LEADING ARTICLE: The lessons of Auschwitz

Hersbruck is a village between the ancient German cities of Nuremberg and Bayreuth. It was here that, at the end of May 1934, a flag was hoisted over the empty house of the last Jew to leave the district. It was flown to mark the "pride and satisf action" of the local population. It was just over 10 years later - 50 years ago today - that the Red Army entered the camp that has become the symbol of the Holocaust, Auschwitz.

In those 10 years something happened that is almost bigger than the loss of people. The industrial scale of the killings at the large extermination camps, the newsreel of the bodies at Belsen, the statistics themselves - all these can obscure the nature of what was lost. In the war, millions of Russians, Poles and Germans died. But there is still a Russia, a Germany, a Poland.

Before the war, on the Continent of Europe, there was a variegated and vibrant Jewish culture that stretched from the shtetls of Lithuania to the salons of Vienna and had existed for hundreds of years. In the Holocaust, millions of Jews were killed and there is no longer a Jewish culture in Europe. It is an aching gap; a terrible, terrible loss.

Auschwitz and the Holocaust are not only symbols of national brutality or of individual inhumanity. In the story of the murder of Europe's Jews, it has been possible to see the greatest individual and collective moral dilemmas of mankind's history. The questions that arise from it are about the actions of governments, of peoples, of communities, of men and women. What would we have done - what would I have done?

The concentration camps were the culmination of the persecution of the Jews. Throughout the mid-Thirties in Germany, as in other central and east European countries, there was a gradual escalation of anti-Semitic activity. There were ebbs and flows in the tide of beatings, boycotts and casual murders. Laws forbidding intermarriage were followed by exclusions from professional activity.

Bit by bit the Jewish people of Germany retreated from public life. Many remained, wedded to their land of birth and hoping for better times. Non-Jewish Germans gradually acclimatised themselves to the notion of Jewish inferiority and separateness. Nastywords about Jews were a small price to pay for what they saw as the nation's rise from the ashes.

The racial nature of the Nazi state was explicit from the start. Time and again British diplomats and Parliamentarians noted the violence of the language of Germany's rulers and their pathology. Somehow this was never a factor when considering policy at the time of the German reoccupation of the Saar, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the Czech crisis or the Anschluss with Austria. It was an internal matter.

As a European war came nearer, more and more Jews tried to leave Germany and her neighbours. Some were sympathetically received, many were rebuffed. Five weeks before the German invasion of Poland trapped 3 million Jews (nearly all of whom were to die), a British official wrote that most of the would-be refugees were not political at all, but panickers.

Much of the early killing, when it came, was not tucked away at the end of a Polish railway track. It happened on the outskirts of venerable cities or in full view of villagers in the countryside. Some, but very few, non-Jews tried to aid the victims. Ifthey were caught they - and perhaps their families - could expect to share the fate of the Jews themselves. Just as often local people helped deliver up Jews to the SS and the Einsatzgruppen.

There were many acts of resistance against the Nazis, in camps, in the Warsaw ghetto and in the swamps and forests of Russia and Poland. But at the end hundreds of thousands of Jews, supervised by very few Germans and auxiliaries, trooped docilely into the gas chambers.

Did they fail to rise up because each hoped that he or she might survive and resistance meant certain death? Or had most of them lapsed into fatalism, weakened by hunger and fear?

These things are important precisely because all the moral components of the Auschwitz story are present today. Last year, in five short weeks, half a million Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda. In the early stages of the massacre the small UN force was pulled out and the world agonised. The Bosnian tragedy also caught us unawares, despite constant warnings about what would happen if Yugoslavia imploded. It took the pictures of emaciated Muslims in a Serb camp, reminiscent of Auschwitz, to cau se real pressure to be brought to bear. Our recognition of these horrors owes a great deal to the memory we have of the Holocaust. We know we cannot just sit by.

And there are things that we can do. In the first place we can remember the banal truth that racism is to be feared and fought in all places and at all times. We can accept some responsibility for what happens around us. We should presume in favour of refugees who seek our help. We can assert the right of the international community to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries to prevent genocide. We can bring war criminals to justice. And above all we can remember.

Fifty years is not a long time. And yet within a very few years the Holocaust will be beyond living memory. Already visitors to Buchenwald camp tell how German schoolchildren, forced to go there, laugh and joke and write on the walls. It is a reminder that moral precepts are best when not institutionalised.

So talk to your children about the Jews of Europe. Explain what happened. Tell them today.