🔯 International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day 2025 – Jan 27

🕯️ International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day ORIGIN & HISTORY

The United Nations pledged to go against group-targeted violence from antisemitism, racism, or any other group singled out that may be harmed through intolerance. Why is this date significant? International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day is marked by UNESCO to pay respects to those who suffered as well as those who died during the Holocaust and is observed on January 27th. This is also the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the last death camp, by the Soviet Red Army troops on 27 January 1945.

This day is set to reflect on the tragic memory of what took place during the Holocaust throughout the Nazi German regime from 1933 to 1945. The Holocaust resulted in six million European Jewish citizens losing their lives as well as five million singled-out minorities who were tortured and suffered great pain physically, mentally, and emotionally before dying.

On 1 November 2005, the UN General Assembly set forth January 27th to pay respects to these victims of the Holocaust. The resolution is an ongoing effort against future acts of genocide by urging each member of the United Nations to have provisional education safeguarding such acts of terror against forms of racial intolerance, incitement, harassment, or violence and discrimination of ethnicity or religious beliefs.

Yom Hashoah is a day set aside for Jews to remember the Holocaust also known as the Shoah. The name comes from the Hebrew word “shoah”, which means “whirlwind”. Yom Hashoah was established in Israel by the Israeli Knesset in 1959. It ALSO falls on the 27th of the month, but this time in the Jewish month of Nissan, a date chosen because it’s the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Holocaust Remembrance Day serves to actively preserve physical sites that represent memories of the atrocities during the Holocaust such as the Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps along with the Nazi German-built prisons. It’s important to be educated about what transpired during this time period. Even though governments were aware at the time and largely ignored it, most of the world truly didn’t know the extent of what happened behind enemy lines.

Although it may be disturbing to learn of the horrific savagery, being knowledgeable of this event or any other act of discrimination against ethnicity or religious bias is important because it teaches to be mindful of acts of hate and helps to ensure it never happens again.

🕊️ HOW to Celebrate & Observe International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day?

Not sure how to LOVE the day? We’ve got a few interesting ideas to consider that may help get you started.

Here are some activities that you can do on International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day!

💙 EDUCATE yourself

Learn about how to actively participate as a person that won’t accept harassment and intolerance in the world we live. There’s a plethora of Holocaust-related media, books, audio, movies, documentaries that teach about what transpired. Perhaps make some Jewish recipes and learn about the Holocaust with friends and family.

💙 ADJUST your attitude

Watch the movie Freedom Writers. This is one of the most effective ways to teach how good wins over evil and led to the foundation of the Freedom Writers Foundation. The film shows how students learned about the Holocaust. Later they visited a Holocaust museum. The impact of what they learned at the museum and prior transformed their ways of thinking to develop empathy for those people. It changed their attitude and work ethic.

💙 MEET a Holocaust survivor

Although seemingly few and far between these days, you might see how you can help an elderly person who was earmarked to survive the Holocaust and tell their story. My mother and I met Jack (Jaap) Polak one time whose book “Steal a Pencil for Me” told of a love story between him and Catharina (Ina) Soep despite being in two different Nazi subcamps. It’s since been made into a feature-length documentary on Netflix called Steal a Pencil for Me in 2007 by filmmaker Michèle Ohayon. Polak would recount for us being taken in transit to Camp Westerbork and later to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

This dutch camp very few people know of. It was fortunate to be sent to a concentration camp rather than a death camp because 90% who stepped out of the cattle cars would be put to death! Bergen-Belsen initially started out as a camp for Allied POWs but later was repurposed as a concentration camp to be in support of a Nazi diamond mine and harness Jewish knowledge of the diamond industry.

When he published the book in 1975 no one would talk about the Holocaust. There are things about WWII that my grandfather still would not talk about. Now of course it’s much more commonplace to talk about the Holocaust through education.

💙 TRAVEL to an important Holocaust site

I also took my mother to the famed “Hiding Place” of the Corrie ten Boomhuis (House) in Haarlem, Netherlands where as many as 800 Jews and other refugees were sheltered from the Nazis and many escaped during the war. Of course, after they were betrayed, 30 people were rounded up and hauled off to prison. Among them were Betsie and Corrie ten Boom. There was a false wall in Corrie’s bedroom just behind a bookcase where you would crawl beneath to access the chamber. At the time of the raid, there were two Jewish men, two Jewish women, and two members of the Dutch underground resistance. The Sicherheitsdienst (the intelligence wing of the Nazi SS) had not found them! After close watch, some men had liberated the people stuck in the wall about 47 hours later and safely led them to a new shelter. Ultimately three Jews and one of the underground would survive in the end.

Corrie and her sister Betsie were taken to the infamous Ravensbrück concentration camp. Betsie died soon thereafter and Corrie would travel the world to more than 60 countries after being released spreading the Christian Faith until she was 91 years old. But it was Betsie that seemingly had the most faith of the two. She would even thank God for the “lice” because the Nazis hated to go into their barracks as everyone was covered in lice and it was happenstance that led them to smuggle a Bible in. This helped them witness to fellow prisoners and gave Corrie the strength to continue long after her sister passed away.

