There are few more finger-nail-on-blackboard jarring bromides than “the right side of history”. History is normatively written by the victors, but with war there are only victims. Some victims can be respected, honoured and forgiven; many cannot. Yom HaShoah on April 23rd was the first official Holocaust Memorial day. Established in Israel in 1951 to coincide with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, it took another 54 years before the UN designated January 27th International Holocaust Memorial Day. This year, as Passover and Easter coincide, I reflect on how Holocaust memorialisation has become much more complex than constructing monuments to the dead and to the injustice that killed them. How have the overlapping concerns of personal remembrance, national memorial and education evolved over the last 80 years? My primary motivation to bring awareness of the Holocaust to Ireland flows from the impulse to honour my family. When I discovered that my maternal grandfather, Pawel Rozenfeld was taken from his factory to Radogoszcz detention centre near Łódź in Poland in November 1939, tortured for 11 days and murdered, I had the responsibility of informing my mother. She knew nothing of these circumstances. Pawel’s old factory is now being developed into 200 apartments. My family receive no compensation, an injustice that does not rankle much – the money was never mine. The erasure of his name, however, I cannot countenance. To that end, I am working with the mayor’s office in Łódź to install a memorial plaque and a Stolperstein, a brass plaque embedded in the pavement, engraved with his name and the place where he was murdered. New research suggests Pawel may have been taken to Brus, 5km away, and shot on a military training ground. Polish authorities are excavating human remains. I will offer my DNA. Perhaps I will have a chance to bring him to England and bury him next to his wife. We may at last have a funeral, a small act of repair for my family – a chance to put a kink in the chaos of not knowing. And, in the Jewish tradition, allow his soul to rest. Today, Radogoszcz is a museum – a textile factory before the Gestapo arrived; what happened was brutal even by their depraved standards. In the autumn, The Objects of Love exhibition, which tells the story of my family, will be presented there. A place that dishonoured Pawel with such ignominy will bow its head to his memory. My mother does not want her name included in any memorial in Poland where the blight of the Holocaust, coupled to cultural anti-Semitism, has crushed any connection to her place of origin as a homeland. For her, her name belongs in Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem. But how do the children and grandchildren of perpetrators, those victims born on the wrong side of history, who often endure similar feelings of shame, humiliation and silence so familiar to children of Holocaust survivors, mourn their families? Memorialisation for them inevitably involves painful truths – the implication of family members in the actions of the Nazis – the inverse of morality. By embracing the benighted state of disgrace that is their legacy, I have discovered that “the right side of history” is a mirage; there is only history and its inheritance. The father of a German friend, imprisoned in Dachau in the 1930s for high treason (he had spoken out publicly against the Nazis), was later conscripted into the Wehrmacht – victim turned perpetrator. Dachau splits his son’s emotions atomically. I will join him in Dachau later this year, in solidarity with his grief. [ I think of the hostages and their tortured families and weep for the broken generations in GazaOpens in new window ] The dialogue I share with these victims spans the abyss of guilt and disgust they often feel, being related to people who participated in total war. The complexity is further amplified where families are divided between perpetrators and victims, common in Germany whose Jewish community was the most assimilated of all. Who are we to judge that they are on the wrong side of history? National memorialisation is always freighted with controversy; there are different approaches. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, above the location of Hitler’s bunker, comprises 2,711 concrete slabs of differing heights. Designed to quickly disorientate visitors who walk between them, maze-like, it suggests that once you lose your way, you easily lose your identity. In an age of living witnesses and extensive documentation, I’m not susceptible to abstract symbolism to memorialise the Holocaust; people should learn the truth, not representations of truth. In Prague’s Jewish quarter, several synagogues form part of a tourist attraction, each now a museum. The Pinkas synagogue, which I visited recently, displays 80,000 names of murdered Czech Jews inscribed on the walls, two-thirds of the total in 1939. A couple, laughing, took a selfie opposite one bank of names. Are they on the right side of history, I wondered, or am I witnessing the transition from living to received history, after eight decades of European peace, in the age of the smartphone; memorialisation as someone else’s cultural curiosity? Some 3,500 Czech Jews remain today, their perfectly preserved synagogues without congregations. At Babyn Yar, outside Kyiv, where 34,000 Jews were massacred over two days in 1941, plans for a memorial centre, with a museum, research centre, archive and synagogue, have been frozen since the Russian invasion. More than a million Jews were murdered on Ukrainian soil during the Holocaust. Uncomfortably, some of the perpetrators were Ukrainian. That a memorial centre, situated at the epicentre of this immeasurably complicated history, is prepared to navigate such charred terrain underscores Ukraine’s heroic efforts to break free from its darkest history. How Putin defiles the memory of Babyn Yar with fresh blood, here of all places, shows not just moral collapse but contempt for morality itself – a kind of Holocaust anti-memorialisation. [ Auschwitz survivors mark 80th anniversary of camp’s liberationOpens in new window ] Yad Vashem, established in 1953, holds the names of 4 million victims. As with Auschwitz Memorial, which manages the camp site and museum, its role is to protect the memory of the victims and promote Holocaust education; both institutions work tirelessly combating Holocaust denial and distortion – rising trends, despite the expansion of Holocaust education. A complicated dissonance explained predominantly by the proliferation of online conspiracy theory; the two most trafficked subjects: Jews and the Holocaust. Everyone who encounters the Holocaust becomes implicated, a new witness to the mystery and the horror, with the responsibility to recount its history honestly. This is the true value of Holocaust memorialisation. Oliver Sears is the son of a Holocaust survivor and founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland. Yom HaShoah runs from sundown on April 23rd to sundown on April 24th