NEW YORK, JANUARY 27th – 76 years have passed since January 27th, 1945, when Red Army troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, a date that the United Nations General Assembly decided to remember every year, establishing in 2005 the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, to ensure that this tragedy never repeats itself.
“Remembrance and education are not only a moral imperative. They are essential to nurture mutual understanding, dialogue and tolerance”, the Italian Permanent Representative to the UN, Mariangela Zappia. “Respect for human dignity and fundamental rights must guide everyone, everywhere,” she added: “#We remember”.
At the UN, Secretary-General António Guterres marked the day saying that the “universal revulsion” at the Holocaustwas one event leading to the UN’s founding and drawing up of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “But it did not end”, he said. “Indeed, today antisemitism is resurgent in many places around the world”.
Zappia participated in the virtual commemoration in New York on behalf of the Italian mission, alongside the Consulate General, the Italian Institute of Culture and other institutions including the Centro Primo Levi, the Italian Academy at Columbia University, the Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo’ at New York University, the Calandra Institute at CUNY and the Scuola d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi School. The ceremony closed with a multilingual reading of Primo Levi’s “If This is a Man.” (@OnuItalia)
