January 27 is designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was designated by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005 during the 42nd plenary session. Since 2005, the UN and its member states have held commemoration ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and to honor millions of victims of Nazism and its collaborators: the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, 200,000 Romani people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, 9,000 homosexual men and many other victims.
‘’The Holocaust profoundly affected countries in which Nazi crimes were perpetrated, but also had universal implications and consequences in many other parts of the world. Member States share a collective responsibility for addressing the residual trauma, maintaining effective remembrance policies, caring for historic sites, and promoting education, documentation and research, seven decades after the genocide. This responsibility entails educating about the causes, consequences and dynamics of such crimes so as to strengthen the resilience of young people against ideologies of hatred.’’ Unesco
Auschwitz-Birkenau
The Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest German concentration and extermination camp. Auschwitz I was created in 1940 and it was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question: – the Nazi plan to murder Jews who lived on the areas occupied by Nazi Germany.
From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe where they were murdered.
An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died. Around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp.Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23 000 Romani people and Sinti, 15,000 Soviets POW, 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses and tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities and homosexuals.
Image: https://pixabay.com/nl/photos/auschwitz-concentratiekamp-gebouwen-4444476/