January 27. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This symbolic step was supposed to help preserve the memory of the Holocaust tragedy by future generations, as well as serve as a warning against possible genocide acts in the future.
It is symbolic that 60 years before that, on January 27, 1945, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated the largest Nazi death camp “Auschwitz-Birkenau” near the occupied Polish city Oświęcim. The soldiers of the battalion under the command of Major Anatolii Shapiro (1913 – 2005), a native of Krasnohrad (now the Kharkiv region), were the first to enter the camp.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp is the place of death of at least 1 million Ukrainian, Hungarian, Polish, French, Czech, Slovak and Greek Jews, as well as residents of other countries, and about 120.000 other prisoners (Poles, Gypsies, Soviet war prisoners and others).
In 1947, Poland, honoring the memory of the Nazi terror victims, founded a museum on the territory of the former camp. Today it is one of the largest memorial complexes on the Holocaust history, a museum, research, archival and educational center. In 1979, the territory of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The permanent exhibition of Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” contains a number of authentic exhibits related to the history of the largest Nazi “death factory”: clothes of the concentration camps prisoners, a can of Cyclone-B insecticide, which was used in gas chambers to kill people, letters from prisoners, etc.
In the Museum’s library you can find the diaries of Witold Pilecki (1901-1948), captain of the Polish Army, who, for reconnaissance purposes, voluntarily became a prisoner of the Auschwitz camp and was in it from September 1940 to April 1943.
It was W. Pilecki’s reports that served as the source from which the world has learned about the tragedy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp prisoners.