The International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established on November 1, 2005, by the UN General Assembly to commemorate the victims murdered by the Germans during the Second World War. The appointed date is not adventitious, because it was on January 27, 1945, when the Red Army entered the German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In support of this decision, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General emphasized “All survivors have an extremely important message for us. A message of the triumph of human spirit and dignity. The survivors remain living proof that tyranny will never win. (…) Holocaust survivors will not stay with us forever, but the legacy of their survival must stay alive. It is necessary to preserve the stories of the survivors – organize commemorative events, teach others about the horrors of the Holocaust, and most of all firmly oppose genocide and other serious crimes. (…) The United Nations is fully committed to these goals. It is necessary to maintain and convey the truth about the Holocaust and to recognize the human dignity of all people without exception”.

The German Nazi concentration and extermination camp was established in 1940, initially as a concentration camp for Polish prisoners. Karl Fritzsch, SS-Hauptsturmführer told the prisoners of the first transport from the German-occupied Tarnów to Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, “You came here not to a sanatorium, but to a German concentration camp, from which there is no other way out than through the chimney. If someone does not like it, he can jump straight to the wires. If there are Jews in the transport, they have the right to live no longer than two weeks, priests – a month, the rest – three months”.

Over time, this camp became the largest German extermination camp where at least 1.1 million Jews from all over Europe were murdered. Poles were the second largest nationality murdered there by the Germans (approx. 130,000).