WARSAW, Poland — Candles flickered at dawn Tuesday at the vast Holocaust memorial in Berlin as people across Europe and beyond paused to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, reflecting on Nazi Germany's murder of millions of people and its attempt to completely wipe out Jewish life on the continent.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed across the world on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet forces of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps. The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration.
At the memorial site of Auschwitz, located in a part of southern Poland which was under German occupation during World War II, former prisoners laid flowers and wreaths at a wall where German forces murdered thousands of people, most of them Poles. Later in the day Poland's President Karol Nawrocki will join survivors for a remembrance ceremony at Birkenau, the vast site nearby where Jews were transported from across Europe to be exterminated in gas chambers.
Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, most of them Jews, but Poles, Roma and others were also killed there.
The day is being remembered in many ways
Commemorations on the anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation by the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945, were taking place across Europe.
Candles burned and white roses were placed at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honors the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and stands as a powerful symbol of Germany's remorse.
In the Czech Republic, a candlelight march is planned for the evening in Terezin at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. Thousands of Jews died there or were sent from there to Auschwitz and other death camps.
On Sunday, the Netherlands marked its National Holocaust Memorial day with a silent march through Amsterdam’s historic Jewish quarter to a memorial to Auschwitz victims. “Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Auschwitz — they are unprecedented and still incomprehensible examples of what intolerance, hatred, and racism can lead to,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema told hundreds at the somber event.
Israel marks its Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, which stresses Jewish resistance to the Nazi terror.
Warnings about the world today
As they look back, many leaders also reflected on the hatred in today's world.
The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, warned that the world is seeing the highest levels of anti-Semitism since the Holocaust and that some of the threats are now “taking new and disturbing forms.”
Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, underlined the misuse “of AI-generated content to blur the line between fact and fiction, distort historical truth, and undermine our collective memory.”
Czech President Petr Pavel said the day is "a call to reflect on the past and the responsibility we have as a society, but especially as individuals, in the contemporary world. Unfortunately, even today there are people who trivialize the hateful Nazi ideology, or even sympathize with it.”
A shrinking community of Holocaust survivors
There are an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors still alive globally, down from the 220,000 survivors estimated to be alive a year earlier, according to information published last week by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Nearly all of them — some 97% — are "child survivors" who were born 1928 and later, the group said.
Though the world's community of survivors shrinks with time, some are still telling their stories for the first time after all these years.
An annual gathering took place at the upper house of Czech Parliament with Holocaust survivors. Pavel Jelinek, a 90-year-old survivor from the city of Liberec — a Czech city with a prewar Jewish population of 1,350 — said he was now the last living of the 37 Jews who returned to the city after the war.
Jelinek told those gathered that his motto has been: “The whole world is one narrow bridge, and what matters is not to be afraid at all.”
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Associated Press writers Karel Janicek in Prague, Lorne Cook in Brussels and Mike Corder in Amsterdam contributed to this report.
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