On 27 January, on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi concentration camp, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated. For this occasion, the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and the House of the Wannsee Conference have prepared a short animated film entitled “Memento”, directed by the Hungarian auteur Zoltán Szilágyi Varga. The short spot is available on the organisers’ websites and it will also be shown across European TV channels. We would like to invite your institution to join our commemorative event by sharing this film on your internet platforms.
The half-a-minute-long spot based on charcoal drawings recalls one of the most tragic events in human history. As its director Zoltán Szilágyi Varga says, when trying to grapple with the Holocaust “we stand in front of human nature’s distortion without any answer despite all the research we know, the number of victims counted, the exact description of the events.” The film evokes symbolism which is easily recognised by Europeans: cattle railway cars, railway tracks, paper snippets or abandoned flats, yet it shows them from a child’s perspective, thereby posing the question whether it is possible to comprehend that tragedy and stressing the need to uphold the memory of those days.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day was designated as such by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 in order to make future generations sensitive to the tragedy of the Holocaust and so prevent in that way any future acts of genocide. The Day is commemorated on 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi concentration camp, the site that witnessed the carnage of at least a million of Hungarian, Polish, French, Czech, Slovak and Greek Jews as well as those from other countries, and around a hundred twenty thousand other prisoners (Poles, Roma, Soviet captives and others). The European Network Remembrance and Solidarity wishes to be involved in activities commemorating the Day in public awareness.
The partners of the campaign include such institutions as: the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Site and Museum, the Berlin-based Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Warsaw-based POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe.