D-DAY ANNIVERSARY

Today Saturday 6th June 2026 is the 82nd anniversary of the Normandy landings that re-opening the western front and ensured with the Russian drive from the east the destruction of the Nazi state within less than a year. We should remember all those who fought for freedom in Normandy on 6 June 1944, those who came back, and those who gave their lives and never returned. Along with all those who worked at home and overseas to secure the victory over fascism and the peace that followed.

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY 2026

This year Tuesday 27 January 2026 is Holocaust Memorial Day, which is commemorated each year on the 27th January because this is the day ( some 81 years ago this year ) when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.  

Now perhaps more than ever, we need to take time to remember the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed beyond recognition during the Holocaust, and other more recent horrors in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Syria and during the war in the Ukraine.

 

It is important that we remember the earlier genocides that inflicted on the Armenians and the Ukrainians. It is only right and proper that we honour the survivors and continue to challenge ourselves to use the lessons of their experience to inform our lives today.

 

By the end of the Holocaust, six million Jewish men, women and children had perished in ghettos, mass-shootings, in concentration camps and extermination camps along with millions of other minorities. As Allied troops made progress across Nazi-occupied Europe, they began to uncover concentration and extermination camps and the remains of camps. 

 

The camp of Majdanek in Poland was the first to be liberated, in summer 1944. Faced with defeat and advancing Allied armies Nazi forces burnt the crematoria and the mass graves in attempts to hide the crimes that they had committed. The Operation Reinhardt camps of Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka were dismantled by the Nazis from 1943, and Auschwitz itself was evacuated in late 1944. 

 

The surviving prisoners, weak from starvation and ill-treatment, and poorly clothed against elements were forced to walk into the interior of Germany, away from the Allied armies, many thousands died on the enforced ‘death marches’. When Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27^th January 1945,  they found several thousand emaciated survivors, and the smouldering remains of the gas chambers and crematoria. 

 

In the following months, the Soviets liberated Stutthof, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck. In the west, US troops liberated Buchenwald in April 1945, followed by Flossenburg, Dachau and Mauthausen. British Troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15^th April 1945. It is estimated there were over 60,000 prisoners in Belsen by April 1945. Approximately 35,000 prisoners died of typhus, malnutrition and starvation in the first few months of 1945.

 

Back in 1999, Jewish leaders, were once asked  Tony Blair (the then UK prime minister) whether we needed Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain? Jonathan Sacks (the then former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth for 22 years, until 2013) noted that that, when it was proposed that the UK have a Holocaust Memorial Day, Blair wanted the opinion of British Jewish leaders. They explained that they did not need a specific day to remember as Jews.

 

When it comes to remembrance Jewish people already had Yom ha-Shoa, their own memorial day, which falls soon after Passover in the Jewish calendar. Every Jew literally (or figuratively) lost family in the Holocaust. For Jews, Yom ha-Shoa is a grief observed. 

The Jewish leaders have repeatedly said that the Holocaust was not just a crime against Jews and other victims – Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political opponents of the Nazi’s among them; it was an assault on all of humanity.  

A recorded rise in antisemitism has been described as the canary in the coal mine - it is a warning sign that society’s principles are weakening - with society prepared to scapegoat, to dehumanise, to exclude. As has been said elsewhere, what begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews. 

The Nazi’s murdered the disabled, the Roma, Gay men, political dissidents and anyone who did not fit their vision of racial purity. In Bosnia, the genocide targeted Muslims. In Rwanda, the Tutsis. There is a disturbing pattern to this. 

First you convince people that one group is less than human. Once that has been accomplished, the rest can follow with frightening rapidity. It is important not to take our society’s tolerance and decency for granted. 

As has been said previously by a survivor perhaps we need is an additional eleventh commandment along the lines of – Don’t be bystander!  

THE OVERLOOKED ANNIVERSARY

Just in case your missed it, Saturday 23rd August 2025 was the 86th anniversary of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact signed by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union in 1939, the anniversary has become the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes. It was on that day in 1939 that an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union opened the gate to Second World War and all kinds of totalitarian violence: from forced migration through slave labour and war crimes to genocide, including an event unprecedented in world history – the Holocaust. The 23rd August should rightly brings back the memory of millions those who fell victim to totalitarian regimes, including the inmates of Nazi concentration camps, death camps, Soviet gulags and Stalinist prisons. This anniversary probably passed unnoticed in the Russian Federation save behind closed doors.

