This yearโs International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust will be commemorated in several places across the Czech Republic.
From 10 a.m., the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic and the Foundation for Holocaust Victims, in cooperation with the Office of the Czech Senate, will hold a commemorative meeting in the Main Hall of the Senate.
Thanks to Czech TV, a live broadcast will be available on the Czech TV news channel, CT24.
At 3 pm the Czernin Palace, belonging to the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will host a Czech-Israeli-American commemorative event focusing on murdered and persecuted Jewish diplomats during World War II.
A candlelight procession will be held in Terezรญn, in the presence of the head of the Terezรญn Memorial Jan Roubรญnek Vice-President of the European Commission Director of the Terezรญn Memorial, and Vฤra Jourovรก,
A public reading of the names of the Holocaust victims will take place at the castle in Mladรก Boleslav, where Jews from the surrounding area were interned between 1940 and 1943.
Between 1940 and 1945, 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, most of them Jewish. The prisoners at Auschwitz included 50,000 citizens of Czechoslovakia, about 6,000 of whom survived.
The Nazis murdered six million people of Jewish origin during the Second World War. The interwar Jewish community of Czechoslovakia was 350,000 strong, 250,000 of whom died during the war.
Some 80,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jews perished in the Holocaust, and before the community could even start recovering from the war, the communist regime practically froze its activities.
It was not until the fall of communism in 1989 that the Czech Jewish community could start to rebuild.
In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as the International Day to Honor Holocaust Victims.
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