Anne Frank, Otto Frank and Primo Levi are names most people know about.
These are three names out of at least 1.3 million people
who were prisoners in Auschwitz.
From 1940 to January 1945, Nazi Germany used Auschwitz as a concentration
and extermination camp.
First Auschwitz was used to hold Polish prisoners,
but later the SS used it as an extermination camp to commit murder
on Roma, Sinti and Jews from all over Europe.
Approximately 1.1 million people were murdered here.
And one out of six Jews murdered in the Holocaust were killed in Auschwitz,
mainly in gas chambers.
These are only numbers and facts, and hard to imagine.
But what does the Holocaust actually mean?
Nazi ideology, based on racism and hating everyone not German,
especially Jews, Slavs and Gypsies, was the main point to commit the Holocaust.
At the beginning of the war, Nazi Germany
was segregating Jews and resettled them into ghettos.
After that, the Nazis decided to exterminate the Jewish population,
which they called “final solution” or the “Jewish question”.
Nazi Germany took the first step to make the Holocaust more industrialized
by building concentration and extermination camps.
The second step was to transport the Jews from the whole of Europe to these camps.
Most of the camps were located in occupied Poland.
In the Holocaust, at least six million Jews were murdered.
This was two thirds of all the Jewish population in Europe.
Before the war, half of them were residents of Poland.
Holocaust for me means the suffering of victims
and the classification of human beings –
things were so cruel that people around the world couldn’t believe it.
If you were one of those people, would you believe what happened in Auschwitz?
Personally for me, Holocaust is crimes not only against the Jews
but against the whole human world.
Humanity has never known such atrocities before the Second World War.
This dark page of history can tell us not only about statistics of death
but also about people’s destinies.
It’s about their life stories which have been cut off too early.
Suffering, pain and death.
These are the three main words I would use to describe the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was one of the biggest war crimes in history.
It shows us the darkest sides of human behaviour
and should always be a warning to mankind about how far
populism, hate and racism can lead.
Perhaps I will never understand how this could happen.
But I hope such a cruel crime will never happen again in the future.
And I will do everything to prevent it from happening again.