Tonight as the King and other world leaders assemble at Auschwitz, we remember the Holocaust, a crime of unprecedented span perpetrated against the Jews in an attempt to destroy their very existence, a plan employing both traditional forms of killing and industrial methods by the Nazi Government of Germany and its allies across Europe and North Africa. It is right to recall its horror as a unique monstrosity that casts a giant shadow over modern history. It is right to use it as a moral lesson and warning against racism, dictatorship, demonic panaceas and ideologies, and the ever-present human and technical potential for mass-murder. It is correct to recognise it as both the greatest atrocity of the 20th century – and as a specifically Jewish tragedy of racist oppression, slaughter - and ultimately defiant and joyous survival. Those are the reasons we commemorate it today and why its denial, minimalization, trivialization or appropriation are signs of moral disgrace and societal degradation. To universalize or homogenize the Shoah is wrong: it inevitably minimizes what happened. To deny it or to strain to play down its scale represents a form of racism almost by definition. In our age when the deployment of victimhood is sometimes an ideological competition of sanctifying virtue, the appropriation of the Jewish Holocaust is heinous. Yet again and again, people who should know better seek to expropriate it from Jewish history, erase Jews from their own history and then, with a brazen amorality and self-righteous arrogance, commandeer it and invert it to use against Jews themselves and indeed lecture them on its meaning - all the while simultaneously deploying ‘Holocaust’ with deliberately careless ubiquity that trivializes its grave significance. It is a wonderful thing that many potentates and countries are today remembering the Shoah and that many are at the services at the worst of the killing camps. It is a great credit and pride for the United Kingdom that our monarch King Charles III, who has done so much to remember the Shoah and its survivors, here visits the Jewish centre in Krakow and is at Auschwitz to attend services now as I write. In terms of the wicked abuse of history, this is one of the tests of our time...

BBC correspondent has just informed us that the hostages "will almost certainly have had a miserable time". That's the insight I'm looking for