We must never forget the Holocaust

A candle in a window at 10 Downing Street, London, in remembrance of victims of The Holocaust - Credit: PA

Last week was Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember the millions murdered under Nazi persecution. This year marks 75 years since vital evidence of this was first presented at the Nuremberg war crimes trials alerting a largely unknowing world to the horrors that had occurred in concentration camps.

Our great grandfather David Maxwell Fyfe was a principal British prosecutor at Nuremberg, and saw the film record made by the Russians of the liberation of Auschwitz, which transported the horror and terror to the courtroom 75 years ago this year. He wrote home in a letter to his wife Sylvia: “I went to a preview of the Russian film in Auschwitz concentration camp. When one sees children of Mo’s age and younger in this horrible place and the clothes of infants who were killed, it is worth a year of our lives to help to register forever and with practical result the reasoned horror of humanity.”

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Mo was their seven-year-old daughter Miranda. When the film was shown in the courtroom it created a powerful impact on the defendants as well as the world’s press that was gathered there.

Maxwell Fyfe’s year spent at Nuremberg directly led to his later role as a champion of human rights and as one of the two artisans of the European Convention which was signed in Rome 70 years ago. The story of how evidence of that liberation helped shape the world we live in, is as important today as it was at that first showing.

We remember and tell it through our multi-media resources at www.thehumansinthetelling.org.

As historian Theodore Zeldin wrote: “To have a new vision of the future it has always been necessary first to have a new vision of the past.”

Lily and Robert Blackmore
Great grandchildren of David

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