January 2022

January, as first month of the year, sees the first of the many commemorations that mark our shared human experience. Not least amongst them, falling on the 27^th, is the official commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. For years now, the Alliance française de Delhi has worked on this event in close partnership with the United Nations Information Centre and the Embassy of Israel, and I want to take the opportunity here to express my gratitude for the work done coordinating this event over the past few weeks under the difficult circumstances that we have all come to know so well: preparing such an important event is always complicated, to do so online is even more challenging.

Below some extract of my introductory speech given on the 31^stJanuary.

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the real privilege and honour but also the great responsibility of introducing the official 2022 commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. I am honoured to have been intrusted with this.

This is our second time online, and of course I am sure that all of us would prefer to sit in an auditorium to interact more easily with our guest speakers, but I believe that this disadvantage in no way limits the necessity of this commemoration.

I am not a specialist of this period of history. Nevertheless, as these events belong to the common history of all of us, and not just to the experts and  politicians, it is important that all citizens, and even more importantly, all future citizens, engage with this most difficult of subjects.

And here lies the role of Education. I know that the role of educating our children is very often emphasized by policy makers, but sometimes the reality, for many reasons, does not match the rhetoric.

All of us know the state of the world in which we live today: the COVID pandemic has affected all societies, and disturbed every aspect of our daily life, and above all, it has upended the Education of many millions of students.

At a time, when happily, we are witnessing an improvement on the Health front that gives us hope that schools will be able to reopen soon, there might therefore be the temptation to concentrate on the core subjects such as Mathematics, Computer sciences, etc. But it is my strongly-held belief that it would be a mistake, a very serious mistake to do so at the expense of other crucial subjects such as Art, Philosophy and above all, History. More than ever, we need our children to acquire the tools which allow them to build critical thinking skills, while also reinforcing humanitarian values, which are essential to the survival of free and just societies. Here more than anywhere else, Education is synonymous with Preservation:

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” – thus Winston Churchill worded a warning that has cut across cultures and generations, a plea to not allow ignorance and complacency to lead us down the same dangerous paths.

All around the world, teachers have a crucial but extremely difficult task: to give students the atrocious, but richly documented, facts regarding the Final Solution, the death camps, the gas chambers. There are many testimonies, many books and many films- an enormous volume of evidence of one of the blackest events in human history, where the need to have someone to scapegoat and to blame for general discontentment, led to the slaughter of one group of humans by their neighbours.

And in the same time, the same teachers need to help their students to develop their critical thinking to be more independent-minded (and maybe smarter…), and able to differentiate between hard evidence and the miasma of mis-information that is the plague of the age: unfortunately, this task can sometimes be difficult as nationalistic ideologies continue to influence the ways in which history is remembered and taught.

There has never been a time when lies have not been spread for political gain, and history not been co-opted and manipulated to serve a given agenda, but we are living through times when this tendency seems to be extremely acute, with the proliferation of fake news, lies insisted on as truths, and history being distorted to fit some ideological agendas.

Although conspiracy theories have always existed, in the past they were not able to spread so rapidly through a population, but today they are breaking into the mainstream and are part of the public debate, and this includes that old lie:  denying, or minimizing the Holocaust. This is especially dangerous because it goes hand in hand with other racist and hateful theories which use lies to demonise entire ethnicities or religious groups…

I would like to end this introduction with a powerful account I came across years ago but which remains in my mind:

When General Eisenhower visited the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945 after its liberation by the U.S. army, he realized how difficult it would be for people to comprehend the reality of the Holocaust, he wrote the following, and I am quoting:

“The things I saw beggar description. … In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. … I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the near future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

It is so sad and disheartening to realise that Eisenhower’s pessimistic words were so prophetic.

Thanks for your attention,