Agnes Kory is a Jewish Holocaust child survivor and “a life-long voluntary Holocaust researcher”. And the BBC‘s commemoration of the Holocaust this year left her feeling “frustrated and puzzled“.
“More Hollywood than Holocaust”
She wrote in particular about the Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 Ceremony on Monday 27 January at London’s Guildhall. High-level politicians and royalty were there, and so was Kory in her capacity as a survivor of the Holocaust. She insisted that:
for me the stage direction felt more Hollywood than Holocaust. Music was played during many of the speeches… pulling the heart strings as in many Hollywood films.
And she concluded that:
this event felt primarily like a well-directed show with inappropriate exploitation of music rather than a sombre memorial for genocide victims.
Remember modern-day genocides too
At a protest after attending the ceremony, she credited the BBC for mentioning “that the Holocaust was not the only genocide”, and referencing “Bosnia, Rwanda, and other tragedies”:
However, not once—not one of them—mentioned the word Palestine at all.
She lamented that this was despite that fact that:
The International Court of Justice ruled that there is a very strong possibility that genocide was and is being committed in Gaza.
In December 2024, leading human rights group Amnesty International proclaimed that Israel “has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip”. This added to the comments of numerous genocide experts who had already called out Israel’s heinous crimes in this way.
She was speaking outside the Polish embassy, imploring Poland not to allow wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to visit Auschwitz. And at that protest, she stressed:
Do not insult the martyrs of the Holocaust, the dead, and even the survivors by allowing Netanyahu to visit Auschwitz for his own political benefit.
In the end, Netanyahu didn’t go to Auschwitz, despite Poland’s promise not to arrest him. This was in part because he was back in court “as his long-running corruption trial resumed”. He is facing “charges of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust in three separate cases”.
A vital voice
Kory is a powerful voice of reason in an age of gaslighting and hypocrisy. She was one of hundreds of Jewish people who vocally opposed the controversial police decision to prevent a recent protest outside the BBC over the public broadcaster’s clear pro-Israel bias during the genocide in Gaza. She was also in London before the heavy-handed policing of 18 January. And she told the Canary:
The atmosphere was chaotic owing to the change of announced time and the police shifting people from spot to spot without any apparent reason.
I arrived at 11:30 for what I thought would be a 11:45 to 12 noon starting time…many people did the same although when I was leaving I met people coming the opposite way to reach the 13:00 pm start.
The number of police seemed huge, much larger than on any previous occasions.
I am not sure they knew what they were supposed to be doing…except for intimidating us.
Hold the powerful to account
Other witnesses from 18 January describe the police’s behaviour at the march as both aggressive and chaotic. MPs and trade unions, meanwhile, have called for an investigation into the authorities’ apparent abuse of power and suppression of a peaceful, lawful protest. The Jewish deputy leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, has stressed that:
The Met is lying – and the video evidence is all over social media.
And Green London Assembly member Zoe Garbett says:
150 people contacted me about witnessing police violence towards children & older people & experiences of kettling, being misled + police misinformation.
As Prof Haim Bresheeth from the Jewish Network for Palestine told the Canary:
It seems, from all the evidence, that a political intervention was made to harden the position on the Palestine marches, the most committed support for international law that we have ever seen in the streets of London!
Featured image via screengrab
