This year the Academy marked Holocaust Memorial Day.
Our theme was "One Day When We Realise That Our Differences Unite Us". At lunchtime on Thursday, 27th January, we held a Gallery Walk and Memorial Flames Campaign in the courtyard.
We believe that this process of reckoning or coming to terms with the history of the Holocaust and other genocides is one that continues today among historians, survivors and their descendants, politicians, citizens, and students.
As American author James Baldwin has said:
"History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do."
Baldwin suggests that we won't understand history or ourselves unless we consider how the past is "present" in our world. And the Holocaust - which historians describe as not merely a significant moment in history but a 'collapse in human civilisation' and a 'symbol of evil' - exerts a potent force.
Author Eva Hoffman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, has observed: "Sixty years after the Holocaust took place, our reckoning with this defining event is far from over. Indeed, as this immense catastrophe recedes from us in time, our preoccupation with it seems only to increase."
Mr Anderson