Oliver Sears: I had to tell my mother that her father had been tortured for eleven days and murdered

There are few more finger-nail-on-blackboard jarring bromides than “the right side of history”. History is normatively written by the victors, but with war there are only victims. Some victims can be respected, honoured and forgiven; many cannot. Yom HaShoah on April 23rd was the first official Holocaust Memorial day. Established in Israel in 1951 to coincide with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, it took another 54 years before the UN designated January 27th International Holocaust Memorial Day.

This year, as Passover and Easter coincide, I reflect on how Holocaust memorialisation has become much more complex than constructing monuments to the dead and to the injustice that killed them. How have the overlapping concerns of personal remembrance, national memorial and education evolved over the last 80 years?

My primary motivation to bring awareness of the Holocaust to Ireland flows from the impulse to honour my family. When I discovered that my maternal grandfather, Pawel Rozenfeld was taken from his factory to Radogoszcz detention centre near Łódź in Poland in November 1939, tortured for 11 days and murdered, I had the responsibility of informing my mother. She knew nothing of these circumstances.

Pawel’s o...
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