ZAGREB, January 26, 2020 – The Anti-Fascist League of Croatia organised a rally in Zagreb’s Victims of Fascism Square on Sunday to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on 27 January, and on that occasion activists laid 75 carnations on the wall of building in the square in which Ustasha police and Gestapo used to operate during WW2.
The 75 flowers were laid to mark 75 years since Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp, was liberated on 27 January 1945.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a memorial day on 27 January commemorating the tragedy of the Holocaust that occurred during the Second World War, was designated by the United Nations General Assembly resolution in 2005. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews and 11 million others, by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
During today’s rally, activists recalled that the Holocaust had been also performed in Croatia during the Ustasha regime in the so-called Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945.
The lessons about the Holocaust teach us that in the societies hit by the evil of anti-Semitism, also the doors are open for the persecution of other minorities, said the Anti-Fascist League’s leader, Zoran Pusić, adding that anti-Semitism lurks in “some obscure part of the society and is potentially always present.”
He said that in Croatia, some 3,000 monuments, which had been erected during the Socialist Yugoslavia in memory of the Tito-led Partisans had been destroyed in the meantime. Pusić said that the national resistance movement (NOB) in the country had been the biggest resistance against Nazi forces and local Nazi collaborators in Europe.
He also warned of the rising anti-Semitic mood in the present-day Europe recently.
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