HOLOCAUST Memorial Day remembers the genocide of millions of Jews and other victims during the Second World War at the hands of the Nazis.
The poignant theme for 2021 is to "be the light in the darkness".
When is Holocaust Memorial Day 2021?
Holocaust Memorial Day is marked on Wednesday, January 27.
This day registers the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, at the end of the Second World War, in 1945.
Early in the war, most prisoners were Poles, rounded up by the occupying German forces.
Later, Auschwitz was transformed into a mass killing site for Jews, Roma and others, operating until the liberation by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.
The international day remembers the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah – which means "destruction" in Hebrew – took place between 1941 and 1945.
The genocide saw Jews targeted – while Romani people, ethnic Poles, Soviet citizens, Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses were also slaughtered.
Any group which did not match the behaviour of the prescribed norms was targeted.
The Nazis were the orchestrators of the Holocaust.
How will it be marked in the UK and US?
In the UK, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) is "encouraging remembrance in a world scarred by genocide".
The UK Holocaust Memorial Day 2021 ceremony will be streamed online from 7pm-8pm for the trust's first digital commemoration.
At 8pm, Brits are asked to "Light the Darkness".
"Households across the UK will be lighting candles and putting them in their windows to remember those who were murdered for who they were, and to stand against prejudice and hatred today," says the trust.
Follow #HolocaustMemorialDay or #LightTheDarkness on Twitter.
AMERICA
In the US, people will take part in the International Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemoration.
This happens on Wednesday, January 27, from 1pm ET.
During the ceremony, leaders from the US and Europe will join Holocaust survivors "in conveying the urgent responsibility we all share to protect the lessons and legacy of Holocaust history and to defend the truth," says the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Share reflections on social media using #WeRemember
For the first time, the United Nations and UNESCO will jointly organise a series of events.
These are being held in partnership with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, to mark the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Because of the Covid pandemic, they are restricted to online events.
These include a commemoration ceremony on January 27, and a panel discussion on Holocaust denial and distortion, being broadcast by UNTV and CNN.
Watch the event live: Twitter – Facebook – YouTube
What atrocities are remembered on Holocaust Memorial Day?
The Nazis established killing centres for efficient mass murder, writes the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Unlike Nazi concentration camps, which served mainly as detention and labour centres, killing centres – also referred to as “extermination camps” or “death camps” – were almost exclusively “death factories".
At these death zones, Nazi officials employed assembly-line methods to murder Jews and other victims.
The largest killing centre was Auschwitz-Birkenau, which by spring 1943 had four gas chambers in operation.
At the height of the deportations, an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) using Zyklon B, a poisonous gas.
Prisoners who were not gassed in chambers died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, beatings or were killed during horrific medical experiments.
In the second half of 1941, SS doctors selected Auschwitz prisoners, and put to death those prisoners they regarded as unfit for labour because of exhaustion or sickness.
They killed these prisoners by lethal injection of phenol to the heart, or sent them to the gas chamber at Auschwitz Concentration Camp – which opened in former Polish army barracks in June 1940.
Between 1942-1944, as part of the “final solution of the Jewish question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage), Auschwitz served as the largest Nazi centre for the annihilation of the Jewish population in European countries occupied by and allied to the Third Reich.
At least 1.1million people including more than 200,000 children and young people, were killed in the gas chambers immediately or soon after arrival at Auschwitz during this time.
These deportees included many figures from Jewish intellectual life – scholars and artists – explains the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
"Authorities there treated Jews with the most ruthless, and often quite refined, cruelty. SS men regarded a Jewish life as the least valuable of all," it adds.
Numerous German physicians took part in criminal medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners.
Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Grawitz and Wolfram Sievers are infamous names connected to atrocities committed during barbaric tests.
Carl Clauberg used a chemical irritant to block women's fallopian tubes in mass sterilisation tests that killed some of his captive subjects, explains the Jewish Virtual Library.
Fellow evil doctor Josef Mengele was keen to see how long a newborn baby could survive without food.
One of his victims, Ruth Elias, gave birth to a "beautiful big blonde girl" in Auschwitz, "but Mengele ordered that my breast be bound".
After several days of watching her baby suffer, the starving infant was injected with an overdose of morphine to kill her.
The SS considered the killing centres top secret.
To obliterate all traces of gassing operations, special prisoner units were forced to remove corpses from the gas chambers and cremate them.
The grounds of some killing centres were then landscaped or camouflaged to disguise the murder of millions, adds the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In 1945, when Allied troops entered the concentration camps, they discovered piles of corpses, bones, and human ashes – testimony to Nazi mass murder.
Soldiers also found thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish survivors suffering from starvation and disease.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, more than 250,000 survivors found shelter in displaced persons camps run by the Allied powers and the United Nations Refugee and Rehabilitation Administration in Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Years after being rescued from Auschwitz, and transported to a new life in America, Madeline Deutsch recalled her traumatic existence at the camp as a teen snatched from a Hungarian ghetto.
She described being utterly terrified by "the beatings, the killings, the dead people that were taken off the train… and the dogs that were released and [would] jump on the people…and tear them apart."
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