Imagine talking about the transatlantic slave trade and not saying the word African. Or discussing the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda without saying ‘the Tutsis;. It would be unthinkable, right? Impossible, in fact. How could you talk about such grave crimes without mentioning the victims, without making at least a passing reference to those whose liberty and lives were ravaged in the barbarism?
I worry that we are only half-remembering the Holocaust
Well, quite a few people managed it yesterday. They talked about the Holocaust without naming its victims. They talked about this ‘sacrifice by fire’ – to give Holocaust its literal translation – without saying who it was that was burnt to death. They lamented the greatest crime in history but neglected to name the ethnic group that was almost destroyed by it.
At times I could hardly believe my ears. Good Morning Britain got the ball rolling on this vile new fashion for omitting the Jews from the Holocaust. In a segment on King Charles’ visit to Auschwitz, host Ranvir Singh said: ‘Six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belong to another ethnic group.’
Oops, evidently OK to forget Jews when mentioning those killed in Nazi death camps. Ranvir Singh, a Good Morning Britain host, only listed 'Polish,' 'disabled' and 'gay' victims. Do the biases journalists have about Israel-Gaza mean Jews are erased now from their own Holocaust? pic.twitter.com/bDp4eivBle
— Gerald Posner (@geraldposner) January 28, 2025
Six million people? The word you’re looking for is Jews. Six million Jews were killed. By gun, death march and gassing. Their ‘crime’? They were Jews. To fail to say the word ‘Jew’ when discussing the most barbarous act of anti-Jewish slaughter in history is bizarre. It is historical erasure of the most egregious kind.
GMB’s Jew omission was compounded by its naming of other social groups that suffered under the Nazis. Poles, homosexuals, the disabled. Every Jewish viewer will have wondered why those victims were acknowledged but Jews were not. Why those who were persecuted, jailed and executed by the Nazis got a name-check, but those who were targeted for annihilation, for complete eradication from humanity and history, did not.
GMB was not alone. All day yesterday – Holocaust Memorial Day – there were people gabbing about the Holocaust without mentioning the Jews. ‘Tonight I’m lighting a candle to remember all those who were murdered just for being who they were’, tweeted Angela Rayner. Eh? Who was murdered for being who they were? Say it, Angela. It begins with J and ends with W. It’s not hard.
Her fellow Labour MP Sarah Champion likewise lamented the barbarism of Auschwitz without saying who it was inflicted on. ‘We must never forget’, she said. Forget what? I’ll say it if Ms Champion won’t: the industrial-scale slaughter and burning of Jews by the deranged anti-Semites of the Nazi regime.
Justin Trudeau expressed sadness over the ‘systematic murder’ at Auschwitz but forgot to say who was murdered. Humanists UK tweeted its sorrow for ‘all the victims of genocide’. Cambridge City Council informed us that it had lit up the Guildhall building ‘to remember those persecuted by the Nazis’. Anyone in particular? Any ethnic group you might want to give a shout-out to for what their forebears endured under the Nazis?
How did we end up with Jew-less commemorations of the Holocaust? It’s actually not a new phenomenon. Way back in 2008, the Socialist Workers Party picketed a festival organised by the far-right British National Party. Leaflets were handed out reminding people of the horrors of the Holocaust, in which ‘thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered’.
That’s right: they forgot the Jews. I say ‘forgot’…. As the SWP’s rivals in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty said, ‘For such a slip to pass unnoticed through writer, typesetter, printer, organisers and distributors, without anyone at any stage picking it up, must say something’.
I feel the same way about GMB. It has now apologised for omitting the Jews from the intro to its Auschwitz report. But we need to know how it happened. We need to know how this Jew-less blurb came to be written, edited, approved, put on the autocue and broadcast without anyone at ITV asking WTF? This was such an appalling oversight that surely some kind of internal inquiry is needed, to find out why one of our largest TV networks said ‘six million people’ instead of ‘six million Jews’ on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of that hell for Jews: Auschwitz.
I think there’s more to all this than slips, than dumb omissions. Rather, we seem to be witnessing the ‘dejudification’ of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is increasingly remembered as a very bad outburst of prejudice. One in which all sorts of people suffered – not only Jews but also gays, trans people, disabled people, Communists. It is of course true that the Nazis persecuted and even killed members of various social groups. But we forget at our peril the racist and frenzied determination with which they sought to destroy for all eternity one group in particular. Say it with me: the Jews.
I worry that we are only half-remembering the Holocaust. It was not just bigotry. It was not just persecution. It was not just bad people doing bad things. It was a conscious, deliberate and industrialised effort to lay waste to an entire people. As the great Elie Wiesel said 20 years ago, the Holocaust was not ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ – it was ‘man’s inhumanity to Jews’.
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