NEVER AGAIN! IS IT?

Here was the grotesque theatre of modernity: dignitaries in black coats standing before the remains of a Nazi concentration camp, while in Gaza, the dead were still not buried. Here was the great irony of the empire’s grief: a requiem for the past and an indifference to the present

By Narendra Pachkhédé 

The present onslaught leaves no space for mourning, since mourning requires an afterwards, but only for repeated shock and the ebb and flow of grief. 

We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? 

To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak…” 

— Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

The world had lost its sense of time. Dates, once sacred, once unshakable in their significance, had collapsed upon each other like dying stars. In the heart of winter, as snow settled over Auschwitz and the rubble of Gaza alike, two histories clashed, not by mere coincidence, but by a terrible, unyielding symmetry. To stand in solemn remembrance of one atrocity while ignoring another is not memory; it is selective amnesia, a betrayal draped in ceremony.

On one side, the solemnity of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day. January 27, a day carved into the annals of human atrocity, was a whisper from the graves, a demand that memory remain vigilant. Presidents and prime ministers, draped in dark coats and graver faces, stood before the gates of Auschwitz and declared, in the cadence of statesmanship: Never Again. 

Their words rose and fell like the tolling of an iron bell, ringing hollow beneath the weight of history.

And yet, across the sea, in another land bruised by history’s relentless hand, the exiled sons and daughters of Palestine set foot on their ravaged soil for the first time in months. A ceasefire had been brokered—fragile, reluctant, trembling at the edges—but it had granted them this moment. They returned not as victors, nor survivors, but as mourners, stepping through streets that bore the scars of fire and steel. For them, January 27 was not a day of remembrance, but a day of return.

With a ceasefire declared between Israel and Hamas, Emmy-winning journalist Bisan Owda documented the journey of Palestinians returning to Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, only to find it unrecognisable. “I am back, I am at home…it’s burnt, my room for 20 years vanished, and it’s severely damaged, but it is still standing and despite everything.” 

Joy radiated from her smile as she unfurled the Palestinian flag from the window, while the video’s text scrolled: “Even in the face of devastation, residents are relieved to be back home and are determined to rebuild.”

The irony, so bitter it burned the tongue, lay in the echoes of the past and the voices of the present. For what was ‘Never Again’ but a phrase turned to ash in the mouth of the West? What was remembrance but performance when, as they stood beneath the words Arbeit Macht Frei, another people, in another place, were crawling through the debris of their homes? 

The cameras flashed, the world watched and the journalists’ ink dried upon the paper with all the ceremony of a requiem.

While Arbeit Macht Frei [Work sets you free], the words inscribed above the gates of Auschwitz, predate the Nazis, and once held positive connotations, their association with concentration camps has forever tainted their meaning, making them a symbol of oppression, a reminder of the Holocaust and a cautionary tale about totalitarianism and the importance of human rights and dignity.

Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, had glimpsed the shadow in the light: “Where is Russia?” 

It was an illuminating moment. The British state broadcaster, with its polished veneer of neutrality, had omitted what could not be spoken—that the very nation responsible for Auschwitz’s liberation in 1945 stood now in conspicuous absence. The void itself spoke louder than any words uttered by presidents in the chill of Birkenau. 

Rosenberg was at the edge of St Petersburg, describing the Soviet memorial, not a Holocaust memorial as such; its official title is ‘the memorial to Soviet civilians who fell victim to the Nazi genocide’. He reported, “At the bottom of some steps burns an eternal flame surrounded by the names of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka… Terrifying words synonymous with the Holocaust.”

He continued, “President Putin unveiled the monument on January 27 of last year, a date of double historical significance for Russia: Soviet forces broke the nearly 900-day siege of Leningrad on this day in 1944, and the Red Army entered the gates of Auschwitz exactly one year later.”

The BBC’s News at Ten, its flagship evening broadcast, allocated nearly two-thirds of its runtime to the solemn Auschwitz commemorations— an act of reverence, perhaps, but one that, in its sequencing, bordered on absurdity. 

Without pause or acknowledgement of irony, the segment was followed immediately by stark visuals from Gaza, a land rendered unrecognisable, reduced to a vast graveyard of shattered stone and lost futures. The juxtaposition, unintended yet damning, burned through the narrative of Israel’s foundational mythology: a nation birthed from the ashes of genocide, now itself presiding over devastation that history would not forgive.

The lifting, however brief, of the siege on northern Gaza, would enter Palestinian memory, much like the relief of Leningrad, another blockade whose suffering reached its end on this very date. January 27, across continents and eras, had become a marker of survival against overwhelming cruelty, an emblem of endurance in the blood of the oppressed.

More than anything, this collective act of persistence, this determination to reclaim dignity in the face of destruction, reminiscent of Hiroshima, stood as the most potent response, not just to Benjamn Netanyahu and his circle, but to the entire global order that had watched, equivocated and enabled. 

The BBC, for its part, covered Donald Trump’s words with muted disapproval, but its detached framing of Gaza over the past 15 months—as if Israel’s systematic destruction was merely another counter-terrorism operation, another instance of ‘mowing the lawn’—had paved the way for unspeakable horrors. Significantly, the International Criminal Court war crimes warrant in Gaza spurred Netanyahu’s Auschwitz no-show.

It was the media’s refusal to name the reality for what it was—a looming genocide, acknowledged by every major human rights body and even suspected by the International Court of Justice —that allowed the slaughter to continue. Footage captured from drones bore silent testimony: hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, those who had managed to escape annihilation, tracing a weary path along the coastline, heading northward toward the remains of what had once been their homes, schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches and bakeries.

Happily, there is no feasible route for Netanyahu and Trump’s blueprint for ethnic cleansing—now conveniently re-branded as ‘voluntary repatriation’—to materialise. Within hours, both Jordan and Egypt reaffirmed their firm rejection of any forced population transfer, not out of new-found solidarity with the Palestinian plight, but because both regimes understood that absorbing such a displaced populace would destabilise their fragile states. It was reported that Albania’s name, briefly floated as an alternative, “was dismissed almost as soon as it was suggested.”

Here was the grotesque theatre of modernity: dignitaries in black coats standing before the remains of a death camp, while elsewhere, the dead were still not buried. Here was the great irony of the empire’s grief: a requiem for the past and an indifference to the present.

Perhaps it was too much to expect sincerity from those whose lips shaped policy in the morning, and platitudes by evening. Perhaps ‘Never Again’ had long been a relic of a world that no longer used it—except as a rhetorical flourish, a moral cudgel to wield only when convenient. 

But for those who returned to their shattered homes, for those who found themselves grieving in a land that had not yet finished swallowing its dead, the phrase was not a promise. It was an epitaph for justice itself.

Israeli historians Daniel Blatman and Amos Goldberg repeated their claim in Haaretz, “There’s no Auschwitz in Gaza, but it’s still genocide.” 

Last year, its publisher Amos Schocken, used the term “freedom fighters” to refer to Palestinians at a conference in London. This ignited a firestorm in Israel, directly leading to a boycott resolution against Haaretz.

In the end, history did not speak in resolutions or commemorations. It did so in the wailing of the mothers in Rafah, in the silence of those who placed stones on the graves at Auschwitz, in the absence of Russia at a ceremony marking its sacrifice. 

And it spoke, most damningly, in the irony that the world, in all its grandeur and pretense, had finally given a new meaning to ‘Never Again.’

Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva

Courtesy: The News On Sunday.