Elie Weisel's book Night is a powerful account of the Holocaust, an event that resulted in the death of five to six million Jews. The most notorious death camp was Auschwitz in Poland where around a million Jews lost their lives. As one former Polish guard at Auschwitz describes, the children were thrown straight into furnaces without first being gassed: “They threw them in alive. Their screams could be heard at the camp. We don't know whether they wanted to economise on gas, or if it was because there was not enough room in the gas chambers” (ibid.).

Alas, our history is full of such examples of crimes against humanity. We do not have to go back far in history for examples of some of the worst atrocities committed. The Cambodian guerrilla commander Pol Pot, as prime minister from 1975 to 1979, caused the death of some two million through execution, starvation, overwork and disease. In 1994 there was a massacre of half a million Rwandans and a million refugees who fled the country, resulting in over a thousand deaths a day through disease and reprisals. Then there was the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia. The list is much, much longer.