International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust . Date on which the UN annually pays tribute to the victims of the Holocaust . On this date the liberation in 1945 by Soviet troops from the Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, is commemorated.
Background
During World War II , the Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered millions of Jews in an attempt to systematically annihilate the Jewish community in Europe . Between 1933 and 1945, these people were systematically persecuted and raided and transferred to death camps. Some were killed immediately; others were made to work cruelly to death. It has not been possible to determine the exact number of victims of Auschwitz since numerous evidences were destroyed and the Nazis themselves did not record the number of people sent to the gas chambers.
The 27 of January of 1945 , the Soviet army liberated the largest Nazi concentration camp of extermination that existed, located in the Auschwithz-Birkenau in Poland. Since its opening in this center guarded by the German SS, millions of people have been murdered since its opening in May 1940.
Not only Jews, but also prisoners of war, who were forced to work for the Hitler regime, arrived at the center, located about 40 kilometers from Krakow . On the front door the main inscription reads ” Arbeit macht frei “, that is, ” work makes free “.
The first period of operation of the camp, until mid-1942, is described by historians as “Polish”, since in that period most of the prisoners were citizens of Poland.
The second period came to be known as “Jewish”: precisely the meeting that took place on January 20, 1942 in a suburb of Berlin, on Lake Wannsee, was dedicated to the extermination of an entire people, “the final solution of the Jewish question “.
The Holocaust not only profoundly affected the countries where Nazi crimes were committed, but it also affected many other parts of the world.
To honor the victims of Nazism, numerous museums and monuments were inaugurated around the world, including the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Museum of Jewish Legacy and the Holocaust in Moscow.
Celebration
The General Assembly of the United Nations established November 1, 2005, in resolution 60/7 to designate January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust . The resolution was devised by Australia, the US, Israel, Canada, Russia and Ukraine, and produced together with more than 90 states.
