The task of selecting a theme to accompany Holocaust Memorial Day must be daunting. As this blog reflects, they are very different, year by year. Like any annual event requiring fresh perspectives, they also vary in accessibility. The theme for 2023, Ordinary People, for example, was a godsend, daunting only in that people had to choose from the myriad possibilities for reflection and education it offered.

I will confess, therefore, that The Fragility of Freedom did not initially catch my imagination. It seemed forced, and actually difficult to map onto the history of the Holocaust in a concrete way. It seemed to suggest the road not taken. For in many ways, the very fragility it sought to identify and commemorate means it is hard to identify historically. It also offered the potential to revive dated models of thought about the Nazi past, suggesting a totalitarian terror-driven state in which obedience was mandated and heavily regulated. More recent scholarship has tended to emphasise the consensual, in what Neil Gregor termed “the voluntarist turn” in his typically coruscating prose: “…the Nazi campaign of genocide was, in many respects, a far more de-centered process, or set of processes, involving mutually reinforcing interactions between the leadership and its often quite autonomous agents on the ground, than an older historiography, with its one-sided focus on decision-making in Berlin and on implementation at a few, major killing sites, led us to believe.”

In short, the Nazi regime in Germany and in the occupied countries of Europe in WW2, offered far more scope for freedom of action than is commonly supposed. Most teachers have, I suspect, encountered references to “brainwashing” or the threat of punishment for non-compliance with killing. The belief that killers only killed when threatened or forced is a staple of discourse, as I explored a few months ago. And my concern was that The Fragility of Freedom might reinforce some of those ideas.

But then 7 October happened, along with the subsequent military reprisal in Gaza. I am not going to comment on that situation here, because I am not an expert, and I have no influence over anyone who might be able to really change things. But the theme of The Fragility of Freedom has come to be terribly significant, as the anxieties, fears, anger and grief at what is happening there have been acted out here. I was privileged to be asked to deliver a 30-minute presentation on the theme at a London school on behalf of the Holocaust Educational Trust. I share it here as a download. But its final paragraph is important:

My suggestion is this. At every moment, however demanding it is, however angry, worried, or desperate we are, we stop and remember that we are a community that lives in freedom. But that freedom can only exist safely if we first make a space for peace: if we put our common humanity ahead of hatreds. If we listen to each other in our pain, distress and confusion as closely as I hope you will listen to the survivor who will speak to you. Do not do to others that which is repugnant to you. The rest indeed is commentary. Now live its meaning.

The problem with The Fragility of Freedom is that it divorces us from the responsibility to maintain it. Freedom is only as fragile as we make it. Hatred and prejudice on our streets and in our politics will not change anything for the better there, and will corrode our society here. Freedom is fragile like candle flame in a high wind: the challenge is not to light it, but to keep it burning.