I just came back from a super holiday in Berlin, but as much as I’m tempted to sit here and write about how amazing this city is, I won’t because I don’t think that my descriptive writing skills will ever do it justice.

So I’ll just say one thing about this great city and move on – Berlin will leave a mark on your heart forever, but its changing fast, so if you have the opportunity to visit, do it sooner rather than later.

I guess I should have known that this trip was going to be a different because as I was waiting for my luggage to make its way through the conveyer belt I overheard one of the other passengers telling his wife how he might not enjoy himself so much because “the Germans can be very rude and rigid.”

Now let it be known that usually, a generic sweeping statement like that is enough to spoil my day, but, because I was in a particularly good mood, I tried to tune him out and ignore him.

Of course I didn’t quite manage.

The man went on to explain how all Germans are the same and, how a couple of years back he had had an argument with a couple of ‘them’ at work.

“You have no idea how rude they all are,” he told his wife, in full earshot of his young son. “They think they are superior and know it all.”

The wife nodded, and then added “...and the women don’t even shave their armpits.”

I bit my lip so hard it bled, so I moved away. You see, whilst most of us would put such silly talk down to harmless banter, every time I hear such BS I see the word Holocaust blaring in front of my eyes.

You might think that this is a mad exaggeration because you believe that the Holocaust was one man’s screwed up idea of ethnic cleansing. Others might think that it was the result of an ideological megalomaniac’s madness.

And because of these beliefs, most of us live in the false security that something so horrid can never happen again, but the truth is different - the truth is that not only can it happen again; it already has, and is happening all the time, and it is usually based on irrational beliefs such as the one I experienced in Berlin’s airport.

Luckily I had a very creative history teacher back in school; everybody loved her because she made everyone feel like they were her pet, but, one day, she walked into class, and started shouting at us like a mad dog.

She then separated us according to the colour of our eyes, forming two lines - one with girls who had light coloured eyes and another line with girls who had dark coloured eyes -

She then made the ones with dark eyes clean the desks, sweep the floor, empty the waste paper baskets and polish the black board. In the meantime, the other girls with light eyes, got treats and were given free range of the playground.

After about 15 minutes she stopped the charade and explained how this was essentially what had happened during the Holocaust. Needless to say, by now, we were all ears to hear the rest of the story and, my interest in the subject was so deeply rooted that, twenty years later, during my stay in Berlin, I visited the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial.

Explaining my feelings as I walked onto the grounds where thousands were tortured and eventually murdered is hard to do. Though so many years have passed, the oppression and sheer cruelty surrounding the place seem to have never gone away, and just like the beauty of Berlin today, no words will do it justice.

We’ve all heard the tragic atrocities that took place in concentration camps, but most of us still can’t understand how one man managed to convince so many others to do so many cruel things to so many innocent people.

How could one man persuade so many others to act so violently and so cruelly against other citizens?

How did he manage this when his argument wasn’t even based on a single thread of rationality?

Before the war, Berlin was one of the most open and tolerant places on earth, so how did Hitler convince so many people to treat other humans like trash just because of their beliefs?

Simple -Hitler didn’t do everything at one go. He found the right timing. He waited for the right set of circumstances and, then used his greed and manipulative madness to his advantage.

Just to put you in the picture, one of the first things that Hitler did that eventually led to a full blown Holocaust, was to make it illegal for Jews to own pets.

Who would have thought that in a few months time, not allowing Jews to own pets would lead to the forced incarceration and then murder of a whole creed?

You might argue that such a tragedy was only possible before WWII because, at the time it was customary for political leaders to persecute entire races in order to pave their way to the top, but don’t be fooled; these things are still happening today.

From Cambodia to Yugoslavia, to Rwanda, Israel, East Timor and Sudan... different forms of ‘ethnic cleansing’ are ongoing. Without belittling what happened during the Nazi-Jewish Holocaust, the truth is that there have probably been many more deaths during the modern day mass murders that have been going on in different parts of the world since the end of WWII.

As Edmund Burke so eloquently put it, “…all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”