Yesterday, 80 years ago, the extermination camp, Auschwitz, was liberated by the Red Army. The horrors that attended this awful site, perhaps amongst the worst in all of human history, gradually unfolded to a shocked world, then just emerging from the Second World War. While some in the West suspected that Jewish people were being interned and possibly murdered, very few could have guessed at the stupendous industrial scale of it.

I learnt about the death camps in the 1960's. It was something that had permeated the consciousness of all institutions in the West and while some did not fully realise the extent of the killing (how does one process the idea of 4 million planned murders?), everybody knew it was evil and that it was real. Hitler and Nazism became bi-words for the most wicked degradations that humans can descend to.

So it comes as a surprise to me and doubtless a shock to others that antisemitism, the seed that lead to the poisonous plant cultivated by National Socialism, is alive and well and on the march. I understand that many young people are upset at the war in Gaza and the policies of the Netanyahu Government, some of which I find unpalatable too.

But these are separate issues - one can criticize a government for its short-sightedness or plain bad policy and still be vigilant against antisemitism. You don't have to conflate the two. The antidote to such muddled thinking is a day spent reading about and reflecting on Auschwitz. One cannot but emerge a wiser, if sadder, person.