On 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration Camp, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated.
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, including Poles, Roma as well as Soviet captives, were killed. 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 crossed the Camp’s gates, the evacuation began: nearly 60,000 prisoners were forced to go on the 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.
We invite you to watch a short animation ‘Memento’ (2016) prepared on this occasion by Hungarian artist and director Zoltán Szilágyi Varga