STEPHEN DAUGHTON, ASSISTANT HEAD: DATA, TEACHING AND LEARNING

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Part of a house is on fire and as you stop to look a man bursts out of the burning hallway coughing…he falls on the floor in front of you. What do you do?

You help him up. He grasps at you and says, ‘My baby boy is in there…’, pointing back to the house.

You look over and see in through the big bay window of the lounge…a cot with a baby in…but this room is not yet ablaze. Glancing back to the doorway you see flames bursting forth and realise there is only one way to save the baby.

What do you do? You smash the lounge window and save the baby. You don’t think to much about it…it NEEDS to be done.

Normally you would never totally destroy a window, but this situation dictated you must do. This is what the German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant describes as A Moral Imperative.

Some philosophy…

A Moral Imperative is a strongly felt principle within you that forces you to act. Your conscience is simply right, you do not need to justify smashing the window…to anyone…ever. Pure intellectual reason dictates you must act. The moral imperative means you must act.

Not following the moral imperative is self-defeating. Imagine if all of us never saved the baby, if we lived in a world where no one ever saved the baby…what a horrible, awful, self-defeating world that would be to live in.

I want to talk to you about a Moral Imperative in today’s world.

Saturday on the weekend was Holocaust Memorial Day. The Holocaust was the systematic rounding up of Jews across Nazi occupied Europe with the sole purpose of exterminating them. Six million people were killed in the space of four years. Camps were specifically created to destroy human beings as efficiently and swiftly in as large a number as possible.

Each year, as we know, we come together to honour those 6 million Jews killed. 1.5 million of those murdered were children just like you…and younger.

Six million is a number too big to grasp. We simply cannot imagine it, see it or understand the enormity of it; it is easier to identify with an individual fate

And so it used to be the case, that in years gone by, we would have a survivor come and talk to you about it and speak the words, ‘I was there…I saw it’.

Alas there are few survivors left these days…the youngest is 86 years old having been sent to a death camp in the final days of 1944. There are hours of interviews with survivors, countless reports that you can read, should you wish to. No other genocide is as comprehensively documented as the Holocaust. 

It is the largest mass murder of a group of people in all of human history. And yet there are still the deniers, people who claim that all the accounts are fabricated, made up and that the Holocaust never happened.

There’s a sobering quote from Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel (below) that underscores just how important it’s for us to share all of this information, and the story, with future generations. He said, “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” That is why I stand before you today to remind you of this event and the horror of what mankind has done.

Last year I told you that we are at an inflection point in History. Soon there will be no one left to put in front of you to tell you ‘they were there’. Soon there will be no survivors left at all. I told you that we….you have a responsibility to ensure that this story continues to be told, that it is never forgotten. If we forget this event and fail to pass it on, then humanity begins the slow inexorable march to allowing it to happen again.

Antisemitism, hatred of Jews, is on the rise in our world, and it is evolving in nefarious ways. It is so important that we recognize the true perpetrators of hate around the world and their efforts to distort the truth. Hitler used lies to ferment and perpetrate hate against the Jewish people. There are leaders in the world today whose tactics it is, to leverage lies as a way to commit violence, and it should remind us of how dangerous and how quickly antisemitism and racism can be used against communities and countries the world over.

We must reject attempts to ignore, deny, distort, and revise history. How painful it must be to the aged survivors of the holocaust to see the memory of those who died next to them erased and made a fiction or an irrelevance.

It is our moral imperative to remember what happened, to talk about it. To fail to do so is akin to killing them a second time.

In keeping their memory alive, we make our world a better place and we push back the darkness of discrimination, hate, and ignorance.