Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus

Am 27. Januar 1945 befreite die Rote Armee das Vernichtungslager in Auschwitz. Es war das größte von Nazi-Deutschland errichtete Vernichtungslager. Mehr als 1.100.000 Menschen wurden allein in Auschwitz ermordet, die allermeisten waren Juden aus Mittel-, Süd- und Osteuropa. Die Nazis haben auch Kommunisten, Sozialdemokraten, andere politische Opositionelle, kranke Menschen oder solche mit Behinderungen, Sinti, Roma, Zeugen Jehovas, oppositionelle Priester /Pastoren und homosexuelle Männer und Frauen ermordet. Seit 1996 ist der 27. Januar ein Gedenktag in Deutschland. Die Vereinten Nationen erklärten den 27. Januar im Jahr 2005 zum Internationalen Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Holocausts.
I quote from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp:
„Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died. Around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish; approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp.[1][2] Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses, and tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, including an unknown number of homosexuals.[3] Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.“

The morning they came for us / Der Morgen als sie uns holten – Janine di Giovanni

This is one of the most touching and best books I’ve read over the last years. War reporter Janine di Giovanni who has covered, amongst others, the wars in former Yugoslavia, travels to Syria between mid 2011 and end of 2012. In 2011, some sort of normal living still existed in Syria, altough the country found itself at the abyss of war. Janine di Giovanni reflects her own motivation and personal history as a war reporter before making us familiar with people in an international upper class hotel in Damaskus, with Nada, an Anti-Assad political activist who had been tortured and raped in one of the many Governments torture cellars, with civilians surviving in the hell that Aleppo has already been 4 years ago – and with many people in other places of Syria. The strength of the book is in building a bridge to people who are living a „normal“ live until the war takes possession of their lives.
Read more here:
http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/janine-di-giovanni-der-morgen-als-sie-uns-holten-als.1270.de.html?dram:article_id=365280

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/books/review-the-morning-they-came-for-us-reports-on-the-hell-of-syria.html