OPINION: A Christian reckoning with the Holocaust

In 1991, my brother James and I stood in front of two photographs at Yad Vashem. In one were the faces of victims experimented on by Nazi doctors. In the next, a group of clerics with their arms raised in a Nazi salute. That juxtaposition shattered any remaining illusion. It was a moment that changed everything. 

The realisation hit hard: the Holocaust was not a Jewish problem. It was a catastrophe of Western civilisation – of Christian civilisation. Yes, Jews bore the unimaginable suffering. But the deeper failure was ours.

We were two young Christians from England, standing in Jerusalem, trying to understand a world we had inherited but not yet fully reckoned with. But in truth, the story begins long before that moment.

Seeing Faith Through New Eyes 

In the early ‘80s, our family took a trip to Israel. My mother packed her Bible and an Avis Rent-a-Car map and set out to chart the terrain of Jewish and Christian tradition. She traced every holy site with care.

That journey brought us to the Western Wall—the Kotel. I remember standing there, watching Jews pray, realising how little I understood of what I was seeing. As Christians, we saw Israel as a spiritual touchpoint. But it struck me then that I had been looking at a story from the outside in.

It was that moment that led me to study theology. Not to become a minister like my father, but to understand the roots and ruptures between Jewish and Christian worldviews. I began to uncover just how deeply antisemitism was embedded in Christian history—in our texts, our art, and even our assumptions.

This wasn’t ancient history. It was part of the moral architecture I had grown up in. And I needed to unlearn it.

From Theory to Testimony 

I initially intended to pursue a PhD in antisemitism. But after our visit to Yad Vashem, it became clear: before I could study the persecution of the Jews, I had to understand their life.

I set aside the PhD and enrolled at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. There, under the guidance of Professor David Patterson and scholars like Jonathan Webber and Dovid Katz, I immersed myself in Jewish life—its languages, literature, culture, and spirit.

That year gave me the grounding I needed. It taught me that the Holocaust wasn’t just a genocide. It was the destruction of centuries of civilisation, of memory, of meaning. It wasn’t just how Jews died—it was what the world lost when they were murdered.

From Academia to Understanding 

Back in the UK, James and I pledged to volunteer for a Holocaust organisation. What we didn’t realise was how few existed.

At the time, Holocaust education in Britain was barely a field at all. The Holocaust Educational Trust consisted of three people—Lord Janner, Lord Jon Mendelsohn, and Craig Levitan. Gillian Walnes was ploughing a lonely furrow at the Anne Frank Trust. And in the classroom, it came down to one woman: Shirley Murgraff.

Shirley had been both a primary and secondary school teacher. She was also the first person to create Holocaust education materials for mainstream UK schools. She understood that the Holocaust wasn’t just history—it was a mirror.

“It seemed to me,” she once said, “the Holocaust was a 20th-century distillation of the human condition.”

She believed it was vital for young people to confront what human beings are capable of—both the worst acts imaginable and the acts of courage and dignity that endured within them.

“It showed the worst humans could do to each other, but also in small instances the best… Now we do know—but we haven’t learnt the lessons.”

She had foresight. And she laid the groundwork for what came next.

• Stephen D. Smith is executive director Emeritus of USC Shoah Foundation