Remembering the Holocaust and its victims is not only an act of solidarity but also serves as a warning to humanity that such horrors could happen again, Pope Francis said.
Before concluding his weekly general audience on 27 January, the pope marked the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day by calling on the world to “remember the Shoah” and to “be aware of how this path of death began, this path of extermination, of brutality”.
“To remember also means to be careful because these things can happen again, starting with ideological proposals to save a people and ending up destroying a people and humanity,” he said.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed around the world on 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation in 1945 of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland.
Operated from 1940 to 1945, Auschwitz was the Nazi’s largest camp and consisted of three parts: Auschwitz I, where many were imprisoned and murdered; the Birkenau extermination camp — also known as Auschwitz II — and Auschwitz III (Auschwitz-Monowitz), an area of auxiliary camps that included several factories.
Beginning in 1942, Auschwitz became the site of the mass extermination of more than 1 million Jews, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and thousands of Polish citizens. The Nazi’s systematic persecution and genocide led to the deaths of 6 million Jews in Europe.
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