Auschwitz is not just a place or an episode in history. It is an event in the human imagination. It was thought up by human minds working in unison. And this consensus was, in turn, translated into systematic action over a number of years and on an unprecedented scale. For the victims of the Final Solution, the absolute degradation that awaited them in the camps or gas chambers was also beyond imagination. (After the trains left them on the ?ramps? of Auschwitz, their faces looked relieved and unsuspecting, as the photographs show.) For the rest of the world then or the unknowing young today, to empathize with or comprehend all this would demand another impossible leap of imagination.

Yet, in a crucial sense, Auschwitz did not happen in the imagination. It happened in real time and place, and to real people, some of whom survived to tell their stories today. It is something that can be objectively confronted and known, even if not fully understood. It is, therefore, part of the truth of being human ? however unbearable this truth might prove to be. This is why it was important for hundreds of people ? world leaders, and survivors with their families and friends ? to gather on a snowed-over tract of land in southern Poland day before yesterday. Commemorating 60 years of the liberation of Auschwitz meant reversing the mechanisms of denial and forgetting. This thing of darkness will have to be acknowledged as humanity?s own.

It could happen again ? at any time and in any place. The Holocaust has made it easy, in a way, to ?locate? its evil in a particular nation, individual and historical epoch, to forget that the will to power, in its most inhuman forms, is an intimate, even inward, enemy. Polarizing victim and aggressor as Jew and Nazi is to deny the possibility of these poles being confounded in another time and place. The terrible ?logic? of revenge and retribution, action and reaction, victimhood and justification is now part of the entanglement of what happened in Europe with what is happening in Israel and Palestine. The afterlife of Auschwitz is not simply in the memory.

There is also the question of who did it and who didn?t. To what extent did those who didn?t do it let it happen nevertheless, and must therefore share the burden of guilt? How could ?innocent? Europeans be Hitler?s ?willing executioners?? What are the ethical implications, and moral consequences, of looking away? These are questions any nation or human collectivity might have to face at any moment in history. ?Those who knew did not talk,? wrote Primo Levi, a survivor, ?Those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers.? This circuit of silence is how the typical German citizen ?won and defended his ignorance?. To remember Auschwitz ritually is not only to honour the millions of Jews, Soviets, Poles, Gypsies, physically and mentally disabled, and homosexuals who were humiliated and murdered in the Nazi camps. It is also an attempt to make this ignorance, this deadly passivity, that much more difficult to pull off again.