Seven decades after the BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby’s haunting dispatch from Bergen-Belsen, his words held undiminished horror as they were played at a London service to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Hundreds of survivors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, and their relatives, gathered to pay tribute to the millions who died. The broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby said his father’s report was the first most people knew of the Holocaust.

“It is a ghastly fact that antisemitism is a poison that is yet to be eliminated and in some, too many, parts of the world is resurgent,” said Dimbleby at the service at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre attended by religious leaders and politicians including the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the London mayor, Sadiq Khan.

It was a “virus” and “a malignancy that not only surfaces abroad but still lurks in the cesspit of thought and of action within the United Kingdom,” Dimbleby added. “That is why it is important to remind ourselves of the degradation, the beatings, the torture , the starvation, the firing squads and the gas chambers, grandparents, parents, children and babies slaughtered to exterminate what Hitler and those around him regarded as a subhuman species.”

The power of words is the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2018 – words that can make a difference both for good and evil. Dimbleby cautioned that it was important not to conflate, as some did, “antisemitism with the individual right to criticise, even strongly, the policies of the Jewish state to the same degree as one might any other vibrant democracy”.



The BBC was hesitant to broadcast his father’s harrowing report because of the strong imagery, and the corporation felt it needed to be corroborated, he said. But the war correspondent threatened to never broadcast again if the report was not played.

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany was liberated by British troops. More than 50,000 people died there during the Holocaust. Originally a prisoner of war camp, it held thousands of Jews in 1943 as the Nazis tried to bring about the “final solution”.

The actors Derek Jacobi, Maureen Lipman, Charles Dance and Pearl Mackie gave readings at the service.

Sajid Javid, the housing, communities and local government secretary, told those gathered that silence could be equally as devastating as words. He said: “It is clear the fight against hatred is far from over. Antisemitism is on the rise, and look at what’s happening in Myanmar – potentially another genocide in the making. Showing us that what leaders say and what they actually do when they get into power can be quite different.

“It is the silence that speaks volumes. And that is all it takes for terrible things to happen, for good people to stand by and to do nothing.”

The chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’s pledge to Holocaust survivors everywhere was: “Your legacy is our eternal commitment. We will never forget.”

The Roma Bridging Sounds orchestra performed Ederlezi, a popular Romany folk song created in the Balkans. The Roma, along with homosexuals and disabled people, were also targeted during the Holocaust. Coda, a singing group from Sedgehill school in Lewisham, south-east London, sang Peat Bog Soldiers, one of Europe’s best-known protest songs, written, composed and first performed in a Nazi concentration camp.

More than 8,000 events are being hosted across the UK to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many of the events have been organised through the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust charity.

The day remembers the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed beyond recognition during the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

Elsewhere, the European Jewish Congress president, Dr Moshe Kantor, has warned that with the deaths of direct witnesses to the Holocaust, and with it their testimonies, Europe is becoming ever more susceptible to antisemitism.



Speaking at the European parliament in a ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he said: “Direct accounts of the Shoah by those who experienced it had immunised European society from the worst manifestations of antisemitism.

“Without the direct memory of Holocaust survivors being passed down through the generations, there’s a danger society will forget and all taboos will be broken down. The EU urgently needs to demonstrate that it will diligently defend pluralism and the rule of law. What was taboo must not become the norm again in Europe. Racist and antisemetic parties marching down the streets of our capitals and filling seats of our parliaments and government must not return to the European continent.”

