I was privileged to be one of those representing Remembering Srebrenica at Holocaust Memorial Day, hosted by Birmingham City Council today.
2025 is a special year for commemoration – marking both the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the 30th anniversary of the genocide near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica when over 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were systematically murdered simply because they were Muslims.
There will be a series of events commemorating the Bosnian genocide later this year. Today, though, the historical focus was rightly on the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were butchered along with thousands of Roma, gay men, lesbians, people with disabilities, political opponents of the Nazi regime and many others.
Many of those murders took place in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. I visited those camps myself in 2008 with the Holocaust Educational Trust. It was an experience that will remain with me forever.

We must never forget the genocides of the past – whether the Holocaust or those in Bosnia, Cambodia or Rwanda.
As we recall those horrific events and pay tribute to the victims, though, it is also vital to remember the words of Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “We don’t teach about genocides in order to realise it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it.”
This is not only about history. It’s about today and the kind of tomorrow we want to create.