Seventy five years ago, on Monday, March 29, 1943, 2,400 Jews from Skopje were murdered on arrival at the Treblinka Extermination Camp.

Here, the Advertiser has a proud record of campaigning against racism and anti-Semitism, that goes back to the early days of the twentieth century. It was the ELA which, in 2012, first published the now notorious mural in Hanbury Street which depicted the grotesque figure of man with an exaggerated hook nose counting money.

Whatever else has been said about Lutfur Rahman, when I bought the mural to his attention, he used his authority to ensure that it was removed. Those of us who have lived as a minority, and in my case a minority within a minority, know that jokes and asides can turn into something worse. In its ultimate extreme it ends in the train that steamed into a halt in rural Poland on that Monday morning to deliver innocent people to their deaths for no reason other than racial laws.

Thank you to the East End and thank you to the Advertiser for playing your part to ensure it could never happen here.