Editorial: Remembering the horror of the Nazi holocaust, when millions of Jews lost their lives
International Holocaust Remembrance Day was commemorated around the world yesterday, including in Northern Ireland.
Holocaust survivors and politicians were among the people commemorating the date, which is observed on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps.
The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration.
At the memorial site of Auschwitz, located in an area of southern Poland that was under German occupation during the Second World War, former prisoners laid flowers and wreaths at a wall where German forces executed thousands of prisoners.
Nazi German forces killed some 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and others. The camp was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27 1945.
In all, millions of Jews were killed in the Holocaust — in ghettos, concentration camps and often shot at close range in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe.
A launch of Mark Scott’s history of the family of Charlie Warmington – the much-loved News Letter writer who died in November – was delayed due to the bad weather. It will be held at a later date.
Only later in life did Charlie begin to discover the details of what happened to his partly Jewish ancestors in Nazi Austria – his grandfather was murdered, while his mother escaped to Northern Ireland as a child. We will be reporting more on that book in the coming weeks.
The holocaust is still marked so prominently because it was so horrifying as to be almost hard to believe – and there are no shortage of bad people who try then to pretend it did not happen. But it did, which is why we must never forget it.