While staying in Haarlem, I brought my mother to Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam or the Dutch Resistance Museum. This was my first real taste of life during what the Jewish people called “the great murders”. What I had encountered was a small wonderful yet powerful little museum tucked away off the street. They had a scale model replica of Auschwitz and a full-sized cattle car used to transport the victims for supposed resettlement elsewhere. It’s been called the best Dutch historical museum, Amsterdam’s best-kept secret, and one of my all-time favorite museums. I may have even enjoyed it more than the multi-million dollar US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. USA that I took my entire immediate family to back in 2013.

Finally, I also took my wife to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany which was mostly used for political prisoners such as Stalin’s son, crown princes of neighboring countries, Soviet POWs, along with the usual Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Polish, Jewish people. There was a gas chamber and a medical experimentation room we visited.

💙 VISIT a Museum

There are several holocaust museums all around the world including at least 16 right here in the United States. These include the massive US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, Holocaust Museum Houston, Holocaust Museum LA, St Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, and the Holocaust Museum for Hope and Humanity about to break ground in Orlando, Florida USA sometime in 2024.

💙 RAISE Social Awareness

Use social media posts with the hashtags #InternationalHolocaustRemembranceDay, #Holocaust, #NeverForget, #WeRemember, #YomHashoah, #GovernmentHolidays, #JanuaryHolidays, #Holiday, #FindADayToLOVE, #iHEARTdays to support the importance of celebrating, promoting, and sharing with the world why you ❤️ International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day.

LEARN more about the importance of Holocaust Remembrance Day

SIX Important Facts you never knew about International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day

1. While the holocaust predominantly targeted what’s deemed as anti-semitic hatred, other groups were also discriminated against with extreme Nazi prejudice including the nomadic Roma people from northern India, Jehovah’s Witnesses, LGBTQ+, gypsies, political dissidents that didn’t align with Nazi views, and disabled people.
2. Violence toward Jews didn’t start when the Holocaust began. Many Jews were violently attacked by non-Jewish populations in Russia as well as Europe during the 1920s and 1930s.
3. Hitler takes control of the Third Reich and is crowned dictator when President von Hindenburg dies in 1934 and the office of the president is abolished. Hindenburg had made Hilter the Chancellor of Germany one year prior.
4. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi) was first established in Munich, Germany in 1920.
5. Dachau was the very first concentration camp established in medieval Bavaria and grew to over 100 subcamps. There were more than 200,000 prisoners come through the camp with 32,000 documented deaths.
6. Two out of every three European Jews died during the Holocaust.

Famous PEOPLE also born on January 27th

• Kaiser Wilhelm II

  The Last German Emperor and King of Prussia. After losing WWI, he was forced to abdicate ending his House of Hohenzollern’s 400-year reign. Born 1859.

• Lewis Carroll

  English children’s fiction writer, mathematician, inventor, and photographer best known for writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He once invented a device for writing in the dark with a special alphabet called Nyctography. Born 1832.

  LEWIS CARROLL Quote

  I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.

• Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Soviet dancer & choreographer born in Latvia and is widely considered one of the best dancers of all time. Born 1948.

  MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV Quote

  I spend at least a couple hours a day in the studio, every day, whether I’m dancing or not.

Future DATES for International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day

🖤 Holocaust FAQ

Can students research the Holocaust by talking to an actual survivor or have a survivor speak to the classroom?

• Jewish synagogues in your area as well as Jewish Genealogical societies may be able to put you in touch with a survivor. At last count, there are 350,000 living Holocaust survivors.

Can I search the Survivors’ Registry?

• A good place to start would be to send the names of people you are looking for to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Be sure to include your postal address so they can contact you on any matches they find. They do a pretty good job of maintaining and cataloging a database of everyone on their website.

Are survivors eligible for restitution from Germany?

• There are different compensation plans available to you. The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC) was one such program that operated from 1998 to 2007. Not all these programs are still open to new claims and depend on the country for different deadlines and eligibility requirements. Holocaust restitution payments are mostly paid by the governments of Germany and Austria to compensate persecuted victims of Nazi Germany and its allies. Since 1952, more than $70 billion has been paid to more than 800,000 victims of the Holocaust. In the US, these payments are not taxable as of 1994. Germany agreed to continue payments to spouses of survivors even after the person passes away.

How is a survivor of the Holocaust determined?

• The US Holocaust Memorial Museum defines a Holocaust survivor as a person, whether they are Jewish or not who were displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against for any racial, religious, ethnic, social, or political policies the Nazis opposed between 1933 and 1945. In addition, this includes former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos, and prisons, as well as refugees in hiding.

The Imp💜rtance of International HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE Day

You may know a person that was a victim of the Holocaust or someone who was subjected to harm & suffering through violence to their ethnicity or religious acceptance. Even though it happened not quite 100 years ago, it’s important to remember to teach against such violent intolerable acts of cruelty against humanity and embrace the differences between us until we are all of one like heart and mind before the Lord. Good must triumph over evil; being complacent of harassment, prejudice, and intolerance is the same as allowing evil to happen in the first place.

NEVER Forget Kristallnacht