Holocaust Memorial Day 2025: a statement

27 January 2025

Today, January 27, is Holocaust Memorial Day, and it marks the moment 80 years ago in 1945 when soldiers of the Red Army liberated the survivors of the Nazi regime’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

The numbers are staggering. Of the 1.3 million people sent there, some 1.1 million were murdered. Of these, nearly one million were Jews, with the vast majority, around 850,000, gassed on arrival. The other victims included 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, Roma, and Soviet PoWs. Gay men and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, those with opposing political views, priests and nuns, and anyone thought “undesirable” were targeted, imprisoned, and murdered. Not all were gassed: starvation, illness, being worked to death, and summary executions accounted for thousands more. Millions more were murdered in other German concentration camps and those built by her allies.

The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event, but; genocide is not. In the lifetimes of many of us, there have been genocides in Darfur, in Cambodia and Rwanda. Genocides in East Timor and of the Rohingya, and 2025 sees the 30th anniversary of Srebrenica and the Bosnian genocide… The list goes on.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, we in SSAFA will take a moment of reflection for the millions of lives cruelly taken during the Nazi terror, and in subsequent genocides, those who survived, and their families.