Holocaust Remembrance Day – why we must never forget

January 27 has been designated by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date was chosen because, on January 27, 1945, the infamous Nazi German slave labor and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by the Soviet army.

The camp, actually it was a complex of camps and work sites, was the destination for more than 1.3 million people arrested, deported, and enslaved by Hitler’s regime. Beyond imagination, an estimated 1.1 million were murdered there, of whom one million were Jews from across Europe and one hundred thousand were primarily Soviet prisoners of war, Polish Catholics, and Roma.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was not the only killing site. Other camps included Belzec, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Sobibor, and Treblinka. In all, an estimated six million Jews, or two-thirds of European Jewry, were exterminated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, whether in camps, forced marches, round-ups, or other killing sites, such as Babi Yar, a ravine in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine.

'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign at the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz  in Oswiecim, Poland. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The Holocaust defies imagination. Its aim was the Endlösung, or Final Solution, of the Jewish people. In pursuit of this goal, a new alphabet of genocide was created — from A for Auschwitz to Z for Zyklon-b, the nerve gas used in the gas chambers.