It’s #HolocaustMemorialDay , and as usual some people have decided it’s a great occasion for a bit of victim-based whataboutery. So let’s be clear. The main victims of the Holocaust, both in design and in numbers, were Jews. Others were targeted for death; others died. But the

machinery that made it all possible was set up for the elimination of Jews. Yes, Poles who were killed because they were Poles. My wife’s grandmother escaped twice from a Nazi transport. I don’t think it was taking her anywhere good. But before the war, nearly half the population

of the town where I live, Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, was Jewish. When the Germans arrived in 1939 they were first persecuted and murdered indiscriminately, then crammed into a ghetto, then shipped to Auschwitz. Only about 400 survived, most of whom had already fled before the ghetto

was built. When I first visited Nowy Dwór in 2003, the only visible traces that remained were an overgrown, untended and desecrated Jewish cemetery, and a few wooden buildings previously inhabited by Jews. Some of the survivors later established an estate of “Nowy Dwór Housing”

in the Israeli city of Holon. At the laying of the foundations in 1954, two poems were read, dedicated to Nowy Dwór. A charter of foundation was buried under the first layer of cement.

None of this should have happened. The activists who raised the money, the workers who dug the foundations, the builders who constructed the first blocks of Nowy Dwor Housing, and the families who lived in them - all of these people should have been dead. Not by accident, not by

circumstance, not as the unfortunate outcome of war, but by design.

That is the central fact of the Holocaust, and no attempts at relativisation and competitive grievance-mongering can change it.