World pauses to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Candles flickered at dawn on Tuesday at the vast Holocaust memorial in Berlin as people across Europe and beyond paused to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, reflecting on Nazi Germany’s murder of millions of people and its attempt to completely wipe out Jewish life on the continent.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed across the world on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet forces of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration.

At the memorial site of Auschwitz, in an area which was under German occupation during World War II, former prisoners laid flowers and wreaths at the Execution Wall, where German forces murdered thousands of people, most of them Poles. Later in the day, Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki will join survivors for a remembrance ceremony at Birkenau, the vast site nearby where Jews were transported from across Europe to be exterminated in gas chambers.

Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and others.

Commemorations on the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation by the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945, were also taking place across Europe on Tuesday, as well as at the United Nations. Germany, the nation that inflicted war and genocide on its neighbours, is holding a commemoration in the Bundestag, the parliament, on Wednesday.

Candles burned, and white roses were placed at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 grey concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honours the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. The vast site in the heart of the capital underlines Germany’s remorse.

Israel marks its Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, which stresses Jewish resistance to the Nazi terror.

There are an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors still alive globally, down from the 220,000 survivors estimated to be alive a year earlier, according to new information released by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Nearly all of them - some 97 per cent - are “child survivors” who were born in 1928 and later, the group said.

Though the world’s community of survivors shrinks with time, some are still telling their stories for the first time after all these years.

On Sunday, the Netherlands marked its National Holocaust Memorial Day with a silent march through Amsterdam’s historic Jewish quarter to a memorial to Auschwitz victims. Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema spoke to hundreds of people who attended the sombre event.

“Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Auschwitz - they are unprecedented and still incomprehensible examples of what intolerance, hatred, and racism can lead to. Unparalleled in history,” she said. The Dutch commemoration happens each year on the last Sunday in January at the Wertheim Park in Amsterdam.