In Chapel on Monday 30 January, Mr Daughton gave a powerful reminder of the importance of memorialising the Holocaust, particularly now that there are so few survivors left to tell their stories.

He began with a reminiscence from his time as a History undergraduate, when an essay on the achievements of the Mongol Empire was criticised by his tutor for not acknowledging that Genghis Khan was responsible for one of most devastating genocides of all time.

I would like to begin by telling you a story. Forgive me, I teach History - stories are what I do best.

90 years ago when I was a little older than you, I was in my first year at University doing a History degree. I had chosen some wild unit on the Mongols and Genghis Khan.

For those of you not aware, Genghis Khan was the ruler of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous Empire in History. That means it is all connected and you could walk from one side to the other. It stretched from the pacific ocean coastline of Asia to Europe. It encompassed one fifth of the entire globe and over 30% of the entire population of the earth. Naturally it had a profound effect on the world that can still be felt today. My task at the end of the unit was to write an essay on the impact of the Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire.

So I did… I laid out the gargantuan impact it has had on modern society: it opened up a trade route between East and West, gave tax breaks to traders, making a essentially a vast free trade area of a third of the planet and established a standardised system of bank notes, all of which exponentially encouraged trade and cultural exchange across Europe and Asia.

It established the idea of freedom of religion

They established and international postal system unmatched for the next 500 years.

Technology changed hands…the Mongols were the first to bring gunpowder to the west.

Medical knowledge flourished under the Mongols as knowledge of the body, medicines and treatment were shared across vast areas.

And they valued learning so much that they exempted teachers from taxation entirely. An excellent idea.

I submitted the essay and when it was returned I got only a C grade. That’s average. I was disappointed. I knew I had researched well and referenced everything and that it was all correct. I knew my assertions about the points I had made were all valid. So I went to question the lecturer who marked it and challenged them on the score – too low, I said. Worth more, I said.

The reply was blunt – I was told you cannot write an essay about the impact of Genghis Khan and not talk about the millions of people who died as a result.

Hundreds of cities were erased and burned to the ground. The Mongols would fire diseased corpses into besieged cities practising chemical warfare long before anyone else did so. The population of China was halved, the population of Persia was so slaughtered that the it dropped by 90% and would not recover to pre-invasion levels until the C20th some 700 year later.

Probably somewhere north of 80 million people were killed by the expanse of the Mongol Empire. More than 10% of the world population.

How can any advantages stack up against this level of murderous destruction? But most of you, until a moment ago, are blissfully unaware of all of this.

Today we remember a more modern genocide. The murder of 6 million jews by the Nazis, during World War 2. The systematic rounding up and killing of a specific group of people, by a modern, well educated society.

You, if you were part of this group, would have been arrested, shaved, beaten, stripped of all your clothes and belongings and sent to a camp to be separated into those fit to work and those not. If not, you were simply executed and those in charge were rewarded for finding the most efficient way to kill as many people as fast as possible…imagine that. It might be someone like you whose job it was to think about that. Those able to work, were worked all day every day until they died, with minimal food and water. Noone cared if they died, in fact they were supposed to die.

6 million Jews were murdered in this way over 4 years.

That’s over 4,000 a day…with minimal sleep for those orchestrating it, to keep this up every single day of the year it would mean 230 an hour.

Four people a minute, every minute, every single day for four years.

By the time this chapel finishes an entire year group could be erased from existence.

And these were mothers, fathers, grandparents, babies…people just like you girls, young, at school. Innocent.

Today you would not be in very much trouble societally to refer to someone as authoritarian as Genghis Khan or that they run a place like Genghis Khan.

But if you compared that person and the way you ran things to a Nazi death camp commander you would be in very serious trouble.

Somehow, it is easy for all of us to feel that that is instantly more offensive. Why?

Time.

The problem is time.

We don’t know anyone killed by Ghengis Khan…it is meaningless to us because the names of people, mothers, sisters, brothers, girls just like you have long been lost to time. We have no knowledge of lives, their hopes, their loves, their pain or destruction and no connection to it.

The holocaust on the other hand is close to us in a world like ours and undertaken by people we are afraid to admit were very much like us. It is uncomfortable. Many of you here may well have met a holocaust survivor. They may have visited you in primary school, or indeed at Queenswood.

But they will visit no more. Even the youngest survivors have either died or are in their 90s.

As these people recede from view, groups who promote the conspiracy theory that the holocaust was all a lie go unanswered by the dead and ideas that jews are behind 9/11 or Covid gain ground. Last year alone anti-semitic incidents in schools increased by 30%.

We are at a very important moment in history.

Very soon…there will be no one left who was there.

No one you can produce as evidence.

No one you can say you know.

There will only be the stories that remain and your generation has the task of ensuring that their experience is not lost to time, that their voices live on and continue to have meaning to us all so that the lesson is heeded and you can live in a world where it doesn’t happen again.