Thought for the Day - 26 January 2007

Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks

Tomorrow is national Holocaust Memorial Day, and on Sunday we'll have the national service in Newcastle. We'll remember the victims: the young, the old, the innocent, entire Jewish communities throughout Europe, some of whom had lived with their neighbours for a thousand years; and the one and a half million children, gassed, burned and turned to ash for the crime of having a single Jewish grandparent. To this day, when I walk through certain European cities I can almost feel the presence of ghosts, an entire murdered generation.

And we'll remember the other victims of the Holocaust, the gays, the gypsies, the physically and mentally handicapped, as well as the victims of other tragedies, in Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda. Three years ago, we observed the tenth anniversary of the tragedy in Rwanda when 800,000 victims were murdered in a mere 100 days, most of them hacked to death by machete. I wondered how the two groups of survivors, Jews and Rwandans, would relate to one another. They were different in so many ways: in age, colour, culture, creed. That was when I discovered the deep kinship between those who have seen the naked face of human evil and ever afterwards have lived with the trauma. It was an extraordinary and utterly moving moment of pure humanity to see aged Jews and young Rwandans standing together in grief and telling their stories; and I too wept - for the evil men do and the good we often leave undone.

I'm sometimes asked: why continue to remember? Rarely have I seen a more convincing proof than that offered by the President of Iran who has repeatedly called the Holocaust a myth while threatening the destruction of Israel. Those who refuse to look on the face of evil in the past make themselves free to commit evil in the future.

And still people are committing mass murder in the name of religion or race in Darfur, Somalia, Iraq and elsewhere. Still they dehumanize their victims. The Germans called Jews vermin, lice. The Hutus called the Tutsis inyenzi, cockroaches. And still the single greatest weapon we have against genocide is the statement in the first chapter of the Bible: that every human being is in the image and likeness of God. God made us different to teach us the dignity of difference, the uniqueness and sanctity of every human life. May we never forget that the people not like us are still people, like us.

Copyright 2006 BBC