LAST week, the world marked Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27.

On that day 77 years ago, Soviet soldiers stumbled into Birkenau on their progression towards Oświęcim; the liberation of thousands of Jewish people left to die by the SS was not part of their plans.

They found: 88,000 pounds of glasses; hundreds of prosthetic limbs; 44,000 pairs of shoes; 6,350kg of human hair; 648 corpses; and more than 7,000 starving camp survivors.

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2019. I have seen the extensive grounds, the original camp blocks, the guard towers and the hundreds of thousands of personal possessions brought by deportees – deportees who had no idea they were brought here to be immediately killed in the gas chamber or forced into slave labour by the Nazis.

My experience of Auschwitz-Birkenau has stayed with me since.

In East Lothian, Whittingehame Farm School was a shelter for Jewish children seeking refuge in Britain, as part of the Kindertransport mission. From 1939 to 1941, the school was home to 160 children whose parents were killed in the Holocaust.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme, One Day, calls on us all to use one day to remember the past and to create a world that will one day be free from fascism, genocide and the politics of hate.

For those who suffered for days, weeks, months, years, focusing on just One Day is a starting point, a snapshot in time that helps bring a small piece of the full picture to life.

As the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust begin slowly to fade from living memory, it is so important that we actively remember the events, honour the survivors and educate ourselves about those who lost their lives and suffered.

As George Santayana famously said: “He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it”.

We all have a moral obligation to tackle, challenge, debate, discuss, expose and teach about the attitudes and behaviours that allowed the Holocaust and other genocides to happen.

We can never forget the inhumanity of the Holocaust as we work to protect human rights in today’s world.

And may we never allow such human atrocities to happen ever again.