Each year, around the world, the Day of Remembrance is celebrated on January 27, the anniversary on which 15 million Holocaust victims are commemorated (a figure from the study by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington) who were imprisoned and killed in Nazi extermination camps before and during World War II. Six million of these innocent victims were Jewish: their genocide* is called the Shoah.
The Holocaust and the Shoah were genocides carried out with scientific methods by Nazi Germany until January 27, 1945, when Soviet army tanks broke through the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Since that day, this camp has become the symbolic place of discrimination and suffering for those interned simply because they were Jewish, Roma, homosexual, or simply because they held political ideas different from those in power.
The Day of Remembrance is not only about commemorating the millions of people who were cruelly and mercilessly killed nearly 80 years ago. It reminds us that every day there are many small acts of discrimination against those who appear different from us. Often, we ourselves are the perpetrators without realizing it.
The Day of Remembrance reminds us that we do not raise our voices enough against these discriminations and that often, out of convenience and opportunism, we hide in what historians call the grey zone. This is a zone of the mind and our behavior, halfway between black and white, between innocence and guilt. In this domain, ultimately, indifference towards those who are isolated and not accepted prevails.
To prevent a tragedy like the Holocaust from happening again, we must remember what happened and especially understand the reasons in order to reject them.
