THE POLITICS OF BYSTANDING

 

Some time ago I had the chance to meet and interview Eva Schloss, who died in January 2026. Eva knew Anne Frank because they lived in the same neighbourhood, and she remembered Anne as gregarious and ‘boy mad’. Eva’s family also went into hiding but were betrayed and deported to Auschwitz, where her father and brother were murdered. She and her mother survived and Eva’s mother went on to marry Anne Frank’s father, which kind of made Anne Frank and Eva Schloss posthumous step-sisters.

 

Eva devoted the last decades of her life to Holocaust education. She knew that the living survivors of the Shoah would soon die out. This loss of this generation is happening at just the moment when our world is being overwhelmed with an avalanche of lies. Until recently people needed newspapers and book publishers to print their ideas. Today, the online world allows everyone to publish whatever they like without anyone else doing the fact checking. The emergence of bots has turbocharged a world where huge quantities of information are being published and consumed. And this digital world is full of lies, disinformation and conspiracy theory, among which Holocaust denial has found its place.

 

This combination of the generation who suffered the Holocaust presently dying out and an online culture full of lies poses an existential threat. The first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis themselves. As the Third Reich crumbled, Heinrich Himmler gave the order to the camp commanders to destroy evidence of the atrocities they had committed. I asked Eva Schloss about Holocaust denial and she said she would like to know where these people think she got her tattoo from before tattoo parlours became fashionable. She looked Josef Mengele in the eyes.

 

So I am glad to be one who bridges the generations, as this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme asks us to. I heard Eva’s story and I have read one of her books and would encourage each of us to read at least one survivor testimony so that it is lodged in our heads. Other, more recent genocides like Rwanda and Srebrenica are already being denied, and so how we treat the Holocaust, the largest genocide of all, will be critical for how we handle lies about these atrocities as well.

 

It's said that antisemitism is a light sleeper, but I’m not so sure it sleeps at all, and recent atrocities in places like Manchester and Sydney put innocent people in fear of living ordinary lives. Those of us who do not live with this kind of existential threat should listen openheartedly to those who do. It is another way of joining hands and allowing stories to be told.

 

Above all else, Eva Schloss emphasised to me the role of the bystander in shaping politics. As our public life becomes more hostile, stimulated by online culture, there is a great temptation to be a bystander who just watches on. And among the apathetic and apolitical, bystanding is even considered cool. But there can be no neutrality round the Holocaust. Bystanding must give way to upstanding, as we come shoulder to shoulder with the victims of the past and the present.