"We are not anti-Semites, but..."
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date was established by a UN General Assembly resolution in 2005 in connection with the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.
The editorial board of NeMoskva believes it is especially important to commemorate this date now, during a surge of anti-Semitism worldwide that is unprecedented since World War II.
1. The Holocaust The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλοκαύστος, meaning "burnt offering") was the Nazi German government's systematic murder of Jewish men, women, and children, as well as millions of other people, during World War II. This policy included the discriminatory Nuremberg Laws of 1935, deportations, the creation of ghettos, mass shootings, and extermination camps. The Holocaust was an ongoing process that occurred across Europe from 1933 to 1945 and was the culmination of the Nazi plan for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question."
2. According to historians' estimates, based on Nazi documents, censuses, and data from deportations and death camps, about 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. This constituted approximately two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe before the war. 1,5 million were children. Some of them were subjected to medical experiments.
3. The Nazis created an entire network of death camps designed for the mass murder of Jews, as well as Roma, homosexuals, and other "inferior" groups. These camps included Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and others. One of the main methods of murder was the gas chamber: between 2,3 and 3 million Jews out of a total of six million were killed using gas chambers.
4. Righteous Among the Nations — an official status awarded by Yad Vashem to non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. More than 28,700 people from over 50 countries have been recognized as such. In some cases, high-ranking German officials have used their resources to help Jews.
5. One of the most famous "righteous" is a German industrialist and member of the NSDAP Oskar Schindler, who owned a factory in Krakow where he officially employed Jewish labor and saved nearly 1200 Jews during the Holocaust. His story formed the basis for the book "Schindler's Ark" and the film "Schindler's List" based on it.
6. Holocaust denial — a conspiracy theory that the Holocaust, as described by mainstream historiography, never occurred. Proponents of this theory claim that the crimes of the Holocaust were significantly fewer than commonly believed, or that they did not occur at all, and that information about them was deliberately falsified by Zionists. These claims are typically based on neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism. The UN General Assembly has adopted two resolutions unequivocally condemning any complete or partial denial of the Holocaust. In a number of countries, Holocaust denial is criminally punishable.
7. The Hamas invasion of Israel, which began on October 7, 2023, was accompanied by the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Following the Israeli retaliatory operation, anti-Semitic sentiment and actions surged worldwide. Thousands of violent incidents, some resulting in deaths, were reported in 2024-2025, including attacks on Jewish communities, synagogues, and other sites.
