They say it never happened. They say the Jews invented it. They say that it’s a lie. A hoax. But I have met those who lived through it. One was forced to play music in the Auschwitz women’s orchestra. Another was a slave in Camp Dora making rockets for Wernher von Braun. Another hid under a rabbit hutch with her mother and aunt while the Nazis paraded on the paving stones above their heads.

On this day, and on every day, we think of those designated a particular ‘race’ and murdered for the crime of being born a Jew, a Roma, a homosexual, a ‘non-Aryan’. Holocaust means a ritual burning. The word is wrong. The Hebrew word Shoah, which means catastrophe, is the right one.

Julia Pascal

Author of The Holocaust Trilogy Oberon Books.