Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day
On November 1, 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 60/7, which states that “The Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one-third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice...”. This document declared January 27 Holocaust Remembrance Day.
According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, on this day in 1945, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. This camp has become a symbol of Nazi crimes in the modern world.
The Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi-occupied territory of the USSR differed from similar events in Europe. There, Jews were forced into ghettos and eventually could be sent to places of mass extermination in gas chambers. On the Ukrainian lands, most of the Jewish population died from bullets in anti-tank pits dug by prisoners of war, local residents, or the victims themselves.
It should be noted that the Holocaust is translated from Greek as “a sacrifice consumed by fire” and means the systematic persecution and extermination (genocide) of Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during 1933-1945. In a broader sense, the Holocaust is the systematic persecution and extermination of people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, or genetic type as inferior and harmful.
It is officially recognized that up to 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, of which 2.2 to 2.5 million were killed on the territory of the former Soviet Union.
As is well known, immediately after the occupation of Ukraine, the Nazis set up a wide network of ghettos (with the largest one in Lviv) and later began massacring the Jewish population. Although one of the largest and most infamous was the shootings at Babyn Yar in Kyiv, the extermination of the Jews of Ukraine was systematic and widespread.
On this day, the international community honors the victims of hateful policies and demonstrates its commitment to combating anti-Semitism, racism, and all other forms of intolerance that can lead to targeted violence against a particular group of people.
