What Holocaust remembrance is starting to forget

When Holocaust memory is softened, something else is lost.

Every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we return to the same instruction: remember. But how we remember, matters just as much as what we remember – especially now.

This week, Tel Aviv University released its annual report “For a Righteous Cause”, to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The report identifies a growing global trend in Holocaust commemoration: an increased focus on the rescuers of Jews – the Righteous Among the Nations – those who defied orders and saved lives.

There is something deeply human in this shift. In a world saturated with cruelty and violence, stories of moral courage offer relief. They remind us that choice exists, even under the worst conditions.

But in an age shaped by information warfare and manipulation, this reframing deserves closer attention. Not because it is wrong – but because emphasis changes meaning.

Modern propaganda does not only work by distorting facts or inventing falsehoods. Increasingly, it works by guiding people towards stories that are easier to sit with. Stories that allow engagement without discomfort. Stories that make people feel humane without forcing them to confront responsibility.

This matters because the Holocaust was not only a story of extraordinary goodness. It was a story of mass participation, bureaucratic efficiency, indifference, silence and compliance. The rescuers were heroic precisely because they were rare.

When commemoration leads with the exceptions, rather than anchoring them firmly in the reality they resisted, the wider story can begin to fade. The system that enabled the crime becomes less visible. The scale of failure becomes harder to grasp.
Honouring rescuers is essential. But if their stories are told without constant reference to how unusual they were, memory can lose its edge.

This is not unique to Holocaust remembrance. It reflects a broader pattern in how uncomfortable truths are handled today. In our current media environment, stories that are easier to live with tend to travel further than those that demand moral clarity. Narratives that comfort audiences circulate more easily than those that force difficult questions. Over time, this shapes what people remember – and what they are asked to reckon with.

When we talk about moral clarity, we are talking about the ability to recognise responsibility clearly: who acted, who enabled, who looked away, and who benefited. Moral clarity insists on distinctions – between aggressor and victim, between law and lawlessness, between choice and coercion. That clarity is under pressure everywhere.

We live in a moment when moral distinctions are routinely blurred. Context is stripped away. Responsibility is diffused. Everything begins to look morally equivalent. And when that happens, judgment becomes optional.

Holocaust memory has always carried a warning beyond hatred itself. It warns about how ordinary people, institutions and systems fail. About how language is used to normalise the unacceptable. About how moral responsibility does not belong only to perpetrators, but also to societies that tolerate, enable or ignore. That lesson is not abstract. The Holocaust did not happen because people did not know. It happened because too many people chose not to act, not to see, or not to care. That is why remembrance is not only about the past. It is about the present – and about us.

This does not mean we should stop telling stories of courage and rescue. It means we must tell them carefully, and in full context. Not as proof that humanity always prevails, but as evidence of how rare moral courage can be when systems collapse.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is not meant to reassure us. It is meant to make us alert. Alert to how memory can be shaped; how emphasis can soften responsibility, and how easily moral clarity can be lost – without anyone intending it.

In an age of manipulation, even remembrance is shaped by narrative choices. How we choose to remember may determine how clearly we recognise our responsibility when it matters again.