World pauses to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day

WARSAW, Poland — Holocaust survivors, politicians, and regular people commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, gathering at somber events across Europe and beyond to reflect on Nazi Germany’s killing of millions of people.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed across each year on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps. The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration.

“The attempt, carried out by Nazi Germany, to erase the Jews from the face of Europe encapsulates, in an emblematic way, all the evil that human beings are capable of committing when they allow themselves to be infected — out of superficiality, indifference, cowardice, or self-interest — by the virus of hatred, racism, and oppression,” Italian President Sergio Mattarella said in a gathering with survivors in Rome.

At Auschwitz, located in an area of southern Poland which was under German occupation during World War II, Polish President Karol Nawrocki joined survivors for a remembrance ceremony that ended with Jewish and Christian clergy reciting prayers.

Bernard Offen, a 96-year-old survivor told participants that in today’s world he sees “signs I know too well.”

“I see hatred resurgent. I see violence beginning to be justified once again,” Offen said. “I see people who believe their anger is more valuable than another human life. I say this because I am an old man who has seen where indifference leads to. And I say this because I believe that — I truly believe — that we can choose differently.”

Nazi German forces killed some 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma, and others. The camp was liberated by the Soviet army on Jan. 27, 1945. In all, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust — in ghettos, concentration camps, and shot at close range in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe.

In the heart of Berlin, candles burned at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs which honors the 6 million victims and stands as a powerful symbol of Germany’s remorse.

Other countries are still struggling to come to terms with the complicity of their ancestors. Mattarella condemned the complicity of ordinary Italians in the fascist-era racial laws, which persecuted Italy’s Jewish community, and deportation of its Jews.

As in recent years, Russia representatives were not invited to the observances at Auschwitz due to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Pavel Jelinek, a 90-year-old survivor from the city of Liberec — a Czech city with a prewar Jewish population of 1,350 — told those gathered in the upper house of the Czech Parliament that he was now the last living of the 37 Jews who returned to the city after the war.

There are an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors still alive globally, down from 220,000 a year ago, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Their median age is 87, and nearly all — some 97% — are “child survivors” who were born 1928 and later, the group said.

Though the world’s community of survivors is shrinking, some are still telling their stories for the first time after all these years.

In Britain, King Charles and Queen Camilla held a reception for survivors. A Holocaust survivor also addressed the British Cabinet in what Prime Minister Keir Starmer described as a first. Government members wiped away tears as 95-year-old Mala Tribich described how Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 destroyed her childhood.

She recalled being forced into hard labor at the age of 12 as the first Nazi ghetto was established in her hometown of Piotrkow Trybunalski, and spoke of the hunger, disease and suffering there. The Nazis killed her mother, father, and sister. She was sent to Ravensbrück and then to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated by the British Army in April 1945.

She urged the Cabinet members to fight antisemitism — and to remember.

“Soon, there will be no eyewitnesses left,” she told them. “That is why I ask you today not just to listen, but to become my witness.”

Many leaders also reflected on the upheaval in today’s world.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, warned about rising antisemitism and new threats. She noted that AI-generated content is now being used “to blur the line between fact and fiction, distort historical truth, and undermine our collective memory.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country has been under attack from Russia for four years, said that just as the world united to defeat the Nazis in 1945, it “must act the same way now.”

“Whenever hatred and war threaten nations, unity that saves lives is needed,” Zelensky said.