Law Event
United Nations commemorates holocaust victims
The United Nations Depart-ment of Public Information observed the first universal Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust under the theme "Remembrance and Beyond" at United Nations Headquarters on 27 January.
Shashi Tharoor, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Infor-mation introduced a programme that began with a message from Secretary-General Kofi Annan. This first observance marked a major step in a broader programme of outreach on the Holocaust and the United Nations by the Department of Public Information, and was designed to encourage remembrance of and education about the Holocaust, in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide. United Nations staff members, delegations of Member States, non-governmental organizations, media representatives, educational institutions and hundreds of survivors of the Holocaust attended the 27 January commemorative event.
Auschwitz - Sixty-one years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, the grimmest symbol of the murder of six million Jews in World War II, ceremonies across Europe marked the first international Holocaust Remembrance Day. They came amid a storm provoked by an Iranian plan to stage a conference questioning the Holocaust, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had described as a "myth". At the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Poland, the largest built by the Nazis, Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz presided over ceremonies attended by camp survivors and the Jewish community. Marcinkiewicz said it was impossible to be indifferent to the horrors of the Holocaust. He said: "The Nazis' Auschwitz camp is the biggest cemetery in Europe that has no tombs. It's all the more important to preserve the memory of what happened here ... as a warning for a world still full of hate and aggression." Historians estimated about 1.1 million men, women and children, most of them Jews from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945. Earlier during a visit to Switzerland, United Nations chief Kofi Annan denounced those who denied the mass murders committed by German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. Last November, the UN general assembly declared January 27 its official memorial day for the Holocaust - the systematic slaughter by the Nazis of mainland Europe's Jews, as well as other groups, during World War II.
Meanwhile, Poland's powerful Roman Catholic Church called on believers to light candles in their windows in memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. In Estonia, invaded by German troops in 1941, the government issued a statement expressing regret that some Estonians collaborated with the Nazi occupiers in perpetrating crimes against humanity as policemen or camp guards. The statement said: "There is no justification whatsoever for the participation of any person in those shameful and morally condemnable acts."
In Lithuania, the ambassadors of Britain, Germany, Poland, Russia, the United States and other officials gathered at a memorial at Paneriai, close to Vilnius, to listen to prayers.
Source: United Nations Information Service.
