Here are five things I have taken from the conference:

The Second World War was really two wars.  The first was the war for European expansion and this is the one we understand.  The second was a total war against the Jewish population of Europe, which was equally if not more important to Hitler.  The conquests to the east (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Russia), afforded Hitler access to the vast bulk of European Jewry and the invasion of Russia in particular gave impetus and space to this diabolical plan.

When evil is unleashed it confronts some people with appalling moral dilemmas where each of the choices will result in murder and hardship and from which there is no escape.  The options facing the Jewish leaders of the East European Ghettos over whether to collude with the Nazis in the hope of avoiding an even worse fate are a prime example of this.  The session we spent looking at the perpetrators of the terror - from those who provided the industrial know-how, via those who oversaw the deportations, to the camp guards – proved a sobering reminder of how ordinary people became a party to genocide.  Hannah Arendt spoke famously of the banality of evil when she observed Eichmann at his trial.  Equally mundane was the attitude of people further down the chain of command: it was a job; if I don’t do it, someone else will; I have a family to feed; I am only a small part of the operation; I didn’t know what happened at the other end.  Hitler may look to us like a caricature of wickedness but the people who served him on the ground only occasionally were.

The Holocaust remains deeply traumatic for Jewish people.  The worst instance of genocide in human history happened less than a generation ago, survivors are still alive and their children and grandchildren are also profoundly affected by it.  It was to the credit of the staff of ISHS that no attempt was made to use this terrible reality, which is often overlooked by outsiders, to justify some Israeli policies today.

The opportunity to listen to Professor Eyal Naveh of Tel Aviv University talk about a cutting-edge initiative he has begun with Palestinian academics to produce a dual narrative of the current Israeli-Palestinian dispute for a school textbook to be used by both Israeli and Palestinian schoolchildren showed the difficulty of finding agreement on fundamental issues even between willing parties but also a glimmer of how this dispute may one day be presented in the education of a future generation of students.

The extraordinary achievement of Yad Vashem itself.  It was a source of wonder to me how a centre which is devoted to the recollection of mass murder could prove one of the most life-affirming places I have ever visited.  The goal of remembering – literally ‘re-membering’, a putting back together of what has been torn apart – is effecting dignity for the victims.  The place’s name is taken from the Hebrew words in Isaiah 56:5 which say that the Lord will ‘give them an everlasting name (Yad VaShem) that shall not be cut off’.  No stone is being left unturned in the painstaking pursuit of memorial, yet there is still so much to uncover.