January 27 is the Holocaust Memorial Day, an international anniversary established by the UN in 2005 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. This date was chosen to remember the symbolic event that happened the 27 January of the 1945 – exactly 75 years ago – when the troops of the Red Army, engaged in the last offensive against Nazi Germany, liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. From here, 10 days earlier, the men of the Reich had withdrawn in a hurry, taking with them the healthy prisoners, many of whom lost their lives during the crossing, which went down in history as "the death march". An extraordinary account of this, as of many other events following the liberation, is found in one of Primo Levi's masterpieces, "The Truce".
The discovery of Auschwitz and the testimonies of the survivors marked a decisive turning point for historical memory, because for the first time they provided a detailed reconstruction of how the Nazi genocide had unfolded. As well as hearing the stories of veterans, the world saw the tools used to torture and exterminate prisoners in the largest concentration camp ever built by the Nazis.
In reality, several months before arriving in Auschwitz, the Red Army had already liberated the Majdanek concentration camp and conquered the areas where the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (dismantled by the Nazis in 1943) were located. However, the revelations that came from Auschwitz had a decidedly greater impact on historical research as well as on collective memory and for this reason the United Nations chose the liberation of this last camp (which in reality was a complex of concentration and labor camps) as an event - symbol to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust.
In Italy, the establishment of the Day of Remembrance on January 27 preceded the UN resolution by five years. Here is the text of law 211 of 20 July 2000, made up of only two articles:
«1) The Italian Republic recognizes 27 January, the date of the demolition of the gates of Auschwitz, as "Remembrance Day", in order to remember the Shoah (extermination of the Jewish people), the racial laws, the Italian persecution of Jewish citizens , the Italians who have suffered deportation, imprisonment, death, as well as those who, even in different camps and alignments, have opposed the extermination project, and at the risk of their own lives have saved other lives and protected the persecuted.
2) On the occasion of the "Day of Remembrance" referred to in article 1, ceremonies, initiatives, meetings and common moments of narration of the facts and reflection are organised, especially in schools of all levels, on what happened to the Jewish people and to the Italian military and political deportees to the Nazi camps in order to preserve in the future of Italy the memory of a tragic and dark period of history in our country and in Europe, and so that similar events can never happen again".
