30th January 2026
HEADLINES
By Mr D Smith Assistant Headteacher
WHY REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER. Holocaust Memorial Day 27th January 2026 I have always felt it a great privilege to teach History as a vehicle not only to develop critical thinking and other key skills, but also to confront prejudice, persecution, and hate. Sadly, the corrosive effects of antisemitism, racism, and hatred are all too present in today’s society. This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is being marked at a time where, incomprehensibly, Jewish people have recently been killed for being Jewish, both here and overseas. In the face of rising hate, Holocaust education can play such an important role in promoting the universal principles of human rights, justice, and moral responsibility, as well as the importance of thinking critically in the world of social media and AI. As the last eyewitnesses to the Holocaust are dying, AI-generated content is confusing fact with fiction, and distortion and denial are becoming more and more widespread. Holocaust Memorial Day takes place each year on 27th January because it marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp by Soviet troops in 1945. Auschwitz, located in Nazi-occupied Poland, was the largest site of its kind. This was the site of the systematic murder of over 1 million people, most of whom were Jews. Auschwitz was at the center of a network of over 44,000 camps, train stations, ghettos, and other sites of persecution, murder, slave labor, transport, testing, and torture. The industrialized mass murder of the Jewish people wiped out what had been a vibrant culture for over two thousand years. After just 12 years of Nazi rule, two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe had been murdered - over 6 million people. Hundreds of thousands of Sinti-Roma people, Poles, Slavs, disabled people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others also met the same horrific fate.
Despite all of these concrete truths about the Holocaust, according to The Guardian in 2025, “a quarter of young people in the UK have come across Holocaust denial or distortion on social media,” and a “third of young people in the UK are unable to name Auschwitz or any Nazi death camp.” The dangers of misinformation are so acute today. A functioning society needs a “shared reality” - an agreed-upon set of facts - to enable a successful democracy. However, when a current powerful political figure made “30,573 false or misleading claims” in his first four years in office (according to the Washington Post), and continues to do so in his second term, it is clear that we are experiencing a crisis where truth is now considered by many as just another form of political opinion. The disinformation and dehumanization of the Jewish people delivered by the Nazis came through books, posters, speeches, radio, and film. Today, disinformation comes straight into our and our children’s phones, delivered by leading political figures as well as shadowy forces on the internet, and so we must upskill children in spotting it. Following 1945, “never again” became an international rallying cry for the lessons of the Holocaust to lead to change. In the face of rising extremism, antisemitism, misinformation, and increased risks of global conflict, remembering the Holocaust is ever more important. I hope that remembrance is met with a strengthening resolve in our whole school community that we will use education as a vehicle to tackle prejudice and hate. A huge thank you to Mr. Tolhurst for leading such thought-provoking and somber assemblies on this theme this week, and a huge thank you to all of the children at Honywood School who continue to engage so fantastically in their education about the Holocaust. “The Holocaust didn’t start with bullets. It started with words.” Holocaust survivor, Al Miller Daniel Smith