People across Europe and the wider world paused on Tuesday to solemnly commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a global moment of reflection on the systematic murder of millions by Nazi Germany and its attempt to eradicate Jewish life from the continent.
A Day of Global Significance
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed worldwide each year on January 27th. This date marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by Soviet forces in 1945. The United Nations General Assembly formally established this annual commemoration through a resolution adopted in 2005, ensuring the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten.
Ceremonies Across Europe
In Berlin, candles flickered at dawn at the city's vast Holocaust memorial, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate, where white roses were also placed, stands as a powerful symbol of Germany's remorse for the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust.
At the Auschwitz memorial site in Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II, former prisoners gathered to lay flowers and wreaths at the Execution Wall. This was the location where German forces murdered thousands, predominantly Poles. Later, Polish President Karol Nawrocki was scheduled to join survivors for a remembrance ceremony at the nearby Birkenau site, the vast area where Jews were transported from across Europe to be exterminated in gas chambers.
Nazi German forces murdered approximately 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, the vast majority of whom were Jews, alongside Poles, Roma, and others.
National Observances and a Shrinking Community
Commemorations were also held at the United Nations and across various European nations. Germany, the nation responsible for inflicting war and genocide upon its neighbours, planned a parliamentary commemoration in the Bundestag on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, a sobering new report highlights the diminishing community of those who lived through this atrocity. According to information released by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors remain alive globally. This figure is down from approximately 220,000 survivors estimated just a year earlier. The group notes that nearly all of them—around 97%—are "child survivors" born in 1928 or later. Despite the passage of time, some survivors are still sharing their harrowing stories for the first time.
It is important to note that Israel observes its own Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom HaShoah, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, a day that emphasises Jewish resistance.
Dutch National Commemoration
In the Netherlands, the National Holocaust Memorial Day was marked on the preceding Sunday with a silent march through Amsterdam's historic Jewish quarter. The procession culminated at a memorial dedicated to Auschwitz victims in Wertheim Park. Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema addressed hundreds of attendees at the sombre event.
"Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Auschwitz—they are unprecedented and still incomprehensible examples of what intolerance, hatred, and racism can lead to. Unparalleled in history," she stated. The Dutch commemoration is held annually on the last Sunday of January.
