Parliament marks Holocaust Memorial Day, 80 years after Auschwitz liberation

A special ceremony has been held in Parliament as an early commemoration to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Speaker of the House Sir Lindsay Hoyle led the event ahead of the memorial day on 27 January which commemorates the 6,000,000 Jews murdered during the Holocaust plus victims of genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

This year marks 80 years since the Holocaust ended and the ceremony in Portcullis House, included testimony from two survivors of Nazi persecution. 

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One was Yisrael Abelesz, 96, who was just 14 when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his parents and younger brother were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival.

"I didn't realise when my parents and brother were separated from me that I'd never see them again," he said.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, established in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940, became a central site of the 'Final Solution' – the systematic extermination of European Jews.

More than 1.1 million people, including Jews, Roma, political prisoners and others, were murdered there before the camp's liberation by Soviet forces on 27 January 1945.

Prisoners faced forced labour, starvation, and inhumane medical experiments in addition to mass killings.

Holocaust Memorial Day serves as a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides and has been observed in the UK since 2001.