On January 27, Ukraine and the whole world honors the memory of those killed and persecuted during the tragedy of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of the Jews, which was widely perpetrated by the Nazis. Holocaust occurred during the Second World War and was the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jewish people, 200,000 Romani people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
January 27, 1945, is the day when the Soviets released prisoners of the largest Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. By various estimates, the number of the camp’s victims totaled from 1.5 to 4 million people; the actual number remains unknown since the Nazis never held records of the victims killed in the gas chambers. Besides, a lot of relevant documents were destroyed.
The UN General Assembly officially chose January 27 to be the International Day of Memory of the Holocaust Victims. The respective bill was offered in 2005 by Israel, Canada, Australia, Russia, and the United States; over 90 countries became the co-authors of the document.
The word ‘Holocaust’ derives from the Greek language; it means ‘the burnt offering’.
