January 27 marks Holocaust Memorial day, 2026. Bishop Neil has shared the following reflection.
Across the world, 27 January is kept as a memorial day to the Holocaust, that unprecedented, deliberate and systematic killing of six million Jews in an attempt to remove a race and a religion from Europe, accompanied by the murdering of so many other victims of a regime that refused to accept their humanity and their value.
Human memory extends only for the length of a human life, although the consequences and the traumas will continue down through the generations. As the lives of those who experienced the Holocaust come to their end, the need grows for their stories to be told from generation to generation.
To remember the Holocaust and subsequent genocides is to ensure that in each generation, we are aware that humanity continues to be capable of such atrocities. To remember is tell the truth afresh in each generation, listening to those who came before us, sharing their experiences with those who come after us and committing ourselves to prevent such horrors in the future.
As the Church of England in the Diocese of Bristol, we stand alongside the Jewish and other communities who retain in their collective memories the trauma of those dark stains on our history. I commend the work of the National Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and of our own Bristol group who enable us to come together locally to remember and to commit. That we shall this year hear from the grandson of Eve Schloss, a survivor, shows us how the bridge of memory from one generation to another is maintained and extended.
My hope and my prayer is that across our churches, schools and chaplaincies, we shall play our full part in listening and in retelling to our children and grandchildren what happened and why it happened so that it may not happen again.
The Rt Revd Neil Warwick
Acting Bishop of Bristol and Bishop of Swindon