(CMR) Portraits of seven of the UK's last remaining Holocaust survivors went on display at the Queen's Gallery to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday, 27 January. This year marks the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945, which was the largest Nazi death camp.
The Holocaust genocide took place during World War II, during which Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million European Jews.
The Prince of Wales, who commissioned the portraits, said they were a living memorial to the six million people “whose stories will never be told, whose portraits will never be painted,” the BBC reported.
People across the UK left a candle in their windows in remembrance. Landmark buildings including the London Eye, Edinburgh Castle, Cardiff Castle, and the Titanic museum in Belfast were illuminated in purple, the color of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Prince Charles said he commissioned the portraits as an enduring reminder of the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War Two and in tribute to the Jewish refugees who made their home in Britain, the BBC reported.
The day falls on the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps where Nazi Germany carried out its Final Solution seeking to murder the Jewish people of Europe.
At the memorial site in Poland, which was subjected to a brutal German occupation during World War II, a small number of survivors gathered in an auditorium. Attendance at the yearly event was sharply curtailed amid Europe's coronavirus surge, and others joined online.
Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma, and others.
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