Warning: Graphic images below
On January 27, 1945 at three in the afternoon, a unit of the Soviet Army reached the gates of a concentration camp in Poland. Finding that the guards had fled, the Soviet soldiers entered the camp. What they found there shocked them to their core – and eventually, the entire world.
The camp was Auschwitz, where over one million people, mostly Jews, were systematically exterminated. That January, as the Red Army approached, almost 60,000 remaining prisoners were forced to leave on a death march westward. About 7,000 prisoners were left behind, most of whom were seriously ill. These were the prisoners the Red Army soldiers found when they liberated the camp.
But in addition to the surviving prisoners, they also found 600 corpses, 370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 articles of women’s clothing, and seven tonnes (7.7 tons) of human hair. The scale of the evil began to come into view, and grew as more and more camps were liberated, and more and more bodies were found.
Today, eighty years later on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we have to stop and remember what happened. We must not turn away, or hide our eyes. We must look at the evil that took place in one of the most educated countries on the earth, and ask ourselves what we would do if we saw it happening again. “Never again” doesn’t have any meaning unless we are willing to be the ones to say “No.”
Images of the Holocaust
So we remember the evil, and honor the fallen.
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