World pauses to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day
[January 27, 2026]
By VANESSA GERA
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Candles flickered at dawn Tuesday at the vast
Holocaust memorial in Berlin as people across Europe and beyond paused
to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, reflecting on
Nazi Germany's murder of millions of people and its attempt to
completely wipe out Jewish life on the continent.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed across the world on
Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet forces of
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps.
The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the
day as an annual commemoration.
At the memorial site of Auschwitz, located in a part of southern Poland
which was under German occupation during World War II, former prisoners
laid flowers and wreaths at a wall where German forces murdered
thousands of people, most of them Poles. Later in the day Poland's
President Karol Nawrocki will join survivors for a remembrance ceremony
at Birkenau, the vast site nearby where Jews were transported from
across Europe to be exterminated in gas chambers.
Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau
complex, most of them Jews, but Poles, Roma and others were also killed
there.
The day is being remembered in many ways
Commemorations on the anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation by the Red
Army on Jan. 27, 1945, were taking place across Europe.
Candles burned and white roses were placed at the Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the
Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honors the 6 million Jews
killed in the Holocaust, and stands as a powerful symbol of Germany's
remorse.
In the Czech Republic, a candlelight march is planned for the evening in
Terezin at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt.
Thousands of Jews died there or were sent from there to Auschwitz and
other death camps.
On Sunday, the Netherlands marked its National Holocaust Memorial day
with a silent march through Amsterdam’s historic Jewish quarter to a
memorial to Auschwitz victims. “Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Auschwitz — they
are unprecedented and still incomprehensible examples of what
intolerance, hatred, and racism can lead to,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke
Halsema told hundreds at the somber event.
Israel marks its Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, which stresses Jewish resistance
to the Nazi terror.
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Holocaust survivor Stanislaw Zalewski walks along a wall in the
Auschwitz Nazi death camp museum during a ceremony marking the 81st
anniversary of the camp's liberation in Oswiecim, Poland, Tuesday,
Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Beata Zawrzel)
Warnings about the world today
As they look back, many leaders also reflected on the hatred in
today's world.
The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, warned that the
world is seeing the highest levels of anti-Semitism since the
Holocaust and that some of the threats are now “taking new and
disturbing forms.”
Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, underlined the misuse “of
AI-generated content to blur the line between fact and fiction,
distort historical truth, and undermine our collective memory.”
Czech President Petr Pavel said the day is "a call to reflect on the
past and the responsibility we have as a society, but especially as
individuals, in the contemporary world. Unfortunately, even today
there are people who trivialize the hateful Nazi ideology, or even
sympathize with it.”
A shrinking community of Holocaust survivors
There are an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors still
alive globally, down from the 220,000 survivors estimated to be
alive a year earlier, according to information published last week
by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany. Nearly all of them — some 97% — are “child survivors” who
were born 1928 and later, the group said.
Though the world's community of survivors shrinks with time, some
are still telling their stories for the first time after all these
years.
An annual gathering took place at the upper house of Czech
Parliament with Holocaust survivors. Pavel Jelinek, a 90-year-old
survivor from the city of Liberec — a Czech city with a prewar
Jewish population of 1,350 — said he was now the last living of the
37 Jews who returned to the city after the war.
Jelinek told those gathered that his motto has been: “The whole
world is one narrow bridge, and what matters is not to be afraid at
all.”
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Associated Press writers Karel Janicek in Prague, Lorne Cook in
Brussels and Mike Corder in Amsterdam contributed to this report.
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