Holocaust Memorial Day 2026

The 27th of January 2026 marks the annual Holocaust Memorial Day. It’s a period of our history that is so familiar to many that it can somehow lose its impact. We often focus on the sequence of events, the key figures, causes, consequences, outcomes… perhaps a few individual stories.

But it’s easy not to really think about the detail or the personal tragedy, and the danger of that is the gradual lessening of the horror. Yet, it’s that very horror that needs to be remembered, generation after generation.

This perhaps explains this year’s Holocaust Memorial theme: Bridging Generations, which brings to mind the war memorial mantra, Lest We Forget. How do we keep the horrors of the holocaust real and relevant to future generations, especially as we lose the last of our first-hand witnesses?

Because it is the voices from the ghettos and the camps that bring it frighteningly to life; in being personal and individual they give a very specific, relatable account – they make the unimaginable, imaginable. Indeed, those accounts don’t even need to be first-hand (though those are arguably the most powerful), even fictionalised accounts, based on first-hand accounts of the Holocaust hold enormous value.

In bringing something that is possibly easier to think about in general terms to the very sharp end of one family’s, or one child’s, story we cannot hide amongst the masses. The stark horror seeps out of every page and into every reader’s consciousness.

When we invest in a story about the Holocaust and the individuals within it, there’s a sense of shock at the end – even when we’re not reading it for the first time. Not because it’s a surprise, most children are familiar with the end of Anne Frank’s story (for instance), but because we have got to know her.

We slipped into her life in the annex, into her sibling quarrels, her hopes and dreams, and lived beside her. So when her world shifts catastrophically and she’s captured, transferred to Auschwitz, and eventually dies in Bergen-Belsen it’s deeply shocking.

We were involved in the mundane, aware of the tightening Nazi grip, fearful and hopeful for the future and bereft at the devastation. The impact is huge.

The death of Eitan in The Pebble is just as compelling and heart wrenching. We have travelled with him from the ghetto in Lithuania, through the closing down of his world to the camp, and when he dies it’s the symbolism of the cawing crows that resonates so powerfully.

Crows are used, throughout this moving picture book to illustrate the Nazi infiltration of Eitan’s world. They are intrusive and aggressive, dark and formidable and they visualise the growing, uneasy Nazi presence in a way we can literally see. In taking something so common and familiar to represent something so remote, Marcinkevičius and Dagilé bring the Nazi occupation into our world – they make it present and current and meaningful.

Art Spiegelman takes this idea of symbolism further in Maus, where all the characters are portrayed by animals (the Jewish community are mice, the Nazis are cats, Polish people are pigs and Americans – dogs) and so the story is stripped right back to something almost primal. In its simplicity it brings the abstract to life. What’s more, it changes a picture we think we know, so we see how those events were experienced by those who lived them in a new light.

It’s an impactful way to highlight the social, cultural and racial divisions and distinctions that define the Holocaust, but it also allows Spiegelman to “reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams”.

Perhaps it is the very nature of the inhuman world he creates that is the greatest symbol of all, because, it is this inhumanity that we need new generations to see and feel if we’re to continue understand and learning from the horrors of the Holocaust.