The difficult question about Auschwitz that remains unanswered

As for Wolfgang Josephs, as late as August 1946, he was still hoping against hope that he might find his father alive. He received a typewritten note from the British Red Cross. It informed him, with regret, that Red Cross officials in Europe had searched the lists of survivors, and his father's name was not among them.

Wolfgang anglicised his name to Peter Johnson and settled in the UK, at a time when few in the western world wanted to hear the stories of those who had witnessed, or survived, the Holocaust. He donated his family papers to the Wiener Holocaust Library, which remains a vast repository of evidence of the darkest period in Europe's history.

Now, 80 years on, there are so few survivors left that soon the duty to remember will pass to posterity.

"I think remembering the Holocaust is even more important now," says Dr Simpson, "because it happened at such a scale, and with such an intensity of hatred, that the need to understand, to explain this continent-wide event in which six million Jews were murdered, where so many people attempt, and still attempt, to deny that this happened, in a world where misinformation is everywhere, there's an ever greater need for us to remember the Holocaust: that this did happen. And the evidence is here."

As Primo Levi wrote: "The injury cannot be healed. It extends through time."

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