But first, what is the Holocaust ?
The word "Holocaust" comes from the ancient Greek words "holos" meaning "whole" and "kautos" meaning "burned". In ancient Greece, the Holocaust was a sacrifice in which the victim was completely consumed by fire. The Holocaust was the systematic extermination of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The Nazi Party, with Hitler as its leader, believed that the world was divided into different races, some of which were "inferior", such as the Jewish race, while others were "superior", such as the "Aryan race". They were therefore anti-Semitic and made this a fundamental principle of their ideology and world view. The Holocaust began in Germany after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Almost immediately, the Nazi regime excluded Jews from German economic, political, social and cultural life. But the Nazi persecution of Jews extended beyond Germany, as during the Second World War Germany annexed many European countries, including Poland, where most of the concentration and extermination camps were located. The liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau revealed the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis between 1940 and 1945. It was a death factory. 5 to 6 million Jews were killed under horrific conditions (shootings, gas chambers, etc.), representing two-thirds of the Jews of Europe and 40% of the Jews of the world.
There was no need for these horrors. We owe it to the Jewish population and to the other populations that suffered these inhumanities to remember their history forever, to teach this tragic event to those who will build the world of tomorrow, so that genocide on this scale never happens again, and if it does, we have a duty to fight against it !
That is why, on this day, it is important to remember and highlight the sixteenth SDG’s goal: "Peace, justice and effective institutions". To fight for this in memory of all the Jews who were killed, so that an event of this magnitude never happens again anywhere in the world !