A Holocaust Memorial Day service will be held in the Festival Hall at Bolton Town Hall on January 27.
The event, organised by community groups, will mark the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s liberation.
In a statement the organisers said: “This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the largest Nazi death camp.
“But Genocides have continued to take place across the world, in Cambodia 1975-1979, in Rwanda in 1994, in Bosnia in 1995, and in Darfur since 2003.
(Image: Supplied)
“At these troubling times we think of ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere, and we continue to call for peace.
“Genocide doesn’t just happen; it starts with divisive language and people being targeted because of their identity.
“We cannot be complacent.
“Prejudice must be challenged by us all.”
Alex Hopkinson and Sarah Ibberson both age seventeen who have been to the Second World War death camps in Europe.
READ MORE: Holocaust Memorial: Holocaust survivor’s harrowing story
The Holocaust was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jewish people in Europe. From the time they assumed power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis used propaganda, persecution, and legislation to deny human and civil rights to German Jews. They used centuries of antisemitism (anti-Jewish hatred) as their foundation.
With the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 Germany invaded Poland, subjecting around two million Polish Jews to violence and forced labour. Thousands of Jews were murdered in the first months of the occupation. Shortly after the occupation Polish Jews were confined to particular neighbourhoods that came to be known as ‘ghettos’. Living conditions in these ghettos were appalling – a deliberate attempt by the Nazis to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews. This approach was repeated across Eastern Europe in other countries occupied by the Nazis.
In 1941, the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews began – a plan known by the Nazis as ‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’. Death squads called Einsatzgruppen swept Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, killing Jews by firing squad. By the end of 1941 the first death camp, Chelmno in Poland, had been established, giving the Nazis their method to continue murdering on a giant scale between 1941 and 1945.
By the end of the Holocaust, 6 million Jewish men, women and children had been murdered in ghettos, mass-shootings, in concentration camps and death camps.
The memorial event in Bolton begins at 10am and finishes at noon.