World Marks Holocaust Remembrance Day As Antisemitism Rises

International Holocaust Remembrance Day honors the lives of the 6 million Jews killed in Nazi Germany.

Holocaust survivors and politicians warned about the resurgence of antisemitism and Holocaust denial Thursday as the world remembered Nazi atrocities and commemorated the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

German parliament speaker Baerbel Bas noted that the coronavirus pandemic has acted "like an accelerant" to already-burgeoning antisemitism.

"Antisemitism is here — it isn't just on the extreme fringe, not just among the eternally incorrigible and a few antisemitic trolls on the net," she said. "It is a problem of our society — all of society."

The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution in November 2005 establishing the annual commemoration, and chose Jan. 27 — the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, many International Holocaust Remembrance Day events were being held online this year again. A small ceremony, however, was to take place at the site of the former Auschwitz death camp, where World War II Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people in occupied Poland. The memorial site was closed earlier in the pandemic but reopened in June.

In all, about 6 million European Jews and millions of other people were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. Some 1.5 million were children.

To tackle Holocaust denial, UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress launched a partnership Thursday with the online platform TikTok popular with youngsters. They say it will allow users to be oriented toward verified information when searching for terms related to the Shoah.

According to the U.N., 17% of content related to the Holocaust on TikTok either denied or distorted the Holocaust.

"Denying, distorting or trivializing the true facts of the Holocaust is a pernicious form of contemporary antisemitism," said UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. "All online platforms must take responsibility for the spread of hate speech by promoting reliable sources of information."

It is unknown how many Holocaust survivors are still alive, but the U.S. Holocaust Memorial contains the names of nearly 200,000 survivors and family members.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.