BY PAUL MCLAUGHLIN

On Saturday 28 January, the people of Hastings gathered for the annual service to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. The event was part of the international commemoration to remember and honour the millions of Jews and other marginalised groups who were brutally murdered by the Nazi regime between 1941 and 1945, and in genocides around the world since.

The theme of this year’s Memorial Day was ‘Ordinary People’, in recognition that genocide is facilitated by ordinary people and that those who are persecuted, oppressed, and murdered in genocide are persecuted simply because they are ordinary people who belong to a particular group.

Dr Shelley Katz organised this year’s event at the White Rock Theatre, with the support of Hastings Borough Council. He told the packed auditorium that it was ordinary people who were involved in all aspects of the Holocaust and in the genocides that took place in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Ordinary people were perpetrators, bystanders, rescuers, witnesses – and ordinary people were victims.

Local MP Sally-Ann Hart and Council Leader Paul Barnett were among the local dignitaries in attendance, and both spoke movingly about the Holocaust and how racism continues to be a toxic influence in society today.

The service included a stunning performance from the Acromax Performance Group, based at Freedom Leisure Helenswood, and the St Richard’s Catholic College choir and dancers.

Eight candles were lit in a traditional menorah, used in the religious rituals of Judaism. Six of the candles were to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The seventh was lit in remembrance of the “liberators, rescuers and the others who were victims of the Third Reich.” The eighth candle was lit for “humanity, and to bring light into the darkness of antisemitism and into the darkness of genocide”.