Holocaust Memorial Day in Auschwitz

80 years ago, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp was liberated, ending one of the darkest, most inhumane and murderous periods in world history.

President Tamás Sulyok, together with leaders from more than 50 countries, including German President Steinmeier, French President Macron, Polish President Duda and Slovak President Pellegrini, paid tribute to the victims.

The Hungarian Head of State said, "I wish that this commemorative event will become a lasting symbol of hope and peace”.
Nazi Germany originally established the concentration camp Auschwitz I for Polish prisoners of war in 1940, on Polish territory annexed to the Third Reich. The Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was built nearby two years later. According to the data available at the memorial site and museum built at the former Auschwitz camp site, the Germans murdered nearly 1.1 million people in the camp complex, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and other nationalities. 

From 15 May to 8 July 1944, almost 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in less than two months. Most of them - according to the Auschwitz Museum, 325-330 thousand - were killed in gas chambers immediately after their arrival. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. The Soviet troops found some 7,000 people, mostly women and children, in the camp, weakened to the point of utter exhaustion.

The world remembered the victims.