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It’s maybe not what you’d expect to see but we’d advise Just Jew It and visit a Jewish Quarter on World Holocaust Day.

And the biggest synagogue in Europe in Dohany Street in Budapest.

And learn how the Hungarian capital was bled of its Jewish population.

With half a million citizens sent to die in Auschwitz-Burkenau, the largest number from any single city in the Holocaust.

All of which is laid out in minute and everyday detail.

In the Quarter’s museum and honoured in the architecture and tributes around Dohany,

Been there bought the T-shirt

Of course, the greatest answer to the ravages of the Holocaust is for the survivors and their descendants to live a good and full life.

And that means celebrating your heritage.

Which we discover when we visit that the Jews of Hungary do with self-effacing humour.

With T-shirts and mugs of the famous Michael Jordan leaping logo with Just Jew It written on them.

It is a side of Jewish people which most will not reflect on today.

But we are reminded of one of the most memorable and heart-rending scenes in any film on the Holocaust.

Life Is Beautiful

From La Vita E Bella (Life is Beautiful) when father Guido uses humour to protect son Giusue’s innocence.

Explaining that the signposts ‘No Jews, No Dogs’ and we are reminded that similar prohibitions throughout history have included ‘No Irish’ are a joke too.

And that when they will go on to open a bookstore they will erect a sign saying ‘No Visigoths, no Spiders.’

And by joking that the rules of the camp are a game.

Read all about it: A Tora in the Jewish Quarter museum

Where you can accumulate points by obeying the draconic, inhumane regulations.

While when the guards come for Guido at the climax for execution and he sees Giusue hiding in a box.

He deflects with wit by winking at him and goosestepping.

The humanity of humour

Roll of honour: Artists in the Jewish Quarter

That people use gallows humour in their worst moments is a uniquely human coping mechanism.

And one which Jews have consistently turned to in the face of victimisation.

With Mel Brooks ridiculing Hitler and anti-semitism and Woody Allen celebrating the eccentricities of his own culture.

While a list of great Jewish comedians rolls off the tongue.

Jackie Mason, George Burns, Groucho Marx, Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers.

To today’s powerhouses of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Adam Sandler, Billy Crystal, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jerry Sadowitz.

World Holocaust Day is, as it should be, a difficult one for us to get through.

None more so than those Jews, Gypsies and other cultures who suffered more than most.

But this year I will reflect on the shared humanity of humour.

Which I encountered in that small piece of Jewish-American fusion of culture I saw in the Magyar capital by the Danube, complete with its emotional shoes statue.

Countries, Europe

Holocaust memorials are a traveller’s duty

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And for those who dismiss it as dark tourism today, of all days, should be a reminder that Holocaust memorials are a traveller’s duty.

If only to remind us that we can travel.

It was the dream of Anne Frank, writing her diary in her secret annexe in Amsterdam.

To travel the world and to become a journalist one day.

And hearing those transcripts in an audio in Anne Frank’s house in the Dutch city choked this hardened hack up at the privilege of being able to travel.

A curiosity at how others in other countries do things.

Both now and in the past has brought me to such places.

Nazis’ evil legacy

Even when fun and debauchery were the order of the day as in my much-storied booze bus trips to the Oktoberfest in Munich.

When we took a detour to the first Nazi concentration camp Dachau.

The horror of what happened there and in Auschwitz and Bergen.

And dozens of camps across Europe during the Third Reich should never be forgotten.

But alas have been with the atrocities in the Balkans in the Nineties.

The first occasion since the Nazis when houses were daubed with markings as a means of ethnic cleansing.

Sarajevo and beyond

In our lifetime: Balkans concentration camp

The horror of which can be seen at the Museum of Crimes against Humanity and Genocide in Sarajevo.

Where, of course, the ‘war to end all wars’, the First World War, started.

With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

A century of conflict: Franz Ferdinand and Sofia

Alas, there is no shortage of genocides around the world and places we can visit to remember them.

So lest we forget that we should remember genocides every day.

And not just every January 27, the day the Russian troops entered Auschwitz in 1945.

And saw the hell that was that extermination camp.

Which it behoves us also to witness because holocaust memorials are a traveller’s duty.

America, Europe

Democrats voted Hitler

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On this National Holocaust Day lest we forget democrats voted for Hitler.

And while we rightly have the notion of the Great Dictators ruling at the point of a bayonet and a pistol.

It was at the ballot box 90 years ago, on January 30, that the Nazis officially won power.

And if that’s not a reminder for us to constantly be vigilant about who we vote for.

And what checks we put on them then we will, and do, pay the consequences.

Now if you thought that your cosy country was immune to being taken over by megalomaniacs authoritarians.

Then that’s just what the Germans thought about Adolf Hitler back in 1933.

And they believed too that he could rid them of a greater Communist threat and then they could put him back in his box.

Nor should we be blindsided by the threat from within or without as the Germans were back in the 30s.

Seduced as they were by a sense of grievance, common bogeymen enemies within the State.

And a zenophobic hatred of foreigners.

Bavarian barbarity

Sound like Germany of the Thirties… and America of the late 2010s, Brazil now, Brexiteering Britain and a fascist stream in the French Far Right.

All touchpoints for us as we travel through history and the world.

My first introduction to holocaust history was as an offshoot to a very different holiday, the Munich Beerfest in the Eighties.

But Bavaria was where Hitler had his first putsch and where he installed his first concentration camp in Dachau in March 1933.

All under the noses of Bavarians going about their daily business.

While the ‘disreputables’ were packed away to what were presented to the rest of the world as holiday camps.

It is challenging tourism but vital and rewardingly now memorials are now marked across the globe.

With permanent Holocaust centres, the biggest being the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam.

But also in towns and cities in every civilised country.

To remind us that racism exists on our doorstep too and genocide grows from unfettered populism.

Cry Freedom

And that was driven home to me not in Germany, Poland or any of the major arenas of the Holocaust last year.

But in one of the most liberal states in America, the Commonwealth of Massachussets, and its capital Boston .

Where the New England Holocaust Memorial stands next to the Freedom Trail.

And that marks the key points and figures in the American Revolutionary Story.

Alas, the openness which defines our free societies means that racist zealots can broadcast their vile racism.

As happened when neo-Nazis took a selfie of themselves and put it up on social media.

Of course that should never put civilised people off paying our respects wherever we are and steel ourselves.

Because lest we forget democrats voted for Hitler… we who are still democrats.