We remember the more than six million people murdered in the Shoah — the six million Jewish men, women, and children at its centre, and the millions of others persecuted and killed alongside them. We remember the communities erased, the families broken, and the futures stolen. May their memory be a blessing, and may it be a warning we never stop heeding.
What it was
The Shoah, in brief
The Shoah — a Hebrew word meaning "catastrophe", and also known as the Holocaust — was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Counting the millions of others the regime also murdered, the toll rises far beyond six million. It was genocide carried out with bureaucratic planning and industrial methods, across ghettos, mass-shooting sites, and extermination and concentration camps.
It did not begin with the camps. It began with words, propaganda, scapegoating, and the steady stripping away of rights and dignity — a reminder of how prejudice, left unchecked, can escalate to the unthinkable.
Before the Nazis
Centuries of antisemitism
The hatred the Nazis weaponised was not new. Antisemitism had existed in Europe for many hundreds of years — in blood libels and forced conversions, in expulsions of Jewish communities from England, France, Spain, and elsewhere, in walled ghettos, and in laws that barred Jews from land, trades, and citizenship.
Violent anti-Jewish pogroms — organised massacres of Jewish communities — long predate the Nazi regime, from medieval massacres during the Crusades to the waves of pogroms across the Russian Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Shoah was the industrialised culmination of this old hatred, not its beginning — which is why antisemitism must be confronted wherever and whenever it appears.
All who were lost
Honouring every victim
The Jewish people were the central target of the Shoah. But the Nazi regime also persecuted and murdered millions of others it deemed "undesirable" or a threat. This page remembers all of the victims — every person whose life and dignity were denied.
Each was an individual, with a name and a story. We honour them not as numbers, but as people.
Why it matters
Remember, and learn
Remembrance is not only about the past. Holocaust education helps us recognise the early signs of hatred, antisemitism, racism, and dehumanisation — and to stand against them wherever they appear. The promise of "never again" only holds if each generation keeps it.
If you take one thing from this page, let it be a commitment to remember the victims, to listen to survivors and their testimony while we still can, and to refuse indifference.
Learn more
Trusted resources
Memorials, museums, and archives dedicated to remembrance and education.