Today, Saturday January 27th the United Nations General Assembly designated this date January 27th; the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution.
The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.
The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas, in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Only a few Holocaust perpetrators faced criminal trials.
Sadly, at this present time here in Ireland and indeed world wide, we are witnessing the alarming rise of anti-Semitism. Indeed it is now more important than ever for us to recognize the critical lessons of Holocaust history, as we commemorate, today, the victims and honour those who survived.
“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.“ – Quotes by Bertrand Arthur William Russell, (British mathematician, philosopher and public intellectual).
If we want to live in a better world, we start now; by not discriminating against our fellow man any more.
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