On 27 January we pay tribute to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and reaffirm its unwavering commitment to counter antisemitism, racism, and other forms of intolerance that may lead to group-targeted violence. The date marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945. It was officially proclaimed International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust by the United Nations General Assembly.
The Holocaust profoundly affected ...
countries in which Nazi crimes were perpetrated, but also had universal implications and consequences in many other parts of the world. Member States share a collective responsibility for maintaining effective remembrance policies, caring for historic sites, and promoting education, documentation and research. This responsibility entails educating about the causes, consequences and dynamics of such crimes so as to strengthen the resilience of young people against ideologies of hatred.
The tragedy of the Holocaust, symbolically summarized in the name of Auschwitz, caused six million lives among the Jews, but the ferocity extended to other groups, from Slavs to Gypsies, to homosexuals, to Jehovah's Witnesses, and Italy also paid a very high price.
The Memory Day brings the thought to other violence, from gulag to sinkholes, and to other genocides, from the one of the Armenians in the early twentieth century to the many African feuds up to today's religious fanaticism. The Memory Day focuses on the horrors of Nazism, but it is also an invitation not to forget other violence, past and present. (F.d’A.)
If this is a man ...
by Primo Levi
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you
One day they came to take me
by Bertolt Brecht
“First of all, they came to take the gypsies
and I was happy because they pilfered.
Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing,
because they were unpleasant to me.
Then they came to take homosexuals,
and I was relieved, because they were annoying me.
Then they came to take the Communists,
and I said nothing because I was not a Communist.
One day they came to take me,
and there was nobody left to protest.
