The 2010 observance of the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust marked on January 27 will focus on a central theme: “The Legacy of Survival", which emphasizes the universal lessons that the survivors will pass on to succeeding generations. With fewer survivors alive to tell their stories, it is of primary importance to share this legacy with people everywhere to encourage respect for diversity and human rights for generations to come.
“The theme of this year’s commemoration at United Nations offices around the world is the legacy of survival. Countless men, women and children suffered the horrors of the ghettos and Nazi death camps, yet somehow survived. All of them carry a crucial message for all of us. A message about the triumph of the human spirit. A living testament that tyranny, though it may rise, will surely not prevail. Survivors also play a vital role in keeping the lessons of the Holocaust alive for future generations,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his message.
“Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most notorious of the camps, was liberated 65 years ago today. There and elsewhere, many millions of people were systematically abused and murdered. Most of them were Jews. But others were targeted, too. At Auschwitz, thousands of those killed were inhabitants of the Roma and Sinti “family camp”.
Holocaust survivors will not be with us forever ‑ but the legacy of their survival must live on. We must preserve their stories ‑ through memorials, through education, most of all through robust efforts to prevent genocide and other grave crimes.
The United Nations is fully committed to this cause. Together, let us pledge to carry forward the mission of Holocaust remembrance ‑ and uphold human dignity for all.”
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries. It was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece. The Wannsee Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their "final solution of the Jewish question" in England and Ireland.
