prijava
SARAJEVO, January 27 (FENA) - The 78th anniversary of the liberation of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp for Jews and the International Holocaust Remembrance Day were marked today in Sarajevo with a prayer for the dead, a commemorative academy and a reminder of the six million Jews who were tortured to death in WWII.
This date was chosen as International Holocaust Remembrance Day because on January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they found 7,000 survivors. It was the end of one of the worst crimes of genocide in human history.
The Nazis built the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland with the clear intention of exterminating all Jews in Europe as per the idea of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Prisoners were brought by trains to concentration camps from all over Europe, then they were put in gas chambers, and their corpses were burned.
The president of the Jewish community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jakob Finci, said that it was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, which ended with the liberation of all the camps.
In his address to those gathered at the commemorative academy, he recalled the horrors to which the Jews were exposed, and after the end of those terrible tortures, they said never again, but genocide happened again in Cambodia, Rwanda, South Sudan, but also in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Almost 60 years have passed since the Holocaust when the United Nations unanimously decided in 2005 to mark January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The hazzan of the Sarajevo synagogue, Igor Kožemjakin, believes that remembering the Holocaust is not only important, but also necessary, because it is the only way to prevent future crimes, because we learned nothing from the Holocaust, about which very little was learned. That is why it is important to educate future generations and warn that the Holocaust was intended to remove an entire people from all of Europe.
At the commemorative academy, the head of the Delegation of the European Union to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Johann Sattler, also spoke, saying that the Holocaust is the darkest point in the history of humanity, adding that it cannot be stopped talking about it, especially not now when a large number of European countries are witnessing increased anti-Semitism.
- This reminds us of the importance of maintaining vigilance and preventing the growth of anti-Semitism and opposing the denial of genocide, regardless of where it happened, and it also happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Turning your head away from these phenomena is dangerous - added Sattler.
The president of the Jewish cultural, educational and humanitarian society 'La Benevolencija', Vladimir Andrle, whose grandfather survived the Holocaust, also told FENA that it is important to remember crimes so that they do not happen again, and although it is constantly said that evil should be defeated, it is not possible, but it can be kept under control.
- That is our task. To remind, to talk, and to talk about the causes of the Holocaust because it did not begin in 1942 but much earlier with the systematic dehumanization of Jews, the destruction of their traditions and customs and the creation of an atmosphere that Jews are the enemies of a certain society - he added.
He also warned about the growing phenomenon of anti-Semitism, which has existed for 5,000 years, but he also said that there are almost no such phenomena in Bosnia and Herzegovina, except for isolated isolated cases.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it was pointed out that the Jewish community in Europe has never recovered from that terrible crime.
(FENA) L. N.
