January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Established by the UN General Assembly in 2005, the day aims to pay tribute to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism.

For this occasion, the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) each year comes up with initiatives to broaden awareness of the Holocaust and this year LSM is joining the initiaitive with a range of materials provided in Latvian, English, Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian.  

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the biggest Nazi Concentration Camp and extermination center. Between 1940 and 1945 about one million Jews and 100,000 members of other ethnicities were killed there. It was just one of a huge network of Nazi death camps.

The methodical extermination at Auschwitz lasted until the very end of the camp's operation. On January 18, only a few days before the Red Army entered the Camp’s gates, the evacuation began: nearly 60,000 prisoners were forced to go on a death march and about 15,000 died.

Auschwitz is a symbol of the Holocaust, but this unprecedented crime against humanity took place wherever the influence of the Third Reich reached. As a result of the Shoah, nearly 6 million Jews lost their lives, of which about half are victims of different concentration and extermination camps.

In order to broaden awareness of the Holocaust, during this year's information campaign the following educational materials and academic research are being presented:

• A short animated film Memento for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day;
• A short film Righteous Diplomacy (2021) dedicated to diplomats who played an important role in saving thousands of Jews during the Second World War. The film is part of educational package Diplomats Aiding Jews on Hi-story Lessons, an online educational platform;
• An educational package on the subject, which includes three lesson plans and a teacher's guide. Lessons based on the suggested scenarios will include questions on human nature, attitudes and mechanisms of people’s behaviour in extreme conditions,  as well as the will to survive and the power of resistance against evil;
• A guide of the travelling exhibition Between Life and Death. Stories of Rescue during the Holocaust, which tells the hidden stories of the selfless courage and incredible efforts made to save the lives of Jews, during the Second World War;
• An interview with one of the heroes of the above mentioned exhibition – Elżbieta Ficowska, and a piece on her love to both of her mothers In the name of both mothers;
• Carol Elias’s article on the Holocaust and Diaspora Survival: The Next Generations. Past, Present, Future and Roman Żuchowicz’s material introducing the subject of The Wannsee Conference, a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders to discuss the implementation of the “final solution to the Jewish question”;
• An interactive map of the Wannsee Conference;
• A performance by participants of this year’s edition of the Sound in the Silence project, based on the knowledge and experiences they gathered during the visits to memorial sites, recalling the voices of both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust, as well as youth’s reflections on experiencing history through art;
• Video recordings and other materials from the conference Genealogies of Memory 2020. The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives (2020);
• An issue of Remembrance And Solidarity. Studies in 20th Century European History on the subject of the Holocaust/Shoah (2016).

More information on this year's International Holocaust Remembrance Day campaign can be found here.