fascists at the annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in London last week. On 27th January 1945 the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the largest death camp in the Third Reich, and every year the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust are remembered at the Imperial War Museum and the nearby Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park.

Holocaust Memorial Day began in Britain in 2001. Since then special events have been held in London and all over the country to remember the millions of Jews and other innocent victims of the Nazis who died in the Second World War and commemorate subsequent genocides around the world including Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur.

    The solemn event at the Imperial War Museum began with a procession led by veterans’ associations to the Holocaust Memorial Tree and the Soviet War Memorial.

New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks joined the Mayor of Southwark and other council dignitaries, Russian diplomats and members of London’s Jewish and Russian communities in laying wreathes and floral tributes at the memorials. It ended, as always, with a minute’s silence and the Last Post.

    The remembrance ceremony then continued in the museum cinema. It was opened by Charlie Smith, the Mayor of Southwark, and the programme included musical and literary tributes to the victims as well as an interview with John Dobai, a Holocaust survivor.

            Memorial candles were lit to remember the dead and the ceremony concluded with Rabbi Lionel Rosenfeld from the Western Marble Arch Synagogue leading the Memorial Prayer and Kaddish.