“THIS unspeakable cruelty must never be repeated,” Pope Francis said in the lead-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day today.
The holocaust saw the genocide of six million of Europe’s Jews, or two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population, at the hands of the Nazi regime.
The international day is held on the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on January 27, 1945.
Pope Francis said the world must remember the “extermination of millions of Jews, people of various nationalities and religious faiths”.
He also appealed to everyone, but especially to “educators and families, so that they might engender in younger generations the awareness of the horrors of this dark page in human history”.
“It must never be forgotten, so that we can build a future in which human dignity is never again trampled upon.”
In conjunction with the day, the Gandel Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness in Australia Survey 2021 was released – the first of its kind in Australia.
The major finding was that a quarter of Australians had little to no knowledge of the Holocaust.
Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler said that a quarter of Australians and a third of young Australians have little to no knowledge of the Holocaust is really worrying.
“The Holocaust is obviously searingly important to the Jewish people, but its human rights lessons are universal – and the Gandel Holocaust Survey confirms that, with nine in 10 Australians agreeing that we can learn lessons for today from what happened in the Holocaust,” he said.
“Knowing about the Holocaust makes people aware of the evils of racism, and the dangers of allowing hatred to manifest.”
In Queensland, there is a mandated minimum number of hours set aside for teaching about the Holocaust but this was not the case elsewhere in the country.
At the end of Pope Francis’ audience, he met with Belarus-born Lidia Maksymowicz, 81, who had spent 13 months at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where she and other children were subjected to Josef Mengele’s medical experiments.
It was her second meeting with Pope Francis, who — at an outdoor general audience on May 26, 2021 — had spoken with her, kissed the prisoner number — 70072, tattooed on her left arm and embraced her.
That meeting sparked an idea for her to write an autobiography, with help from the Italian journalist Paolo Rodari.
She told ANSA, the Italian wire service, that she and Mr Rodari decided it would be important to describe the experience of a child during the Holocaust, since so many books cover the experiences of adults who survived.
“One must not forget that more than 200,000 children died just at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” she said.
