Dr Altaf Hussain MS marks Holocaust Memorial Day:
Following World War 2, United Nations adopted a Convention on Genocide criminalising committing any act, “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. We’ve since seen horrific genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and in Darfur (2003-2005). 80 years to this exact date, Red Army soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau – today, we mark international Holocaust Memorial Day.
During their reign of terror, the Nazi’s perpetrated organised mass murder by design: systematically slaughtering six million jews, half a million Roma and Sinti peoples and hundreds of thousands of gays, black people and the disabled. They were murdered in industrial levels of organisation by Hitler’s death squads or inside concentration camps, killed for who they were or what they believed. I’m reflecting today on innocent lives lost like Dr Korczak’s orphaned children living within Warsaw under his care deported to Treblinka before being executed 1942.
Jews were targeted for their beliefs, persecuted as an ‘Other’. Photographic evidence captured of these terrible sites shows us what was done in the name of hate, nothing could come close to ever possibly justify or mitigate this terrible thing. We must continuously challenge poisonous prejudice, all of us disavowing vocabularies of hatefulness creating conditions for new violence.
It’s important that this level of extreme evil be taught to every generation, noting never again.