Holocaust Remembrance Day honours victims of genocides

(Vatican Radio) ‘Don’t stand by’ is the theme for the 2016 Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated every year on January 27th to recall the day that Soviet forces arrived to liberate prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Over 70 years on, events are being organised in countries around the world to honour the victims of the Nazi’s final solution and other genocides which have taken place since then.

Philippa Hitchen reports: 

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron announced today that a planned national memorial to Holocaust victims will be built next to the parliament building in central London, while U.S. President Barack Obama marked the day by honoring two Americans and two Poles who risked their lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust.

At a meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) last week, the Holy See delegate said Holocaust Remembrance Day “calls for a universal and ever deeper respect for the dignity of every person.”

The Vatican diplomat,  Monsignor Janusz Urbańczyk, said the day “serves as a warning to prevent us from yielding to ideologies that justify contempt for human dignity”. While remembering all the victims of the Shoah, he said it’s also an opportunity to honour all those men, women and children who continue to suffer at the hands of those motivated by hatred and violence.

At Auschwitz today dozens of elderly concentration camp survivors carried candles and wreaths at a commemoration attended by the Polish and Croatian presidents.

Alberto Mieli is one Italian Jewish Holocaust survivor, who has been recounting his experience to students in schools and universities, as a way of honouring the memory of his family and friends who never came back from the camps.

He described to us the horrors of seeing Nazi soldiers snatch young babies and throw them into the air, shooting at them for target practice. Mieli said it’s important for young people today to know exactly what happened and to understand how such killing became normal practice.  

But Mieli said he also tells stories of great solidarity from those war years, as neighbours saved his eight brothers and sisters from the Nazis, hiding them and caring for them like their own children.