January 27th has been established as the International Day of Remembrance for its Victims Holocaust. “Today and every day, let us resolve never again to remain silent in the face of evil and to always defend the dignity and rights of all” was the message of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

“We must never forget or allow others to forget, distort or deny the Holocaust. By remembering the Holocaust, we recognize the threats to freedom, dignity and humanity in our own time too,” he says.

Regarding the significance of today’s day, he states that we honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. “We remember the six million Jews, children, women and men, as well as the Roma and Sindi, the disabled and the countless others who perished. We think of the millions of lives whose thread was cut prematurely, the future of millions of people that was lost,” he says in particular.

“As we mourn the loss of so many and so much, we also recognize that the Holocaust was not inevitable. It is no genocide, it was the culmination of millennia of anti-Semitic hatred, he notes.

More specifically, it states that the Nazi they were able to move with calculated cruelty from the discrimination against the Jews of Europe to their extermination because so few rose up and so many stood by them. “It was the deafening silence – both at home and abroad – that encouraged them. The alarm bells were ringing from the start. There was hate speech and misinformation. Contempt for human rights and the rule of law. Apotheosis of violence and stories of racial superiority. Contempt for democracy and diversity” he characteristically points out.