'Indifference kills': Zelenskyy leads global tributes on Holocaust Memorial Day

Cities across the world have marked International Holocaust Memorial Day, with Ukraine’s president warning that “indifference kills” in his tribute to victims.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy laid candles at the Holocaust memorial at Babyn Yar, Kyiv.

The president released a message to mark the day, saying: “Today, as always, Ukraine honours the memory of millions of Holocaust victims.

“We know and remember that indifference kills along with hatred. Indifference and hatred are always capable of creating evil together only,” he said.

“That is why it is so important that everyone who values life should show determination when it comes to saving those whom hatred seeks to destroy.”

The Ukrainian leader added: “Today we remember the Righteous Among the Nations. Different people in different countries who were equally determined to save lives. Today we remember the determination of the global coalition that stopped Nazism.

“And today we repeat it even more strongly than before: never again to hatred; never again to indifference.

“The more nations of the world overcome indifference, the less space there will be in the world for hatred. Eternal memory to all victims of the Holocaust!”

Antisemitism ‘more prevalent than it has been’

In Israel, a Holocaust survivor, 92, became emotional during a performance of I Have Survived by a choir of Holocaust survivors.

She was attending a ceremony hosted by the Yad Ezer Lechaver Association to mark the day in Haifa, Israel.

While in London, another 92-year-old – Vera Schaufeld – whose parents were murdered in a concentration camp, raised concerns about whether young people are learning enough about the atrocities of the past.

She said: “Antisemitism is more prevalent than it has been in the past because I think young people are no longer learning about the Holocaust as much as they did.”

Ms Schaufeld, who was born in Prague in 1930 but came to England via the Kindertransport in 1938, added: “Jewish people should be seen just as much as individuals, and not as a whole group, but understood that they have their own views and their own lives in the same way that every other minority has to be respected.

“And it has to be understood that their experiences and their lives are relevant to them and their families.”

In Moscow, Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar and head of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, Alexander Boroda, laid flowers at the monument to resistance heroes at Nazi concentration camps.

In Oswiecim, Poland, survivors Eva Umlauf and Zdzislawa Wlodarczyk took part in a ceremony marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

More than a million people – including Jews, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Roma – were killed in the camp before it was liberated by Soviet troops on 27 January, 1945.

While in Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said “the suffering of six million innocently murdered Jews remains unforgotten – as does the suffering of the survivors.”

“We recall our historic responsibility on Holocaust Memorial Day so that our Never Again endures in future,” he wrote on Twitter.

The German parliament was holding a memorial event focused this year on those who were persecuted for their sexual orientation. Thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual people were incarcerated and killed by the Nazis.

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