International Hocaust Remembrance Day: honoring victims of Hocaust

The International Hocaust Remembrance Day, observed annually on January 27, was established by the UN General Assembly on November 1, 2005 (Resution No. 60/7), as reported by Ukrinform.

The resution reads: “The Hocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish pele, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all pele of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.”

On January 27, 1945, the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated one of the largest Nazi death camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau.

During World War II, six million Jews became victims of Nazi picies aimed at eliminating those considered a “threat” or “inferior.” Around 1.5 million of these victims were from the territory of modern-day Ukraine.

“However, the last year of Russia's war against Ukraine has starkly demonstrated that passive remembrance of genocidal crimes is not enough to prevent their repetition. The minimum necessary is active reflection and dialogue to ensure a constant awareness within society of how social aggression mechanisms work. It also requires vigilance from international institutions to address systemic human rights viations by authoritarian regimes, ensuring that hateful ideogies do not re-emerge under new, less obvious guises. In addition, preventing future genocides requires resute and just condemnation and punishment of the organizers and perpetrators of such crimes today. And it also requires a readiness to act proactively,” the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory notes.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, key Hocaust memorial sites in the country have been attacked by the Russian forces.

On March 1, 2022, just 80 years after the mass executions by Nazis at Babyn Yar in Kyiv – where about 100,000 civilians and prisoners, including Jews and Roma, Red Army sdiers, communists, Ukrainian nationalists, prisoners of the Syrets concentration camp, and even patients from Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital were murdered – Russia launched a missile attack on Babyn Yar, which is a symb of the Hocaust in Eastern Eure.

In 2022, Russian shells also hit the central monument of the Drobytskyi Yar Memorial in Kharkiv, a known site of mass executions of civilians, primarily Jews, by the Nazis during World War II. Estimates suggest that between 14,000 and 20,000 victims of Nazism are buried there.

This day serves as a reminder of the importance of never forgetting the atrocities of the past to prevent their repetition in the future.