HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY

27th January 2025

National

This is a remembrance day for all the different categories of people who suffered at the hands of the Nazis during the second World War (1939-45). It aims to keep fresh in the mind the memory of those who suffered and died at that period, and to help ensure that no such atrocity happens again. The date was chosen as the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but for many it is appropriate to remember others who have been victims of subsequent acts of genocide elsewhere in the world.

Holocaust Memorial Day remembers especially the millions of people who were killed in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. More than a million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland, during World War Two. The majority were Jews and the former extermination camp has become the world’s largest Jewish cemetery; but the site was also the death place for many people who did not fit into the Nazis’ view of their world: Poles, lesbians, homosexuals and the disabled were amongst those killed here.

Many of the concentration camps set up by the Nazis in World War Two were razed to the ground towards the end of the war, but this Nazi German death camp was liberated before it was completely destroyed. Now it has become a museum, and a focus for people of all nations, and especially for the young, to visit as pilgrims.

The Holocaust began in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. It ended in 1945 when Allied powers defeated the Nazis. Jewish people were excluded from public life on September 15th, 1935 when the Nuremberg Laws were issued. These laws also stripped German Jews of their citizenship and their right to marry Germans.

Kristallnacht occurred on November 9th and 10th, 1938. Nazis pillaged, burned synagogues, broke windows of Jewish-owned businesses, and attacked Jewish people in Austria and Germany. 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. In prison camps, prisoners were forced to do hard physical labour. Torture and death within concentration camps were common and frequent.

Once World War II began, the Nazis ordered all Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing so they could be easily targeted. Jews were forced to live in specific areas of the city called ghettos after the beginning of World War ll. In the larger ghettos, up to 1,000 people a day were picked up and brought by train to concentration camps or death camps.

11 million people were killed during the Holocaust (1.1 million children). 6 million of those victims were Jewish. Other groups targeted by the Nazis were Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, disabled people, and Roma. Two-thirds of Jewish people living in Europe at the time of World War II were killed by Nazis.