Thread by @gabrielmilland

For the #HMD202 theme of "one day" I am choosing 17 December 1942. The day of the Allied Declaration that it was actually taking place - and that Jews were being murdered in their hundreds of thousands. The world knew then.

api.parliament.uk/historic-hansa…

And yet the liberation of Belsen - "our camp" for the British - still came as a shock to many. The difference between knowing, and understanding.

It is at least doubtful that anything substantial could have been done to halt the Final Solution by the Allies, other than what they did - defeat the Nazis as quickly and crushingly as possible. But we knew.

And as one MP told the Commons after Eden delivered the statement, to know that their suffering was at least acknowledged perhaps brought "some faint hope and courage" to the victims.

But there are never any clear, simple moral lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, other than the presence of absolute evil among those who instigated and implemented it.

One more thing I am remembering today, among many. Sitting on a bus somewhere near Beersheva in perhaps 1988. The woman in front of me, with her grandchild, was wearing a sleeveless summer dress. On her bare upper arm there was a number tattooed. To life.