Today, we remember the six million Jews who died at the hands of Nazi Germany and its accomplices. As a British-Ukrainian, I have profound reverence for the people who died in the Holocaust, but I am also aware that the promise of “Never Again” has not been kept.
The Holocaust was a terrible thing that had never happened before in history. Not because suffering can be measured on scales, but because it had unique features, such as the industrial efficiency of death factories, the bureaucratic precision of extermination, and gas chambers built specifically to wipe out Jews in Europe.
But the bigger lesson is that genocides recur, can look different each time, and regardless of their scale, we need to recognize and fight against all of them.
It was genocide systematically carried out as state policy based on the idea that an entire group of people should not live. The yellow stars, cattle cars, gas chambers, and execution pits, such as in Babyn Yar, in Kyiv, are historical facts that should never be forgotten.
To fully understand the Holocaust and its lessons, we need to see it as more than just a single, however huge, historical genocide.
Yes, the Nazis showed us what people can do when hate is the law, dehumanization is the rule, and the world turns a blind eye. But the bigger lesson is that genocides recur, can look different each time, and regardless of their scale, we need to recognize and fight against all of them.
Ukraine knows this well enough. Between 1932 and 1933, the Holodomor killed millions of Ukrainians by deliberately starving them to death. Stalin’s Soviet totalitarian regime was to blame for it. The methods were different from Nazi gas chambers, but the goal was the same: to take away and destroy their national and social identity and punish those who resisted collectivization. At the same time, the cultural elite of modern Ukraine, including its writers, poets, singers, scholars, teachers, and even naive communist supporters, were to be killed.
The Holodomor and the Holocaust were not the same thing. They functioned in distinctive ways, had diverse ideological underpinnings, and existed in different historical settings. But what occurred was genocide all the same: killing a group of people on purpose. And, like the Holocaust, there were years of denial, downplaying, and forced silence after it.
The Nazis thought the Jews were a threat that needed to be eradicated. Russian officials and state-run media often say that Ukrainians aren’t a separate people and that Ukraine cannot be a sovereign state.
This happened to other people, too. For example, genocidal elements in the colonial policies of some European countries have been retrospectively flagged. In 1915, Turkish Ottoman officials killed almost 1.5 million Armenians. Many Poles are convinced that the mutual ethnic cleansing that occurred in Volhynia in 1943 amounted to attempted genocide by Ukrainian forces.
The genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s brought back mass killings and concentration camps to Europe. During the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 Tutsis were killed in 100 days while the rest of the world fought over words and did nothing.
Today, on the anniversary of the Holocaust, not just Ukrainians, but many people around the world, including lawyers and human rights groups, believe that Russia is committing genocide against Ukraine.
The Nazis thought the Jews were a threat that needed to be eradicated. Russian officials and state-run media often say that Ukrainians aren’t a separate people and that Ukraine cannot be a sovereign state. The Nazis said the Jews were a threat to Germany’s greatness; today, Putin’s fascist-like regime sees the Ukrainians as an obstacle to the “great” Russian Empire, which he is trying to rebuild, and therefore needs to be removed from the map of Europe.
And on this day of remembrance, we can’t ignore a sad irony. Parts of Russia, along with all of Ukraine and Belarus, suffered terribly during the Nazi invasion. Leningrad was besieged and starved, Stalingrad was turned to rubble, and millions of “Soviet” citizens died. Now, Russia invokes the notion of ‘de-Nazification’ to conceal its genocidal imperialistic objectives towards Ukraine and its Nazi-like methods.
Today, the case of Israel also presents tough questions. Founded as a refuge for Holocaust survivors, built on the promise that Jews would never again be defenseless, Israel now faces serious allegations regarding its conduct in Gaza.
Many international legal experts, human rights organizations, and UN officials have described recent military operations as potentially genocidal, with cases now before the International Court of Justice.
The scale of destruction and civilian death toll has led many observers, including some Israeli and Jewish voices, to question whether the response has crossed legal and moral lines.
Memory without moral clarity becomes mere tribalism – "Never Again for us" rather than "Never Again for anyone."
This is not a simple matter of aggressor and victim, but a tragedy where legitimate security concerns, historical trauma, asymmetric warfare, and potential war crimes intersect in ways that demand honest examination rather than reflexive defense or condemnation.
These observations indicate a troubling trend: victimhood, however severe, does not shield nations or individuals from becoming perpetrators. Surviving genocide does not ensure that survivors or their descendants will identify and oppose genocidal practices in subsequent contexts.
This is perhaps the most difficult lesson: remembering is not enough. Memory without moral clarity becomes mere tribalism – “Never Again for us” rather than “Never Again for anyone.”
We need to remember the specifics of each genocide while also seeing the things they have in common. The Holocaust’s industrial nature, the Holodomor’s use of starvation as a weapon, and the speed and severity of the Rwandan genocide are all things that need to be understood on their own.
Yet all share core elements: intent to destroy a group, systematic planning, dehumanizing ideology, claims that the extermination is necessitated by the exigencies of security and self-defense, and international indifference or complicity.
Recognizing these patterns helps us identify genocide in real-time rather than only in retrospect.
This shows that museums and memorials are important, but they don't stop mass killings.
The Ottomans said they were protecting Turkey from traitorous Armenians. Stalin’s regime claimed it was defending communism from anti-socialist wreckers and Western-influenced ‘bourgeois nationalists.’ The Nazis insisted they were protecting Germany from a Jewish plot. Putin’s Russia initially said it was protecting ‘Russian-speakers’ in Ukraine and stopping NATO from expansion eastward, though now increasingly acknowledges that it wants to grab as much territory as it can from Ukraine and re-impose its former imperial hegemony in its neighborhood.
We need to do more than just remember to stop genocide. The world couldn’t stop the terrible things that happened in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Ukraine, and Gaza. This shows that museums and memorials are important, but they don’t stop mass killings.
We need early warning systems, political will, economic pressure, military action when necessary, and most importantly, the courage to call genocide what it is when we see it instead of waiting for everyone to agree.
The Holocaust illustrates the feasibility of genocide, the capacity for ordinary individuals to perpetrate significant malevolence, the role of bureaucracy in enabling mortality, and the tendency of individuals to favor comfort over action.
These lessons are relevant to both the past and the present. They apply to places like Ukraine, Gaza, Xinjiang, Tigray, and anywhere else where people are being killed on purpose.
So, on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, without in any way seeking to downplay the significance of the Holocaust, let’s not only remember the six million Jews the Nazis killed, but also all the other people who have been killed in genocide throughout history and are dying right now.
The dead cannot be brought back. But the living can choose whether their memory serves as a shield for new crimes or as a sword against them. That choice defines whether we truly mean what we say – or whether we merely mean “Never forget what was done to us.”
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.