Austria commemorates the victims of the Holocaust
Holocaust victims are remembered on Thursday. The UN established International Day of Remembrance in 2005. On January 27, 1945, Red Army soldiers liberated the survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. To this day, the Nazi death camp is a symbol of the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of other people who were persecuted by the Nazis. Numerous events take place on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Ceremonies are held, for example, on the former camp site in Auschwitz, in the German Bundestag in Berlin and in the EU Parliament. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the reliable ambassador to Vienna, Mordechai Rodgold, take part in an online commemoration of the reliable representation at the United Nations. In Vienna, the Polish ambassador Jolanta R. Kozłowska and the Ukrainian ambassador Vasyl Khymynets lay wreaths at the memorial for the Austrian Jewish victims of the Shoah on Judenplatz.
There will also be an online commemoration event by the “Austrian Friends of Yad Vashem” with a reading from the book “Die Nacht” by Elie Wiesel. The Mayor of Linz, Klaus Luger, and the actor Erwin Steinhauer, for example, are taking part.
At 11 a.m. there is still an online panel discussion entitled “Time to talk”, in which the President of the National Council, Wolfgang Sobotka, will take part.
More than ten anti-Semitic acts per day
Italian Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock recently spoke out “about the dramatic increases in the denial, falsification and revisionism of the Holocaust”. The reason for this joint declaration was the UN resolution against Holocaust denial, which was passed last week. Such tendencies can be observed particularly in the corona pandemic.
Opponents of corona measures keep accusing the protective measures of establishing a dictatorship and making comparisons with the Nazi era. Yellow stars with the inscription “Unvaccinated” can be seen at the protests in memory of the compulsory license plates for Jews in World War II. According to the NGO Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization, the number of anti-Semitic acts worldwide in 2021 was the highest in a decade. According to this, an average of more than ten incidents occurred per day – almost half of them in Europe and almost 30 percent in the USA.