This week, one of the deadliest and most vicious acts in modern history perpetrated on the human race will be remembered at a special ceremony at Bath’s Guildhall.
Friday, 27th January marks the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, the largest Nazi death camp, by Allied forces towards the end of the Second World War.
Coordinated nationally by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, ‘How can life go on?’ is the theme for the 2017 commemorations.
The chairman of Bath and North East Somerset Council, Cllr Alan Hale, will lead the district in remembrance and has invited Cllr Sarah Bevan, as the Council’s Human Rights Advocate and as the daughter of a survivor, to introduce and speak at this year’s event.
Cllr Sarah Bevan (Independent, Peasedown St John) has been a champion of human rights, particularly in remembrance of Holocaust atrocities, since joining the local authority in 2003. She said: “Every year on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz extermination camp, we remember the six million Jewish people murdered by the genocidal Nazi regime.
“This year’s theme is ‘How can life go on?’ and it encourages each of us to challenge the attitudes that allowed this and other racially motivated acts of hatred to happen – everyday discrimination and the tendency latent in all of us to see some people as less worthy than others.
“As a Roma survivor of Auschwitz, Ceija Stojka, said, ‘I remember Auschwitz every waking moment of my life’; so must we remember and reflect on how and why attempts at genocide happen.”
Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by Hitler’s Third Reich in many Nazi occupied countries, including France, Germany, Poland and Holland during World War II.
During the Nazis’ rule over Germany and invasion of other European countries, as well as millions of Jews, other groups of people were targeted, captured and killed, such as gypsies,
homosexuals, liberals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Soviets, those with mental and physical disabilities and Afro-Germans.
Bath and North East Somerset Council’s annual event to honour victims of the European and other holocausts will be held on Holocaust Memorial Day 2017, Friday, 27th January, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m., in the Alkmaar Room, Guildhall, Bath.