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Good morning. A survey of young Americans, published yesterday, produced some startling results regarding their awareness of the Holocaust. Amongst 18-39 year olds, only 50% could name a concentration camp. 12% said they had never heard of the Holocaust or weren’t sure whether they had. 11% thought that the Jews caused the Holocaust. Are these results surprising? To young Americans what took place in Europe a couple of generations ago might seem very distant. It would be interesting to know what a survey in the UK would reveal – but whatever results it might provide, the US figures surely serve as a warning that there is at least a risk of current generations forgetting the Holocaust, or wholly misunderstanding it. But why does remembering the Holocaust matter, one of the 12% who said they had never heard of it might ask? I suppose I would reply by saying that we owe it to the past, and we owe it to the future to remember. We owe it to the past – to the victims – to remember the terrible wrongs they suffered. In particular, it seems right and proper to respond specifically to the attempted erasure of the Jewish people, exactly by remembering them – by telling and retelling the story of the Holocaust, and perhaps especially the stories of identifiable individuals - mothers, fathers, and children; young and old; rich and poor; outstanding people of great accomplishment and ordinary people with regular lives – caught up in this horror. We owe it to the victims, to keep their stories alive. As we recount this history, however, there is one feature of it which I think Christians in particular are duty bound to acknowledge – which is just that the virulent racism of the Nazi regime, which aimed most centrally at the obliteration of the Jews, flourished in an overwhelmingly Christian nation. That Germany had such a Christian heritage – that Germany in addition had made an outstanding contribution to art, culture, science, music and the enlightenment - none of this proved an antidote to the unfolding of the Holocaust. And this is just what we need to remember for the sake of the future. We need to remember, against any ‘it couldn’t happen here’ frame of mind, that it very probably could - that a nation’s being civilized, cultured, Christian, a democracy, none of this is enough to save it from succumbing to the evil myths of race and racism. On the wall of the Protestant Chapel at Dachau is inscribed the Psalm 130, which begins with the words, ‘Out of the deep have I called to thee O Lord, O Lord hear my voice.’ Out of the depths of the horrors of the Holocaust the voice of the victims still calls to us even 75 years after the end of the war – and we are surely bound to listen.