The Holocaust should not be for sale

Holocaust Memorial Day will only further debase the suffering and the memories of those who survived the Nazis, says Frank Furedi

As someone whose family was virtually wiped out in Nazi concentration camps and forced labour battalions, I become furious when I read that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismisses the Holocaust as a myth. I cannot forget my mother's heart-wrenching account of how she was compelled to leave her younger sister to die in a ditch as two SS camp guards forced her to march on during the last week of the war in Germany.

Sometimes, it is the less tragic, almost banal, events that prey on the imagination. In late 1944, my elder sister was caught by a group of Nazis near the Budapest ghetto, who decided to have some fun with her by slapping her around, before finally kicking her in the backside. Perversely, my sister was most offended by the jeering remarks these thugs made about her "Jewish squint". Her humiliation is something that I still feel with a surprising degree of intensity. I can really understand her continual determination to demonstrate that she mattered - a character trait that stayed with her throughout her life.

I was made to feel lucky that I did not have to live through those desperate years. Growing up in a very, very small family, I was always conscious of missing grandparents, aunts and uncles. Sometimes an ominous silence or a nervous glance around the dinner table signalled the suspicion that bad things could happen in the future. And I still remember how my father exploded with outrage when he heard a group of scornful Hungarian anti-Semites claim that after the war, more Jews came back than went to the camps. Remembering was important to him, as it is to me.

So why I do I feel so uncomfortable with the institutionalisation of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain? Is it because the Holocaust has been turned into a bite-size moral morsel to be hawked around by dodgy peddlers of virtue? Or because the Holocaust has become the most overused metaphor, adopted by moral entrepreneurs to promote a bewildering variety of causes? I suspect that it is because remembering the Holocaust has become an official ritual that allows every sanctimonious politician and public figure to put their superior moral virtues on public display.

Preaching about the horrors of the Holocaust helps society avoid working out its own moral view of the world. Its transformation into a universal symbol of evil has helped promote the simplistic moral formula: to be against it is good and to be for it is bad. That is why the Holocaust can play such a prominent role in the school curriculum.

The incessant demand that we "learn the lessons of the Holocaust" has little to do with a genuine act of grieving or remembering. Nor does it have much to do with encouraging people to scrutinise the past in order to learn from it. Usually, it means appropriating the label Holocaust to attack any target we choose. Thus, everything from the erosion of bio-diversity to a loss of jobs can be denounced as a "Holocaust". It has become an all-purpose claim for sympathy and moral authority, a platitude trotted out in the most incongruous situations.

When Germaine Greer bailed out of Celebrity Big Brother last year, she denounced her housemates for refusing to support her defiance of the "fascist" bullying of Big Brother. "Holocaust is what happens," she lectured, "when good people do nothing."

After reading Greer's pious justification of her behaviour, I recalled my father's warning that the "Holocaust should not be for sale". He believed that if the Holocaust was transformed into a universal symbol of evil, remembering it would turn into an empty ritual to be used for self-serving ends. He would not have been surprised by recent claims that the British bombing of Dresden constituted a "German Holocaust". Nor would he be shocked to hear animal rights activists refer to a Holocaust of seals in Canada. Once the Holocaust has been turned into an all-purpose claim for sympathy, it is bound to become a commodity in the moral market place.

The more that the terrible experience of the Nazi era has become institutionalised through Holocaust Days, Holocaust memorials and museums, Holocaust curricula and Holocaust films, the more it has become a focus of competitive claims making. Is it any surprise its emotional power has been co-opted and transferred to other events, such as the African-American Holocaust, the Serbian Holocaust, the Bosnian Holocaust or the Rwandan Holocaust. Predictably, everyone wants a piece of the action.

Instead of serving as a focus of unity, Holocaust Day merely encourages different groups to develop an inflated sense of past suffering and to demand public recognition for it. It encourages different cultural groups to represent themselves as victims of historical injustices. Such a response is not surprising, since it is difficult for a single experience of barbaric violence to serve as a universal symbol of suffering. It is one thing to recognise the scale of destruction and the unique dimension of the Holocaust. It is quite another to turn it into a moral tale that can inspire all people at all times.

If Holocaust Day was just another meaningless ritual, I would not be worried about it. But such initiatives actually help create an environment that encourages cynicism and scepticism about what actually happened during the Nazi era.

False morality always incites the response of cynicism, and Holocaust-mongering is no exception. Last year a poll conducted in nine European countries by the IPSO research institute indicated that 35 per cent of those interviewed stated that Jews should stop playing the role of Holocaust victims. And in a survey carried out in Britain by ICM, 15 per cent of those polled said they thought that the scale of the Holocaust has been exaggerated. At present, this mood of scepticism is still unformed. But the obsessive institutionalisation of the cult of the Holocaust will create a situation where scepticism will invite disbelief.

When memory becomes politicised, get ready for trouble. Remembering suffering is best pursued through the genuine sentiments of people who were touched by the experience of the Holocaust. But now, even they feel alienated by the way it is portrayed as a universal icon of suffering that does not resonate with their memories.

Probably the single decisive event that alerted me to this was a conversation I had 15 years ago with my 89-year-old mother. After watching a television programme about "Holocaust victims", she appeared puzzled by the terminology. She said she did not realise she was a "victim", and that she did not perceive her identity in terms of victimhood. But what really upset her was the implication that she must be peculiar because, unlike the people in the programme, her entire life has not been defined by the events of the Forties.

"Maybe there is something wrong with me," she said. Some therapists would concur and say she is a sick woman in denial. But to me she demonstrates an admirable human capacity to overcome adversity. And for that we do not need government-sponsored rituals.