(RNS) — On Jan. 27, people around the world will mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp and to mourn the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi genocide alongside the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution.
As a third-generation descendant of Jews who survived the Holocaust, I often think about the use and purpose of Holocaust memory because its influence extends far beyond the Jewish community. To our dismay, the Holocaust was only one of the catastrophes of the 20th century, and for complicated reasons, it became enshrined as a seminal moral failure that the world committed to preventing in the future. The International community formed the United Nations in part to prevent these kinds of atrocities, but they regularly fail to stop them when they’re happening. In our collective imagination, the Holocaust stands for two very different things: It is a call to action to fight injustice and it’s an enduring reminder of the world’s indifference to the suffering of innocents.
Jews are also divided about how to understand the Holocaust and once had fierce debates over how to commemorate the catastrophe. Should we embrace particularism and prioritize empowering ourselves to make sure this never happens again, or should we understand the Holocaust universally, embracing a framework where “Never Again” applies to all?
Some of the reluctance to adopting a universal understanding cuts to the term “Holocaust” itself. Unlike “genocide,” a word coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin from Latin roots to describe the annihilation of entire peoples, “holocaust,” derived from the Greek word for “burnt offering,” is ambiguous. It’s unclear how this word was assigned to this tragedy because the idea of “burnt offering” positions Jews as the proverbial sacrifice of Christian Europe on its road to a new international world order. There’s real resistance to stripping the catastrophe of its uniquely Jewish character, further erasing European Jewish life and potentially supporting the already widespread phenomenon of Holocaust denialism.
But marking the Holocaust in 2025 asks for something different. We are living through a crisis of hate that isn’t restricted to antisemitism. In the lead-up to the Holocaust, the Nazis attacked a wide variety of people in ways that are increasingly familiar today. They consolidated power by jailing political opponents, including left-wing activists and opponents of the regime. They attacked trans and queer people, including by closing the Institute for Sexual Research, which was led by the German-Jewish doctor Magnus Hirschfield. And of course they targeted Jews to remake the racial dynamics of their growing empire and to conserve resources for themselves.
It’s impossible to know what the next four years have in store, but we do know what the government is intending. Building on the racist “great replacement theory,” which he seemed to encourage as a candidate in 2016, Trump is readying the federal government to deport millions of undocumented people after having already suspended refugee resettlement and sent the military to the border. Proposals such as Project 2025 will serve as a basis to dramatically slash social service programs and attack minorities. The MAGA forces that brought Trump to power are expanding across our society and are supported by and boosting authoritarianism around the world, meaning that, even if he wasn’t elected, these influences would have been in play no matter what.
As we stare down these threats, we cannot retreat to our corners and turn against one another. If we were to remember the Holocaust only through a particularist frame, we would jeopardize its most important lessons for grappling with this moment of history. As the Holocaust teaches, what makes mass atrocities possible isn’t only the agency of the powerful — it’s the silence of everyone else.
While there’s fierce disagreement over how to understand the Holocaust in 2025, I strongly insist that we need to remember that its victims spanned across vulnerable identities. Horrifically, it wasn’t only 6 million Jews who perished, but millions of others died resisting, organizing, and advocating against fascism.
Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking about the history of the righteous among the nations, people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Shoah, often at great personal risk to themselves and their families. As a Jew living in relative safety and comfort, I find inspiration in their sacrifice, knowing that in a situation where so few were sticking up, they did.
As we mark the 80-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we have to stand for justice and against the horrors of the new government. Only together will we make it through.
(Zev Mishell is a student at Harvard Divinity School. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
