70 years ago today, Red Army soldiers marched up to the gates of the Auschwitz death camp and liberated the remaining Jews who were still alive after the Nazis turned and fled.

The Holocaust – or Shoah (catastrophe) – saw approximately 6 million people being worked to death or gassed in ovens at the Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and other Nazi death camps. The world vowed that it would never happen again. But it is clear that hate is rearing its ugly head once more.

The Israel and Palestine question aside, it is clear that a new form of hatred is on the rise. Sporadic slayings of Jews has continued in Europe, but the taking of hostages and the killing of four Jews in a kosher market in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo attack shows that orchestrated hatred against them still prevails.

But just as Jews have been targeted, extremists – falsely using the cry of Islam – have killed westerners and other Muslims in cold-blooded genocide. They rally under the flag of Islamic State and their behaviour is barbaric and completely unacceptable to any norms of society at any point in world history.

Jewish survivors of the Holocaust believe that fading memories are part of the reason. If we dig beneath the surface, the fundamental issues here are those of intolerance, hate and the desire to exterminate.

Just as followers of Islamic State have been doing, Nazi Germany did the same on a grand scale only 70-odd years ago. Germany has never come to terms with what it did to Jews, gypsies, the mentally ill, gays and many other sectors of society that did not fit into Hitler’s plans for an Aryan race. And we have to ask the question, how has society – repeatedly – fallen into the trap of believing the ideas of grandeur of madmen? How did they do it then? And more importantly, how are they still doing it now?

To experience the desperation that people went through at the death camps, you have to visit, see and touch. It is only when witnessing and touching the scratch marks on the walls – the result of men, women and children having tried to escape poisonous canisters that dropped into what they thought was a de-licing and shower facility – can one begin to imagine the horror people experienced.

When you put your feet on the sorting ramp at Birkenau and try and imagine what it must have been like as the weak and young were ripped away from their families to be put to an immediate death, you realise the magnitude of the crimes against humanity that we – as people – are capable of committing.

There have been attempts at genocide since – one of them only 20 years ago in a European territory. We never seem to learn. At the end of the day, we are all human beings and we only have one planet to share. Our hatred and intolerance will one day prove to be our undoing.