It is relatively straightforward to believe in a benevolent god when things are going our way. It is more difficult when circumstances turn against us, but then maybe that is when some of us turn to our god in search of help. But it seems to me almost impossible to believe in any form of god when your family are held in a church without food or water for three days, then crammed into trucks and driven to a clearing in the woods, murdered and buried in a mangled heap.

And yet, on occasion, Arek goes to synagogue to pray. He was lucky. He escaped the church, survived the Lodz ghetto, then Auschwitz, and finally visited the mass grave in which his family lie 55 years on. Holocaust Memorial Day today (Jan. 27) has the theme Imagine! Remember, Reflect, React. The call is for us to use our imagination, to put ourselves in the shoes of the Jews and the numerous other groups persecuted by the Nazis, as well as the many groups who have suffered genocide since. It is difficult to do so.

Can you imagine losing 80 members of your family? Can you imagine seeing them dragged away in front of your eyes knowing it is for ever? Can you imagine being 12 years old and living alone, faced by the Nazis? Can you imagine the hunger, the disease, the agonising choices of life and death every hour of every day? Can you really imagine arriving at Auschwitz with 102 children from the orphanage and being the only one still alive two hours later? Can you imagine watching a trainload of people walk in and never seeing anyone walk out? Can you imagine not having a single detective ask you a single question in order to track down the murderers of your entire family? Maybe that is the whole point. The Holocaust is beyond our imagination on one level, and yet it was so ordinary. The mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews and the persecution and killing of a further 5,000,000 people was made up of hundreds of thousands of choices and actions, which in many ways were very ordinary. It is precisely that which we need to fear and heed. The call to remember, to reflect and to react is to empower us to think about the Holocaust in a new and more challenging way.

Remembrance is important, because the people who became the victims of the Nazis were not only killed, but all trace of them was removed. Remembrance reminds us that their lives as individuals were important. Not one member of Arek’s family has a headstone. If you do not have a name, who are you? Reflection gives us time to work it out, to think it through, to wonder, to question, to challenge ourselves.

If the people of Weimar Germany had fundamental respect for the “other”, they would not have voted for the Nazis. If, as happened, the Nazis got their mandate, what could the people have done if they had opposed Hitler’s antisemitism? Refused to load the trains, or pull the trigger?

Arek stands in the synagogue. He is having the bar mitzvah he missed 60 years ago. As he reads the scroll I wonder where he gets the strength to believe. He looks up and winks at me sitting in the pews. I guess correctly that he is reading the Torah, not because he has re-found his faith in his God, but because he has regained just enough faith in humanity. To remember, reflect and react does not change history; it does not change the world; and it does not change the divine. It changes us. — The Guardian