Welcome to the Bristol Holocaust Memorial Day website
Here in Bristol, we normally commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day with an annual civic event, held at City Hall on College Green. Our event typically includes a keynote speaker, local speakers and a range of community organisations gathering to remember the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, and of genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.
However, this is the second year we adapted our plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so we hope you’ll understand why we cannot encourage people to gather at City Hall in 2022. Instead, we created an online event.
If you would like to join our Bristol Holocaust Memorial Day Steering Group to help prepare for our 2023 event, please email us.
How we marked HMD 2022
The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2022, set by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) was ‘One day’: looking at how a single day can change your life as a victim or survivor of genocide and persecution, and how we can keep telling the stories of genocide victims and survivors.
Bristol HMD online event
Thursday 27 January 2022, 6:15pm-6:45pm
Free – live-streamed on YouTube or Facebook
We are also encouraging people to join a national online commemoration event organised by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT), which follows shortly after our online event:
Please join conversations on social media throughout the day, using the hashtags #HolocaustMemorialDay and #LightTheDarkness (don’t forget to capitalise each word in the hashtags, as this helps the screen reader technology used by people with visual impairments).
Why we mark Holocaust Memorial Day in Bristol
Holocaust Memorial Day is a day for education, commemoration and reflection: to think deeply about what happened to countless individuals, and how small actions escalated to acts of organised hate crime and, ultimately, genocide.
We remember all the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, of Nazi persecution, and of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.
We also reflect on what we need to do today, both to keep the memory alive and to build societies that resist this kind of discrimination and all forms of identity-based violence. Here in Bristol, we look at these issues throughout the year, not just in January.
Holocaust Memorial Day falls on 27th January every year, which is the date when the death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated in 1945. The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2022 is ‘One day’. Previous themes were ‘Be the light in the darkness’ (2021), ‘Stand Together’ (2020), ‘Torn From Home’ (2019), ‘The Power Of Words’ (2018), ‘How can life go on?’ (2017), and ‘Don’t Stand By’ (2016).
Polly Allen & Ben Royston
Co-Chairs, Bristol HMD Steering Group
Twitter: @BristolHMD #BristolHMD #HolocaustMemorialDay #LightTheDarkness