Holocaust Memorial Day

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Today is another sombre affair, we remember the holocaust.

Beyond remembering what happened, how it happened and why, International Holocaust Rememberance Day is remembered in the hope that it will never be repeated. Over the course of the day I have been exploring how people in the age of technology have been rmembering the tragedy. Some campaigns were simple; show solidarity. Everybody shares the same phrase on social media and share personal stories, interviews with survivors and facts. One campaign that I found particularly touching was @stl_manifest on twitter. it is a simple thread of almost identical tweets About the refugees on the St Loui, a ship that took a thousand Jewish people across the Atlantic who hoped to settle in America. They were turned back, and almost all that returned to mainland Europe were murdered during the course of the war.

The tweets read as follows : My name is Guenther Rotholz. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz.

Some have pictures, most don't.

I have had the opportunity to visit two concentration/death camps, Majdanek and Dachau. Dachau has an extensive museum that catalogues the horrors, Majdanek had a guide who talked us through every part of the processes. Both had monuments to memorialise the dead, lest we forget, tragic, haunting and beautiful. Dachau has a statue of barbed wire, and Majdanek a large pit covered with a dome that houses the ash and bone that were found.

But what's the int of remembering if we don't stop it when it starts happening again. The Holocaust was by no means the last time in history that genocide has been committed. There all these warnings in history that are missed or downplayed.



Tomrrow is Chinese New Year, a slightly more jolly day, and after that Kansas Day (no, I didn't know that was a thing either!).

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