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Holocaust Memorial Day

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) takes place annually on 27 January and marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Holocaust Memorial Day remembers:

  • The six million Jewish men, women and children who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1941 and 1945.
  • The Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, gay people, political opponents and others who died alongside them as the Nazis pursued their ideal of a ‘pure Aryan race’.
  • The more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were murdered when the Srebrenica enclave fell to Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.
  • The countless Black African victims of the Janjaweed who in 2003 destroyed entire villages, murdering civilians and displacing many more during the civil war in the region of Darfur.

Holocaust Memorial Day challenges each of us to learn the lessons of the past and to let those lessons inform our behaviour, our language and the way in which we treat those who are different to us. HMD encourages everyone to stand together with their local community.

We will mark the official date by lighting up the Guildhall in purple at 8pm as part of the Holocaust Memorial Day trust’s light in the darkness campaign. The following Tuesday a memorial event will be held in the Peace Garden on Plymouth Hoe at midday, providing an opportunity for communities to reflect.

The theme set by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for this year’s commemorative activities is ‘fragility of freedom’, which recognises that freedom is fragile and cannot be taken for granted.

This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. After the plane carrying the President of Rwanda was shot down radio broadcasts demanded people stay in their homes which made them easy targets for the subsequent massacre. Approximately one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in just 100 days. The genocide began when their freedom of movement was restricted.

Genocide is the ultimate manifestation of violence ending freedom to live. During the Holocaust, six million Jewish people – men, women, children and babies – were brutally murdered in fields, ghettos, concentration camps and death camps. In more recent genocides, vast numbers of people have been murdered purely because of their faith, ethnicity, or other form of identity.

Freedom is fragile and it cannot be taken for granted. You can read some examples of ways in which the freedoms of people targeted during genocide are restricted, showing how fragile freedom is and how we must not be complacent about it on the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website