January 27: The UN Commemorates the Holocaust

The United Nations established this date as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005, with a General Assembly Resolution (60/7) that rejected “any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or part,” commended “those States which have actively engaged in preserving those sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labour camps and prisons during the Holocaust,” and condemned “without reserve all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur.” January 27th is the date the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. This complex of labor and death camps was located 37 miles west of Crakow near the German-Polish border. The Soviet troops found only 7,000 inmates remaining; 60,000 had been forcibly evacuated by the Nazis several days earlier. At least 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, and at least 1.1 million were murdered there.

“In the last barrack, which was for children, there were only two children left alive, and they began yelling, ‘We are not Jews, we are not Jews!’ It turned out that they were Jews, but were afraid they were going to be taken to the gas chambers. Our medical workers took them out of the barracks to be washed and fed.” — Anatoly Shapiro, a Jewish officer who the led the first battalion of Soviet troops into Auschwitz