Schools are falling silent on Holocaust Memorial Day – that should shame us all

This year, Holocaust Memorial Day will pass quietly in hundreds of British schools. Not because the Holocaust is no longer relevant, and not because it is no longer important, but because too many educators now fear the reaction it might provoke, from parents in their communities and even from colleagues in their own staff rooms.

According to new figures released by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has more than halved since 7 October.

That fact alone should trouble us deeply. It is a stain on this country.

Holocaust Memorial Day exists to remember the six million Jewish men, women and children who were systematically murdered for no reason other than that they were born Jewish. It is not a political gesture. It is not a commentary on today’s conflicts. It is an act of human memory, and a moral one at that. When we begin to treat remembrance as something that must be justified, balanced or quietly avoided, we reveal how fragile our commitment to it has become.

My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, survived Auschwitz. For decades of her life, she devoted herself to speaking to people all over the world about what she had witnessed and endured in what she called “hell on earth.” She answered their questions, listened to their fears, and tried to explain, with remarkable strength and gentleness, how ordinary societies slide into extraordinary evil. When she said “never forget,” she did not mean “unless it becomes uncomfortable.”

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers and death camps. It began with words. With lies. With the spread of conspiracy theories. With the slow normalisation of hatred. With the othering of Jewish people. With people deciding that certain lives mattered less than others. And, crucially, with silence, with decent people looking away because it felt easier than speaking up.

This is precisely why Holocaust education matters. It teaches young people where prejudice leads when left unchallenged, how democracies corrode from within, and what happens when lies become louder than truth. My great-grandmother always believed that education was the solution, that knowledge could be a shield against hatred.

At a time when antisemitism is at its highest level in decades, and becoming increasingly violent, we should be strengthening Holocaust education, not retreating from it

But what happens when education itself becomes the problem?

What we are seeing now is that the sharp rise in antisemitism is not happening despite decades of Holocaust education, but in part because so much of it was never truly believed in to begin with. For too many academic institutions and teachers, Holocaust remembrance and education about anti-Jewish racism became a tick-box exercise, something done because it had to be done, not because it was understood, valued or defended. It was procedural, not principled. Now, when that education becomes inconvenient, when it carries social cost, when it risks controversy, when those teachers have an excuse and a reason not to teach it, it is quietly dropped. And that tells us everything.

At a time when antisemitism is at its highest level in decades, and becoming increasingly violent, we should be strengthening Holocaust education, not retreating from it.

Too many teachers are being forced into silence by pressure from their communities and from colleagues. They are being told they must “balance” Holocaust remembrance with unrelated political narratives, as though the murder of six million Jews requires qualification, as though Jewish suffering must now come with footnotes.

Soon, there will be no survivors left. No living witnesses. Only last week, we lost Harry Olmer, a Holocaust survivor who endured multiple Nazi forced-labour and concentration camps. He was a personal hero of mine. I travelled to Poland with him in 2023 and heard his story first-hand. Soon, there will be no one left who can say, simply, “I was there.”

When that moment comes, all that will remain is what we chose to teach.

If we allow Holocaust education to wither now, at precisely the moment antisemitism is rising, distortion is spreading, and Jewish students increasingly report feeling unsafe, then we are not just failing the past. We are betraying the future. Because history does not repeat itself. People do.

And when we abandon the responsibility to teach our children the past with truth and integrity, we abandon the future too. If we teach children that history can be set aside when it becomes uncomfortable, we teach them something far more dangerous than any lesson about the past, we teach them that moral clarity is negotiable.

That is a lesson no school should ever impart.