The assault on the memory and historical facts of the Holocaust began with the first attempts to downplay reports of the ongoing genocide. Szmul Żygielbojm committed suicide in London in 1943 because he could see no other way to bring the plight of his people to world attention. 

“I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.”

A year earlier, in 1942, an official comment on the Riegner telegram, alerting the Jewish MP Sidney Silverman to the attempt to exterminate European Jewry “at one blow” dismissed the news: 

“I do not see how we can hold up this message much longer, although I fear it may provoke embarrassing repercussions. Naturally we have no information bearing on this story.”

After the war, despite an impressively full account (given the constraints of time and the complexity of the events) at the first Nuremberg trial of what had happened to European Jews, survivors struggled to be taken seriously. The late Gena Turgel described how she was told that, whatever she had endured in the Kraków Ghetto, the camps of Płaszów, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and finally Bergen-Belsen, the Blitz had been difficult too. 

As awareness of the Holocaust grew in the 1960s, therefore, it was perhaps not surprising that the truth of what had happened was met with deliberate attempts to deny that it had happened at all. Confronted with an event which challenged all kinds of assumptions about European society and historical progress, many people refused to acknowledge it at all.

By the 1990s, this movement reached a kind of apogee, with Holocaust deniers like David Irving shrieking to their followers to “Sink the Auschwitz!” It was not successful, because, as Robert Jan van Pelt demonstrated so compellingly in the trial Irving instigated against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, the evidence for Auschwitz and the Holocaust is overwhelming. As the judgement against Irving concluded, any reasonable person on encountering the evidence must concede the Holocaust happened.

Moreover, the blanket claim that “the Holocaust did not happen” could always be countered with simple truths. What were these camps for? How did these mass graves happen to be here? Where then, are our families? The fact of the Holocaust is now a fixture in modern culture and society: the annual commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day is marked across the country and throughout the media.

But this is the challenge. Distortion does not mind conceding that your family fell victim to the Nazis. Even that many of these people were victims.

“But all of these families? [the distorter will exclaim] But if the Nazis, as you claim, kept such good records, why are there none for his family? How many victims can you prove there were? Yad Vashem has recorded four million, but you say there were six? And how do you explain that this person in Yad Vashem’s Book of Names of victims actually survived, and died in Israel, long after the book says they perished? This memorial used to say there were four million victims but now it is a mere 1.5 million? Mistakes get made, you say? Ideological distortion required the earlier figure? Then how can you prove which things are not mistakes? How can you prove you are not responding to ideology and bias?”

Against the disingenuous insinuation of distortion, simple assertion will not be enough. It will be reduced to bluster, all the more effectively because they may even commiserate with our loss. 

They may, for example, in the guise of “standing with Israel” subtly shift the terms of the debate; admitting that Germany may have “mucked up” but what about Hamas? It is not about the facts: it is about confusion. It is about charming plausibility when shifting not just the goalposts, but the whole pitch. And it will back us into a corner in which the moral imperatives of Holocaust memory – because they do exist – will be closed off and blurred by our need to remain more faithful to what we said last week than to what happened eighty years ago. History is not a perfect method, but it has integrity, because it is based on what we can prove happened, not what we may wish or imagine had happened. 

The beginning of my journey into studying the Holocaust, and eventually reclaiming my heritage and becoming a Jew, was reading about a father and his son, on the edge of a shooting pit, in Ukraine in 1942. 

“The father held the ten-year-old boy by the hand, speaking softly to him: the child struggled to hold back his tears. Then the father pointed a finger to the sky, and, stroking the child’s head, seemed to be explaining something.”

Everything I do as a Holocaust educator is done with that moment in mind. Because that moment happened. Because just a few moments later, the whole family were summoned to their fate, out of sight behind the mound of earth dug for their grave. Because the witness who told the Allies what he had seen paid for his honesty with ostracism from his community.

We need to be knowledgeable, and skilled, and able to relate individual facts and histories to their context. We need to work with the museums and libraries to access the primary sources they hold and safeguard, not the quick-fix summaries. We need to ensure that the accounts we give of the Holocaust and its origins conform not to the minimum standards of an overstuffed curriculum but to the highest possible standards of accuracy and scholarship: that is, those most securely linked to provable facts. Is this placing the burden of proof upon the victims? Absolutely: but if not us, then who? And if not now, then when? 

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