This last January 27, 2010, 700 people gathered at Auschwitz, which is the site of the former Nazi’s camp. I wanted to write about this event because I think it’s important that people don’t forget this huge genocide. That’s why this week I have decided to write about that day.
The Remembrance Day has been established by the United Nations in 2005 as a global day of commemoration, and this year is the known as the 65th anniversary of liberation. Journalists reported that the remaining survivors and other people, who were there to honor the million victims, walked among the barracks. They were thinking of the 1.1 million people killed in that camp in the gas chambers, and the one who died from starvation, disease, forced and inhuman labor, or even from medical experiments. In an overall speech, they were thinking of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. This whole reunion was organized by the European Jewish Congress. This congress has collected support from numerous presidents. Barrack Obama was part of the support since he spoke of that day as a “sacred duty to remember the cruelty” of Auschwitz. The French president Nicolas Sarkozy even said that “ Auschwitz is the symbol of absolute evil that remains seared on the human conscience”. So here, we can see the good impact news can have on people because they allow us remembering such horrifying acts.
The Congress used this event to once again remind us the tragic history saying that the Nazis opened that Auschwitz as a concentration camp in the summer of 1940. Even if its primer goal was not to be the house of detention and murder of Jews, Auschwitz became a huge detention camp because of its location. So, the plan to kill all European Jews, also know as the Final Solution, occurred there. Several articles revealed that only 7,000 survivors when the camp was liberated, unfortunately nazis had evacuated 60,000 jews several days before the soviet arrival. Some of the survivors are still alive today and were at the Auschwitz some days ago.
Talking about this event in the news is a really important thing because that prevents the Holocaust to be forgotten by the younger generations. Indeed, humanity has to remember this because this is the real illustration of what humans are able to do. Also, this illustrates what racism can engender… Everyone has to be aware that differences are not always accepted, and that creates stereotypes and murders… Unfortunately, racism still exists since during that day nazis people have profaned a jewish cemetery in France.
