Karen Pollock

Karen Emma Pollock CBE (born May 1974) is a British writer, activist and chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET).

Quotes

2016–2022

• The fact that Hitler and his party came to power from electoral obscurity within two years should serve as a warning just how quickly society can change, how quickly the abnormal can become normal and how the frustrations of a population can change from simmering discontent to a fully-fledged inferno of rage.
  • "The warnings of the Holocaust have never been more relevant in Britain", The Telegraph (30 June 2016)

• I don't understand how it is acceptable to be handing out such disgusting literature outside Labour's conference quoting one of the 20th century's most notorious antisemites and architects of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich.
• The Labour Party Marxists‍'‍ guide to motions at the conference suggests that at least some of their supporters are party members.
  • As cited in "Throw out antisemitic party members now, Corbyn urged", The Times (27 September 2017)
  • The first quote refers to an essay published by Labour Party Marxists and written by Moshé Machover, in which Machover quoted Heydrick commenting in 1935: "National Socialists had no intention of attacking Jewish people in any way". See Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party.

• We have elected Labour politicians suggesting that antisemitism has been "weaponised" – a suggestion that it is being used to promote some other agenda.
  • "How many more times must we condemn antisemitism in Labour?", The Times (27 September 2017)

• The seemingly endless book of victim names. The train tracks which brought the victims to their final destination. The gas chambers. Nothing can replace standing at this site, seeing the grotesque reality of the day-to-day function of an extermination camp.
  • "Let our youth stand at Auschwitz and witness the truth", The Times (10 November 2021)
  • See Auschwitz concentration camp.

• He and his family were marked out with the yellow star, they were stripped of their property and their rights, they were expelled from their schools, they were forced into a ghetto, they endured starvation and disease. And eventually, they were deported to concentration and death camps and murdered.
• Out of a Jewish community of 800 before the war, Roman was one of only four survivors from his town. He was alone in the world.
• "Giving Holocaust victims and survivors a voice matters", The Times (27 January 2022)
  • Roman Halter (1927–2012) was a Polish survivor of the Holocaust but, by the time he was aged 16, his "grandfather, parents and six brothers and sisters" had been killed by the Nazis. See Holocaust Memorial Day (UK).

• There are some days so significant that they change everything. They change how people feel in the moment. They change history. For many Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, the November Pogrom, the November 9 and 10 1938, often known as Kristallnacht was just that for Jews across Europe.
  • "Kristallnacht anniversary reminds us to speak out on antisemitism", The Times (9 November 2022)

2023–present

• Haya was marched to an execution spot.
  To this day, Hannah freezes as she recalls the moment she saw her mother fall, saw blood on the snow, and understood that her mother was not coming back.
  Hannah was seven years old.
  Incredibly, Hannah survived.
  • "Holocaust Memorial Day: Testimonies of survivors must live on", The Times (27 January 2023).
  • From an account of a Jewish family who formerly lived in Włodawa, Poland.

• The Nazis agreed on, organised and perpetrated the Holocaust. Their actions left permanent scars on humanity and had ramifications still felt the world over.
  So, however passionately we feel about important and pressing issues of the day, it seems to me that comparing those current concerns to the almost unimaginable horrors of the Nazi period is wrong. These comparisons are wrong when the point being made is one we agree with, and when it is not.
  • "Let’s calm down, remember history, and keep Nazi comparisons out of political rhetoric", The Times (10 March 2023).

• And when eventually the remnants of European Jewry were liberated from concentration camps and hiding places, you could be forgiven for believing that the flame of antisemitic hatred had burnt out.
  Sadly, 85 years on, we know this is not true.
  • "During Kristallnacht, the Jews were defenceless. 85 years on, we can defend ourselves from hate", The Jewish Chronicle (9 November 2023).

• For the Jewish community, with the Holocaust still in living memory, our dream is simple. I know my parents hoped that I would inherit a world free from the anti-Semitism that blighted their generation, and every generation before them. Today it feels that this dream is more distant than ever. Anti-Semitism across the globe is surging. Here in the UK, anti-Semitism has risen exponentially.
  • "Our universities have failed their Jewish students", The Telegraph (24 December 2023).

• And the spread of these antisemitic conspiracies [on X/Twitter] is already having a harmful effect. A recent study published in the Economist found that one in five Americans aged 18-29 believe the Holocaust to be a myth. A different survey found that nearly a quarter of Dutch people born after 1980 similarly believe it to be a myth or the number of its victims to be greatly exaggerated.
  • "Antisemitism and Holocaust denial are rife, just look at Stephen Fry’s X trolls", The Observer (24 December 2023).

• The Holocaust could only happen because the massacre of the Jews of York happened in 1190. The Holocaust could only happen because the expulsion of Jews from Spain was decreed in 1492. The Holocaust could only happen because it was ruled that the Jews of Venice were to be confined to a Ghetto in 1516. The Holocaust could only happen because at least tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in the Eastern European pogroms of the late 18th and early 19th century.
  And just as antisemitism existed before the Holocaust, those two thousand years of hatred were not erased by the Holocaust.
  • "Anti-Semitism didn’t start with the Holocaust - sadly, it didn’t end there either", The Telegraph (26 January 2024).
  • On pogroms in Eastern Europe during the 19th Century, see Pogroms in the Russian Empire (including the Odessa pogroms, five atrocities between 1821 and 1905) and the Warsaw pogrom of 1881.