“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the British author LP Hartley once wrote, hinting at the mystique of history – the idea that people in the past were somehow different to us in the 21st century.
As many historians will tell you, it’s not particularly useful to project modern values onto the past, or to judge historical figures by contemporary ideals. But the idea that the past far away in space and time, is also flawed. It encourages people to overlook the fact that those involved in seismic past events were real human beings, just like ourselves.
Nowhere is reconciling that distance between past and present more important than in the case of the Holocaust, which saw the murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Drawing on this idea of making the past less of a “foreign country”, the official theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2023 in the UK is “ordinary people”.
