How can someone not know how to pronounce ‘Auschwitz’?

Last week, as I was leaving my local town hall, I had a taste of what a theatre critic might experience when the curtain comes down on press night.

“That was awful,” someone in front of me mumbled – but not so quietly that the organiser of the event couldn’t hear.

“Gosh, wasn’t that moving,” said the lady walking behind me, but unfortunately well out of earshot of those in charge.

I would have liked to have been watching a play – preferably a comedy – to warm up this eternal stretch of cold we find ourselves in.

But instead, I found myself at a ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day, which, like a contentious new piece of theatre, has sharply divided opinion.

Strange, you may think, when surely there is only one way to view the commemoration of the murder of six million Jews, some of whom lived just a short hop across the Channel? As an absolute necessity.

Apparently not.

HMD, as it has come to be known, has, for the last few months, found itself like the guy at the centre of a pub brawl – attempting to placate opposing sides, while simultaneously getting bashed by both of them.

There are those – mainly from our community – who say that it should stick to what it says on the tin and only be about the murder of Jews. That marking other genocides (a stipulation of the UK government, which provides most of the funding for HMD) risks watering down and eventually erasing the Jewish experience.

Then there are others who argue that if you are going to have a day which talks about attempts to wipe out other ethnicities, you also need to recognise the genocides of X,Y and Z.

This was the brutal trap HMD fell into this year, when a vicious boycott campaign was launched by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, calling on hundreds of universities and local authorities to ignore HMD for not recognising the “genocide” in Gaza. This was despite the UN’s (now former) special adviser on the prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, refusing to apply the term. 

Back to the town hall, where, even though I harbour some ambivalence towards the marking of other genocides on HMD, I found myself being deeply moved by both the testimonies of a Holocaust survivor and of a lady who had lived through the Rwandan genocide, without feeling that the latter, in any way, obscured the former.

But equally, there were moments so seat-squirmy that I was surprised we couldn’t hear the sound of the benches creaking – namely, when one of the presenters managed to mispronounce both Auschwitz (“Oshwitz”) and Kinder (“rhymes with ‘binder’”).

How come she didn’t she know how to say the name of the biggest Nazi death camp or the word for the 10,000 Jewish children who were bundled onto trains to an unknown country to live with unknown people, many of them never seeing their parents again? Didn’t she learn anything at school, where, since 1991, the Holocaust has been the only compulsory topic on the history curriculum?

To be fair, if her lessons were anything like mine (in the late 80s) - the murder of six million Jews shoehorned into 35 minutes between art and science - it is little wonder that “Auschwitz”, which rolls off Jewish tongues with a disconcerting familiarity, is a struggle for her – and likely others - to say.

I am not hopeful that much has changed since then, as figures released in January showed that a third of young adults in the UK were unable to name Auschwitz, any of the other concentration camps, or a single ghetto.

The survey, carried out by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also revealed that in the UK, 20 per cent of the population believed that two million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

And only a few weeks ago, I came across an advert for an HMD event, hosted by one of the largest teaching unions in the country, which failed to even mention the J-word.

Here lies the crux of the problem. If we can’t educate properly, how can we commemorate properly?

This is not to dismiss some of the phenomenal work of organisations such as the Holocaust Education Trust, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, Holocaust Centre North and AJR, which work all-year-round to conserve and share the stories of survivors. But, for some reason, this expertise is not being translated into effective teaching in mainstream schools across the board.

Nor does it take away the very powerful impact of some of the events on Holocaust Memorial Day, when we saw Holocaust survivors lighting candles alongside the Prince and Princess of Wales, and synagogues inviting local schoolchildren to hear first-hand testimonies. But it would seem that HMD events are only as effective as the hands – and heads –  they fall into, and those heads need to be very well versed in the facts of the Holocaust.

In September, the Prime Minister promised to keep Holocaust education on the National Curriculum “come what may”, and to also make it mandatory for schools which don’t follow the same curriculum. He also pledged an additional £2.2m to the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Let’s hope that those teachers charged with drawing up the history syllabus in their schools give the subject both the quantity of time and the quality of teaching it deserves, so, in future, on Holocaust Memorial Day, everyone will be able to commemorate the worst atrocity in modern history with meaningful actions and words – ideally pronounced correctly.