First observed by the United Nations (UN) in 2001), January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day. In 2025, it is also the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz- Birkenau. Today we, and Greenham Women, remember the millions of people whose lives were taken by the Nazis.

Greenham Women were – and still are – a hugely diverse group of women who came together to protest both the siting of US nuclear weapons on UK common land, and the patriarchal use of violence everywhere, from within domestic homes to international wars.

As a heritage project collecting and collating stories from Greenham Women, about their time at the peace camp and beyond, we rarely speak *for* Greenham Women. The Embrace the Base action, for example, saw 30,000 women hold hands and encircle the US military base. Rebecca Johnson estimates that over 50,000 women were present at one time for another action in 1983.  Thousands more women attended for days, weeks, or months – and many more supported, providing water, food, and moral support.  It would be impossible to imagine that we could represent these thousands of women, and their varied viewpoints, on almost anything other than the issues that they attended Greenham for.

However, today we as a project, inspired by those women’s commitment to peace, to their refusal to bow to bullying tactics, feel compelled to stand on their shoulders and speak out.

The Holocaust was a systematic, organised and state sponsored series of acts of increasingly extreme violence that culminated in the brutal murder of over 6 million people. Rooted in the false belief that Germans were racially superior to Jews (and Black people, and disabled people, and gay people, and the list goes on…) and perpetuated by propaganda at all levels of society, it sought to literally erase these people from the planet.

Aushwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the concentration camps built by the Nazis. To call it one camp is somewhat misleading – there were three main sites, with over 40 camps of various sizes and with various purposes. The entire thing was fenced in and surrounded by a further, approximately, 40 square kilometers of land which was overseen and patrolled by the SS. Originally an army barracks, the site was added to and extended from the time of it’s adoption as – initially – a quarantine camp – in April 1940.

It is estimated that around 7000 people were liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau on the 27th January 1945. By this time, over 1.1 million people – men, women, and children – had been killed there.

Alongside the state apparatus and structures, including vast swathes of legislation like the Nuremberg Laws, millions of individual people made millions of tiny decisions, day by day, which allowed the Holocaust to happen.

We are seeing increasing, worrying signs of the rise of the right, again, in our world today, from world and tech leaders. Tech matters as it underpins so much of how so many of us live our lives. Propaganda and censorship are easily delivered to our pockets. As women – as Greenham Women – we will stand firmly against this.

We will stand for unity, peace, co-operation, and the safety and security of all people to live peaceably.

We celebrate diversity and all the wonders it brings. We celebrate learning, growth, sharing and connection.

We must all remember Michael Rosen’s words, ‘Fascism arrives as your friend…It doesn’t walk in saying, “Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”

We will stand for what we know to be right, from the smallest spaces to the largest, from domestic conversations to protests. We urge you to do the same.

Stand firm. Stay fierce.

Never again.