D-Day 81st Anniversary

Friday was the 81st anniversary of the Normandy landings that re-opening the western front and ensured with the Russian drive from the east the destruction of the Nazi state within less than a year. 

We should remember all those who fought for freedom in Normandy on 6 June 1944, those who came back, and those who gave their lives and never returned. Along with all those who worked at home and overseas to secure the victory over fascism and the peace that followed.

D-DAY 80th ANNIVERSARY

Thursday 6th June 2024, is the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. 

We should remember all those who fought for freedom in Normandy on 6 June 1944, those who came back, and those who gave their lives and never returned. Along with all those who worked at home and overseas to secure the victory over fascism and the peace that followed.

D-DAY ANNIVERSARY

Today Saturday 6th June 2020, is the 76th anniversary of the D-Day landings. 

We should remember all those who fought for freedom in Normandy on 6 June 1944, those who came back, and those who gave their lives and never returned. Along with all those who worked at home and overseas to secure the victory over fascism and the peace that followed.

A MATTER OF ANNIVERSARIES

Friday 8th May 2020 will be the 75th Anniversary of Victory in Europe - an anniversary we should remember for a variety of reasons including the hard fought bloody victory of allied forces over fascism and the destruction of a great evil in the world. 

On the 75th anniversary of VE Day we should reflect on the bravery of so many men and women who fought the tyranny of fascism and came back home. We should also spare more than a few thoughts for those who made the ultimate sacrifice and never came back home.

Peace after war always comes with a price even for the victors. With the sense of relief would have been an awareness of those friends and neighbours who were not there, those who would have lost their lives and those who would have lost loved ones. 

At the time despite the no doubt profound and overwhelming sense of relief that many people would have felt and displayed, people would also have been conscious of the on going conflict in the Far East and the fact that relatives and friends would have been still serving in distant lands overseas in the war against Imperial Japan.

For a state so allegedly if somewhat selectively obsessed with elements of a rich history it is the things that are forgotten that occasionally should still have the power to surprise or shock us. 

I was talking a few years ago to a family friend, who had served in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War, he was shocked to discover that the Poles had been excluded from the Allied victory parade in held in June 1946.

Greek contingent marching in 1946 victory parade

The 4th June 2020 will be the 74th anniversary of the great victory parade, which was held in London to commemorate the victory over fascism. 

It was held on June 4th 1946 by the then Labour Government, who staged an elaborate victory parade in London. 

Representatives from over 30 Allied nations gathered to celebrate the Allies collective victory over fascism. 

Some 134 different nationalities actually took part in the victory parade:  Czechs, Dutch, Iranian, Indian, Sikh, Norwegian, Canadian, South African, Arab, Belgian and Australian and many others marched (or flew over) through the streets of London. 

Absent were the Poles, who in probably one of the most despicable (even with the benefit of hindsight) gutless acts of any Westminster government, were excluded due to indirect pressure from Stalin. 

The Poles, some 200,000 thousand of whom had served alongside the Western Allies, in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, and who had given so much for allied victory in almost every campaign and had done the ground work which broke the enigma codes (formally recognised on 12th July 2001), were perceived as a problem post war.  

The British Labour government initially invited the Soviet-backed government in Poland to send a flag party to represent Poland among the allied forces in the parade, but did not specifically invite representatives of the Polish forces that had fought in the West alongside Allied forces. 

Attlee's government had previously hindered, harassed and pressured the Poles to return to Soviet occupied Poland, before somewhat reluctantly granting them asylum. 

They were specifically and perhaps deliberately excluded - perhaps due to a combination of expediency and pressure from / fear of offending Stalin. 

To their everlasting credit, the RAF, consistently refused to harass the Poles to return to Soviet dominated Poland from the start, and they gave the Polish airman who had fought so valiantly in the Battle of Britain in 1940 the option to fly but they chose not to fly in the aerial victory parade in an act of solidarity with their excluded comrades on the ground.  

Poland itself would not finally be free and a democracy until 1989. The Poles finally marched in the National Commemoration Celebration Day of VE Day and VJ Day in London on 10 July 2005.