As Holocaust Remembrance Day comes round again, actual remembrance of the Holocaust seems fainter than ever. The arson attacks on synagogues in France and Australia, the mass-assault on Israeli football supporters in Holland last autumn, or the shocking recent scenes at the Oxford Union, where Jewish speakers were taunted, booed and sworn at by the audience, are a horrible echo from history, almost unimaginable a few decades ago.
At Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote, nothing was morally clearcut
Much of this may be due to demographic change, as sworn enemies of Israel migrate in large numbers to the West. Yet as genuine survivors of the Holocaust die out – a year ago, there were an estimated 245,000 spread across the globe, but with a median age of 86 – some of it’s also, surely, a case of Western amnesia. As James Fenton’s poem ‘A German Requiem’ put it, ‘How comforting it is, once or twice a year, // To get together and forget the old times.
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