Envy and Memory Holes: The Disappearance of the Jews on Holocaust Memorial Day

When the Nazis were defeated at the end of WWII and the death camps were liberated, the full extent of their crimes against humanity, predominantly against European Jews, were laid bare to the world. As part of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, innocent Jews were intentionally targeted, hunted down, herded like animals, sent to death camps and executed. By the end of the Second World War, six million Jews had been murdered. In Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Belzec, among other camps, Jews were exterminated simply for being Jews. In response, the worldpromised that it would never let such barbaric acts happen again. A part of this promise was to establish a day of remembrance – Holocaust Memorial Day. It would be held on January 27th, the day in 1945 which saw Auschwitz-Birkenau liberated – a camp where over 1 million Jews and one hundred thousand others had been exterminated.

When I learned about these events in secondary school 40 odd years ago, I could not believe my eyes and ears. I had so many questions, foremost of which was “why did the world look away?”.  Over the last 16 months, I have begun to understand the mechanisms that shaped this ‘looking away’, this denial, this changing of narratives. In this climate of widespread Jew hatred and antisemitism it’s been possible to see the corruption and suppression of truth unfold in front of us.

This has played out in the most grotesque of ways in relation to the Holocaust. This year, the 80th anniversary, the day was tarnished by a cast of bad actors. Amongst them are the usual suspects, the Holocaust deniers and the perennial antisemites; but there is a new breed in the mix – a component of wilful malignants who seem to want nothing less than the Jewish Holocaust to fade into history and for a new Holocaust to be pronounced. It seems excruciating for these people to be faced with the genuine atrocities of the Shoah, it creates such discomfort, such cognitive dissonance, that they have to fend it off by any means. To reawaken the reality of six million jews being intentionally massacred would break their world view apart. And so they divert attention away from it; they ignore it; they erase it; they co-opt and exploit it for their own advantage.

Why? In his book ‘After the Pogrom’, Brendan O’Neill points to envy as a significant driver for warped public attitudes towards the Holocaust. From a psychological perspective, I am inclined to agree. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein defines envy as “the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable – the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it”. She further describes it as: “an innate expression of destructive impulses” that is present from birth, and is one of our most primitive, hardwired emotions (like sadness, joy, disgust, anger, fear, shame, curiosity). She suggests that envy plays a part in every infant’s........

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