Holocaust Memorial Day: 'We’re standing on the brink of a catastrophe again'

Barkow said: “We have had Holocaust Memorial Day for a quarter of a century now and Holocaust education has been compulsory in schools for even longer and yet it doesn’t appear to have given us any meaningful protection against the rise of the far right either in Britain or in any other country.

“The failure to absorb a proper understanding of what the Holocaust was and how it came about is a large part of what has led us to this. And I think now we’re on the brink of a catastrophe. So the story of what happened in the Holocaust is more important than ever…The tendency of the far right is to airbrush the Holocaust out of history altogether and I’ll fight that until my last breath.”

Writer and historian Barkow was, for 20 years until 2019, the Director of the Wiener Holocaust Library – the world’s oldest centre for the study of the Holocaust and anti-semitism. He then became chair at the Holocaust Centre North, where he still remains as a trustee, and in 2022 he was presented with the CBE for his services to commemoration and education of the Holocaust.

Between 1941 and 1945, six million Jewish men, women and children were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime, in ghettos and mass-shootings, and in concentration and death camps.

Holocaust Memorial Day, held each year on January 27 - the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, is a day dedicated to the remembrance of those who lost their lives. It also commemorates the millions more people who were murdered through the Nazi persecution of other groups and in more recent genocides across the world.

For Barkow, focusing on those who were killed is important. “I think there’s far too much emphasis on the stories of people who survived (the Holocaust), who by definition are an anomaly. It’s a very small number of people and they are the exception and what we need to have understood much better is not the exception but what happened to the bulk of people and why the societies that were affected by this chose to behave the way in which they did.

“(It’s also about) recognising above all that in our society, in modern industrial societies, all the potential for the Holocaust that existed in Germany and the occupied territories exists with us today.”

Barkow is a descendant of relatives affected by the Holocaust and like many others, he grew up with little knowledge of the facts, surrounded by an atmosphere of unspoken pain.

Over the years, he has worked to piece together his family’s history, but with a lack of extensive correspondence and archival material, he struggled to write about it coherently.

Instead, he turned to poetry to capture his family’s fragmented legacy and in a collection recently published by the Holocaust Centre North, he offers a personal and intimate reflection on the Holocaust.

Barkow, who now lives in Cornwall, said: “There were people on one side of my family who ended up in concentration camps and on the other side, there were people who were members of the Nazi party, and everything in between, so it’s a very mixed bag of experiences.

“I would hope that it might be of interest to people and show that the stories are usually more complicated than simply dividing people up into victims and perpetrators.”

The collection, Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde, sees Barkow explore the lives of his grandparents and their siblings, and those of his parents.

One of his relatives, his great-aunt Hilde Rosenthal Laubhardt, was a Jewish school teacher working in Germany at the time of the Second World War. In 1942, she and her husband got notification they would be deported from Berlin to the East - and ran off into hiding.

But in April 1943, the Gestapo - the secret police force of the Nazi regime - arrested the pair.

Barkow said: “At the point when they were arrested, Hilde’s husband took poison and killed himself. Hilde also had poison with her but she for some reason didn’t take it so she was arrested and sent to the Terezin ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic.”

She was there until October 1944 when she was sent to Auschwitz and killed as soon as she arrived.

The Auschwitz camp was above all a place of extermination. Historians estimate that around 1.1 million people were murdered there, the majority of whom were Jews.

About seven thousand prisoners remained in the complex at the point of liberation in 1945. For many, Barkow said, that was not a day of celebration.

“I think it’s probably true to say that for the majority, it didn’t really make any difference. Did they feel great? No they didn’t. A lot of them were so sick and huge numbers died after liberation. They didn’t feel a sense of triumph.

“And it’s not like that once the war was over they could go home. The majority of them couldn’t because they didn’t have any homes, their families had been wiped out and their property had been stolen.”

Barkow’s poetry book is the first in a series of publications from Holocaust Centre North’s Memorial Gestures programme, which has been set up to encourage creative engagement with Holocaust education and legacy work.

Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde is available for purchase at holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/shop