Today, 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day 2026, which was marked by an event locally at Crawley Town Hall arranged by the Mayor and her staff.
The theme of this year’s Day is Bridging Generations. There is a saying by Winston Churchill, which is in itself a variation on wording that a famous philosopher said before him, that: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.
It is perhaps accurate to say that humanity learns from its mistakes, but that if something is forgotten there is less guarantee that it will not happen again.
If we remember the rise of hatred, scapegoating and intolerance that took place in 1930s and 1940s Germany against Jewish people and what happened under the Nazis, we can spot if and when it is happening again. We can challenge and confront that hatred before it passes the point of no return. We know what to look out for and what some of the arguments might be.
And that means ensuring this message is not lost on our young people. The rise of the Nazis and the stories of some of the most horrific premeditated acts in the story of humanity cannot be forgotten.
Even in decades to come, when people like me writing this column are just a memory, our young people today must be telling the young people of the future what happened and why we must remember. We cannot have such suffering, such indiscriminate hatred, such brutality – it cannot be allowed, or its parallels in a decent world that I know the vast majority of us strive for.
Even when I was a young boy, the Second World War felt an impossibly long way away – but you know, it really wasn’t. The war was still very much in living memory, there were still a lot of people on this planet, not just the very oldest, who had lived through it. I remember hearing their stories, I remember hearing what they discovered. And I remember the shock of realising that there had been people out there capable of committing such atrocities.
There are so many ways to learn about the Holocaust – some of the concentration camps in Europe are still preserved as a warning from history, other things like books, and Anne Frank’s diary, spell out the human emotions behind those suffering, the brutal, evil ways innocent men, women and children were either actively murdered or left to deteriorate and die through extended work and starvation.
Today and days like it are not intended to frighten our young people, but they are there to give the message that we do not automatically live in a world where good always prevails. We have to be vigilant for the future and that means we must make sure new and future generations know about it too and share the memories of what went before them.
Ask the young people in your life if they know what happened in those times, make sure they know and don’t forget that when we dehumanise others, it is the path to some of the most terrible acts imaginable.
Cllr Michael Jones
Leader, Crawley Borough Council