On 27th January, the world marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In the course of the reportage on that, we became aware firstly that there was a National Holocaust Centre, and secondly that it was very near Newark, in a little place called Laxton, where we'd spent a pleasantly historical afternoon back in 2012.

So we visited.

This is a private initiative, set up by two brothers who were so moved by their visit to Israel's holocaust museum in 1991, and so conscious that very little information about these events had figured in their education up to then, that they resolved to set up a museum.

Outside, there are sculptures, and a number of bushes planted in memory of people who perished in the death camps. They're bare and stark under the winter sky, but when the leaves return, they will be a powerful symbol of hope.


There's a huge commemorative pile of stones, to which visitors are invited to contribute.

The timing of our visit was probably not the best -- on a Sunday, and in this highly significant week. When we arrived, the place was heaving, and the flow of visitors to the main exhibition, which winds through various fairly narrow "zones", was pretty much backed up to the entrance.

But of course it's really good that people are visiting, and with a little patience, we were finally able to tack ourselves onto the end of the line.

The main exhibition is appropriately saddening. They display a lot of graphics, many of which I'd never seen (moving depictions of Jewish cultural life before the great disaster; examples of the cruel caricatures of Jews that appeared in children's textbooks; photos of "eugenics hygienists" intently comparing hair and eye colour to a set chart; and intimate records of daily life in the crowded ghettos). They also have a vast amount of recorded oral history.

A second exhibition is aimed at primary-school children (based on the Kindertransport). It is well designed, and very poignant.

It's a truism that these reminders -- and equivalent memorials to other atrocities -- are needed more than ever in these nationalist, populist, short-sighted days, when anti-Semitism is on the rise, and even the desire to remember becomes "instrumentalized".

And that this whole undertaking arose from the desire of one family to "do something" is inspirational. I guess we all need to figure out how, each day, we can lay our little stone of memory for past evils, and cast our own little vote for decency going forward.