Remembrance Day. The Holocaust: how people were exterminated and why the world should not forget it
Kyiv • UNN
January 27 marks the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which coincides with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. This date commemorates the 6 million Jews and other groups exterminated by the Nazi regime.
On January 27, the world commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day – one of the most tragic pages in 20th-century history. On this day in 1945, the anti-Hitler coalition forces liberated the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oświęcim), which became a symbol of the mass extermination of people and the inhumane cruelty of the Nazi regime. This date was officially approved by the UN General Assembly in 2005 as a day of international remembrance, so that humanity would never forget crimes against humanity and prevent their recurrence.
What is the Holocaust and how did it begin?
The Holocaust refers to the systematic persecution and extermination of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. However, the victims of Nazi genocide policy also included Roma, people with disabilities, political prisoners, LGBTQ+ individuals, Slavs, and other groups deemed "undesirable" by the regime.
The ideological basis of the Holocaust was the racial theory of Nazism, which proclaimed the "superiority of the Aryan race" and dehumanized Jews and a number of other peoples. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany began to adopt discriminatory laws that restricted the rights of Jews. They were forbidden to hold public office, study at universities, or own businesses. Subsequently, these oppressions escalated into open repression, pogroms, and violence.
Concentration camps and "death factories"
During the war, Nazi Germany established a network of concentration camps throughout occupied Europe. Initially, they were used to detain political opponents of the regime, but later became an instrument of mass extermination of people.
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The most infamous death camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bełżec, Majdanek, and Chełmno. In these places, people were killed in gas chambers, shot, starved, or forced into exhausting forced labor. According to various estimates, over 1 million people, mostly Jews, died in Auschwitz alone.
In total, approximately six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust – about two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe at that time.
The Holocaust in Ukraine
Ukraine became one of the main sites of mass killings of Jews during the Nazi occupation. Here, crimes were often committed not in camps, but through mass shootings in ravines, forests, and on the outskirts of cities and villages.
The most famous symbol of the tragedy in Ukraine is Babyn Yar in Kyiv, where in September 1941, over 33,000 Jews were shot by the Nazis in two days. Over the following years, tens of thousands of people of various nationalities died in Babyn Yar.
Similar mass executions took place in Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Rivne, and hundreds of other settlements. According to historians, about 1.5 million Jews were killed on the territory of modern Ukraine.
Resistance and Rescue
Despite the brutality of the Nazi regime, there were those who tried to resist and rescue the doomed. In many European countries, people hid Jews in their homes, helping them escape from ghettos and camps.
Among those who helped were thousands of Ukrainians. They, risking their own lives and the lives of their families, helped save others from extermination. This reminds us that even in the darkest times, humanity is capable of overcoming fear.
Why is Holocaust remembrance important today?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is not only a remembrance of the past but also a warning for the future. The Holocaust became possible due to a combination of hatred, propaganda, indifference, and society's silent consent to violence.
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Ukraine and the commemoration of memory
Every year on January 27, Ukraine holds commemorative events, history lessons, and lays flowers at memorials to the victims of Nazism. The state and public organizations work to preserve mass graves and document historical evidence.
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Honoring the victims of the Holocaust is an important part of Ukraine's national memory, as the tragedy affected millions of people on our land and became a shared pain for many nations.
Lessons of history for all humanity
The Holocaust showed the catastrophic consequences that an ideology of hatred and devaluation of human life can lead to. It is a reminder that democracy, freedom of speech, and respect for diversity require constant protection.
January 27 is a day of sorrow and responsibility to remember, to tell the truth about the past, and to do everything possible to ensure that such tragedies never happen again.