Greek Foreign Ministry Urges Fighting Holocaust Denial On Remembrance Day

Greek Foreign Ministry Urges Fighting Holocaust Denial on Remembrance Day

Greece honors the memory of the millions of Jews that fell victim to the Holocaust and considers it everyone's duty to combat the deliberate denial of that tragic event, the country's Foreign Ministry said on Monday, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day

ATHENS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th January, 2020) Greece honors the memory of the millions of Jews that fell victim to the Holocaust and considers it everyone's duty to combat the deliberate denial of that tragic event, the country's Foreign Ministry said on Monday, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

This day, 75 years ago, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp was liberated by the Red Army. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly, designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust is also a day of responsibility and duty for us all to fight against the attempt to wilfully trivialize or even deny the blackest page in modern European history," the ministry said in a statement.

Greece commemorates the deaths of Jews, Greeks, and other peoples, as well as survivors, according to the statement. Athens has also recognized the efforts of everyone who protected the victims of Nazi Germany's "racial paranoia."

"Greece will continue to fight racism, intolerance, discrimination, intimidation and xenophobia," the ministry added.

Meanwhile, Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid also urged her country to push back against all Holocaust denial attempts to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

"It is our duty to resist all attempts at Holocaust denial or justification of any crime committed against humanity, including genocides. We must talk about these atrocities even to schoolchildren and explain what caused such appalling events in the history of the human race. This is a measure of our humanity and a guarantee that those crimes will never be repeated," she said in a statement.

The Holocaust refers to the period from 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed the position of the German chancellor, to 1945, the year the Second World War ended. It involved the mass persecution and murder of German and European Jewry, culminating in the ethnic cleansing program, dubbed as the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question'." Jews were relocated to ghettos, and concentration and extermination camps where were they were either murdered or died from malnutrition, disease, hunger and inhumane treatment. Six million Jews died over the course of the tragic period.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is set to take part in the commemorating events in Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to the data from the Greek Foreign Ministry, among 1.1 million people murdered in Auschwitz, 55,000 were Greek Jews, 83-86 percent of all Jews residing in the country on the outset of the Second World War.