Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim.
This death factory exterminated 1.4 million people over four years, of whom 1.1 million were Jews. Since 2006, this day is celebrated as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. In an interview to BelTA, Chairman of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Belarus Vladimir Andreichenko emphasized the unchanged and consistent position of the deputy corps, proceeding from the fact that Belarusians have always perceived and will always perceive the bloody events behind the word “Holocaust” as a personal tragedy.
“For centuries, representatives of various nationalities, including Jews, have lived and worked peacefully on our land, contributing to the development of our national culture, science, education, economy, and system of state administration. For example, of the 475 MPs of the pre-war Supreme Soviet of the BSSR of the first convocation, 32 were Jews. And we remember this,” Vladimir Andreichenko said. “The Second World War took the lives of every third citizen of Belarus and left an open wound on the heart of the peace-loving multinational Belarusian people. The years of occupation radically changed the ethnic composition of our population, which had been formed over the centuries, destroying such familiar to the Belarusians concepts as Jewish localities and introducing such terrible ones as ghettos and death camps. In them the fascists and their collaborators exterminated more than 850,000 Belarusian Jews in Minsk, Berezino, Bobruisk, Brest, Glubokoye, Krasnopolye, Pinsk, Ushachi, Cherikov and other settlements alone. Tens of thousands of Jews from Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany and other European countries shared their fate in Trostenets. The camp ranked fourth in terms of the number of victims after the infamous Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.”
“More than 500 monuments and memorial complexes, hundreds of museum exhibits, a series of books, trails of memory and many other things have been developed in Belarus to forever preserve the memory of those terrible events and their victims, said the speaker. “The names of the brutally tortured and fallen in the ghetto uprisings are carved on plaques, immortalized in printed and electronic publications, in bronze and marble. Most importantly, they are in our minds and in our hearts. This memory makes us people who cannot tolerate the revival of Nazism, its principles, ideology and symbols. We cannot stay indifferent to how inhumans and executioners, who have the blood of children, the elderly, women and other defenseless people on their hands, are honored at the state level as war veterans and elevated to the rank of national heroes – fighters for freedom, independence and democracy,” the chairman of the House of Representatives stressed.
“We cannot watch indifferently as neo-Nazis march with weapons in their hands through the streets of European cities that our grandfathers and fathers liberated from the Nazis, their patrons and collaborators. We cannot be silent witnesses to how these cities systematically destroy monuments to those who defended the world from the brown plague and saved innocent victims from death, how the memory about the role of the peoples of the USSR and the highest price they paid for the victory over Nazism is erased. We cannot agree with the actions of those who today sponsor, arm, train and cover up murderers of civilians, thus pushing the international community towards World War III. All these events dangerous for mankind were the result of a long campaign by the leaders of the collective West to rewrite history, remove pages from it that do not serve their interests, transform public consciousness, and implement a policy of double standards,” Vladimir Andreichenko added.
“Sharing the grief of the Jewish people, as well as all right-thinking and concerned people, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp, we urge everyone to unite our forces and stand in defense of the historical truth, the memory of the fallen and tortured, to preserve the world from destruction and to prevent Nazism and its crimes from ever returning again,” the speaker concluded.
BelTA
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