Holocaust Memorial Day is observed annually on 27 January to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet forces in 1945. The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 is ‘Bridging Generations’, emphasising the importance of the transmission of historical memory from survivors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides to subsequent familial and communal networks.
Rabbi Daniel Lichman, PhD candidate at the LBI London, spoke at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ interfaith Holocaust Memorial Day, citing the recent movie Marty Supreme (2026) as an example of how Holocaust memory cannot be escaped.
Set in 1952, the movie’s main character is a table tennis player of New York’s Jewish Lower East Side, who wants to become the best in the world. Marty’s Jewishness informs his drive and worldview: he sees his success as connected to both personal ambition and deeper communal pride, even if he expresses it in undisciplined or brash ways. One of Marty’s opponents, Bela Kletzky, is a character based on Alex Ehrlich, a real-life Polish-Jewish table tennis champion and Auschwitz survivor forced to defuse bombs. His experience – shown in an anecdotal flashback- directly ties the film’s competitive world to the human reality of the Holocaust: what does it mean to compete in a world that has seen such immense suffering?
The movie also highlights the evident contrast between “finite games”, rule-bound contests with endings like table tennis, with life’s “infinite game”, which stays open to new possibilities. At the end of the film, Marty stops running and is greeted by ‘infinity’.
In response to the Holocaust Rabbi Lichman challenges us: how might we render the ‘finite’ ‘infinite’ once again.
You can find the full speech here.
Further HMD resources are available at hmd.org.uk.
Image of Alex Ehrlich: Wikipedia
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