Today – January 27 – International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Exactly this day in 1945 the Red Army liberated the prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest death camp in occupied Europe, in Auschwitz (on the territory of Poland), which became a terrible symbol of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes in World War II. It is deeply symbolic that the camp was liberated by the 1st unit of the Ukrainian Front under the command of Major Anatoly Shapiro, a Ukrainian Jew, a native of Kharkiv Oblast.
The tragedy of the Holocaust is an integral part of the national history and memory of Ukraine. It was on Ukrainian soil that the Nazis and their accomplices took the lives of more than 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews. Declaring January 27 as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the UN General Assembly called on member states to develop educational programs so that future generations preserve the memory of this tragedy in order to prevent acts of genocide in the future.
Ukraine suffered other genocides on its long-suffering land - the Holodomor of 1932-1933, the extermination of the Roma during World War II, the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people, and a modern tragedy: the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine recognized the actions of the armed forces of the Russian Federation and its political and military leadership during the last phase of armed aggression, which began on February 24, 2022, with the genocide of the Ukrainian people.
We invite you to watch the address of the director of “Tkuma” Institute, Dr. Igor Shchupak, regarding the content of commemorating the Holocaust Remembrance Day and the lessons that humanity did (not) learn from that tragedy.