I remember one particular episode of Blue Peter on the BBC, when, as a six year old, I watched a special programme commemorating the Holocaust. Fifty years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, this was to be my first knowledge of the persecution of the Jewish people.

I remember watching naively as a fresh-faced presenter crouched by frozen train tracks. Only years later would I understand that this cold, detached scene bore no resemblance to the hellish cattle trucks that ran on those innocent-looking lines, rammed with herds of dead and dying Jews just half a century before.

I remember watching this young woman describing the shower rooms with grates at the top, from which Zyklon B would extinguish the lives of those below. For days, I would leave the bathroom door ajar, wary of our fitted extractor fan.

This was my first interaction with the Holocaust, yet in the fifteen years that has passed since then, the memorialisation of the Holocaust has become increasingly important. As the number of survivors dwindles, it seems that the number of deniers - self-proclaimed 'revisionists' - grows. Knowledge of the experience of the Jews of Europe is increasingly scarce, and doubts have become subconscious. With no sense of irony, nor of harm, I am often asked why Jews are 'so obsessed' with the Holocaust.

Though Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years, the Holocaust - otherwise known as the Shoah - was unique in the Jewish experience in its totality. It was the 'final solution', a sanitised term for the complete decimation of every Jew, even a non-Jew with Jewish ancestry.

It is hard, perhaps even impossible, to comprehend the figure of 6 million. It is equivalent to 10% of the UK population. In Poland, before 1939, there were 3.5 million Jews. Over 90% of them perished. In Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial authority in Israel, there is a monument entitled the 'Valley of the Communities', listing every community where Jews died in the Holocaust. Many of these villages and hamlets exist only in name; the Nazis left no-one alive.

The vastness of the Holocaust continues to daunt me, to dominate my understanding of human nature. It propels my politics and justifies my activism. Yet, even as the embers of the Holocaust still burn in my mind, there are some that wish to perpetrate new crimes against mankind, against the Jews. There are faux-intellectuals who try to undervalue or legitimise the horror of these now desolate camps. Some politicians, newly mainstream, have written texts that disregard the weight of historical fact and human experience, their denial a logical consequence of their hatred.

These camps are the graveyards of the Jews of Europe, without headstones to mark their place. The greatest memorialisation is not superficial artwork dedicated to the six million, but education in our communities of the life and death of the Jews. The Holocaust must become more than history.

The whispers of these unwilling martyrs can be heard through our lives, through our activism.

Never forget  ×œ× תשכח