On Monday I attended the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with Joe Carlebach, representing Masorti Judaism at the Government’s Holocaust Remembrance Day Ceremony, co-hosted by the Embassy of Israel. The theme is Bridging the Generations. It is a deeply affecting ceremony.

After a robust speech, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper takes Mala Tribich’s hand and helps her to the platform. Mala, wonderful, eloquent and brave as ever in her mid-nineties, tells how she’s a hidden child before being taken to the Czestochowa ghetto where she’s made responsible for her five-year-old cousin Anna. After years of slave labour she’s sent to Ravensbrueck and finally Bergen-Belsen, where, sick with typhus, she is liberated by the British Army.

The El Malei Rachamim, sung by Jonny Turgel, penetrates deep into the heart.

But remembrance, Yvette Cooper stresses, is not enough. ‘Memory must be combined with resolve,’ the determination to remove antisemitism and all forms of religious and race hatred from across our society. Meg Davis, Young Ambassador for the Holocaust Education Trust, tells of the gross ‘so-called Holocaust jokes’ she faces on social media. Hatred and bigotry must be confronted with education and more education.

Poignant about the past, pertinent about the present, this is a profoundly affecting gathering.

Tonight I’m speaking about my own father’s relatives from my book My Dear Ones: One Family and The Final Solution.

International Holocaust Memorial day cuts deep for all of who live and love our Judaism, and, tragically, for many other peoples as well.