Remembering Evil: International Holocaust Remembrance Day

On November 1, 2005, the United Nations Genera Assembly declared through an official resolution that January 27 is to become the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day, every member country of the United Nations is required to commemorate the effect of the evil that befell more than a million Jews. This day is to stand witness for all time, about the culpability that humans are capable of inflicting on their fellow humans.

The Preconditions of the Nazi Holocaust

There was a standing prejudice against Jews even before WWII. There were publications printed calling the Germans to ostracize the Jews. Aside from the deeply seated prejudice against the Jews, there was also a belief that the economically inferior class to which most Jews in Europe belonged just needed to be eradicated to get rid of poverty. Moreover, most of the Germans were also indifferent to the plight of the Jews and were disinclined to protest their government’s treatment of them.

The Holocaust

What was so horribly incredible about the Holocaust was the systematic extermination that went above and beyond mere prejudice. The whole Holocaust bespoke of a deeply rooted belief in the Nazi Germans’ supremacy and the extreme inferiority of the Jews. The Holocaust, for the Nazis, was merely cleaning up dirt off the streets, nothing more and nothing less.

The Nazis had six extermination camps in all were the Jews and other members of small minorities were held, imprisoned and killed. The largest of these camps was the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In these camps, the elderly and the children were gassed immediately and the physically stronger Jews were worked to their deaths.

Before the massive killings in concentration camps, Hitler’s army first had Jews concentrated in ghettos. They did this all over Eastern Europe. At the height of Hitler’s power, racial extermination began by wiping out ghettos then bringing survivors to the woods and killing all of them with firing squads. Trailing Hitler’s armies were small commandos specially designated to exterminate all Jews along the path taken by Hitler’s forces.

In the end, the Nazis conferred with each other and decided that they needed to remove all trace of the Jews and began the construction of the extermination camps. The Jews were collected into these camps to become a ready source of human labor. The camps were also designed with gas chambers to readily facilitate Jewish extermination.

The Significance of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day

January 27 was marked in history as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day because on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops reached the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to liberate the pitifully small number of Jews still surviving there. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was the last such facility in existence at that time.

This event brought home to the international public the atrocities committed by humans to their fellow humans. It is important that the Holocaust be remembered in case we forget that prejudices, however harmless they seem at the beginning, can become the beginning of another extermination effort, something that the Holocaust has proven we are capable of doing.