People in Redditch can take part in this year’s events to remember the millions of people killed in the Holocaust and genocides worldwide.

From Monday (Jan 23), a special Holocaust Luggage Tag Project will invite people to hang their own thoughts and messages on a tree in Redditch Library, and a civic event where all are welcome will be held in town on the following Saturday morning (Jan 28).

The programme and readings can be found here

Whether you want to leave just a word, or a story, poem, or picture, the luggage tags and tree will remain available in the library until the Saturday after that (Feb 4).

Holocaust Memorial Day itself is on Friday (Jan 27), and local schools and groups are also taking part in the events which are being co-ordinated by Redditch Borough Council’s Holocaust Memorial Steering Group.

Cllr Peter Fleming, Chair of the Steering Group, said: “Once again Redditch comes together to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

“This year we have an interactive luggage tag exhibit, and we can all take part. A luggage tag is such an ordinary object, and it aims to prompt us to reflect that any genocide, especially on the horrific scale of the Holocaust, must involve lots of ordinary people. The ordinary people who let it happen, the ordinary people who actively perpetrated it, and the ordinary people who were persecuted. It’s an important, sobering message that reminds us why it matters to remember the lessons of the past, together as a community, so we never allow it to happen again.”

Anyone can attend Redditch’s Holocaust Memorial Day event on Saturday January 28th. It will start at the Town Hall at 10.15am, from where a short procession will start at 10.30am to the Holocaust Marker on Church Green. There will be readings there, including from the Mayor and MP of Redditch, and then free refreshments at the tree in the library afterwards.

Holocaust Memorial Day exists to help us to honour the memory of all victims of genocide and atrocity in the world and to strive to ensure that we do not allow such things to occur again. It remembers the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions killed under Nazi persecution of other groups as well as the people who died in genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

This year’s theme of ‘ordinary people’ aims to highlight the roles ordinary people have played in genocide and how we all, as ordinary people, might play bigger parts than we imagine in challenging prejudice today.