WARSAW, Poland — Holocaust survivors, politicians and regular people commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, gathering at events held across Europe to reflect on Nazi Germany’s murder of millions of people and its attempt to annihilate European Jewry.<\/p>\n
International Holocaust Remembrance Day<\/a> is observed across the world on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps. The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the memorial site of Auschwitz, located in an area of southern Poland which was under German occupation during World War II, former prisoners laid flowers and wreaths at a wall where German forces executed thousands of prisoners. Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki was scheduled to join survivors for a remembrance ceremony at Birkenau, the vast site nearby where Jews from across Europe were exterminated in gas chambers.<\/p>\n Candles burned and white roses were placed at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honors the 6 million victims and stands as a powerful symbol of Germany’s remorse.<\/p>\n In the Czech Republic, a candlelight march is planned for the evening in Terezin at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. Thousands of Jews died there or were sent from there to Auschwitz and other death camps.<\/p>\n Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and others. The camp was liberated by the Soviet army on Jan. 27, 1945. In all, some 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust \u2014 in ghettos, concentration camps and often shot at close range in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe<\/a>.<\/p>\n Israel \u2014 home to more Holocaust survivors than any other country \u2014 marks its remembrance day, Yom HaShoah, on the anniversary of the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising<\/a>, emphasizing the heroism of the Jewish insurgents who resisted the Nazi terror.<\/p>\n An annual gathering took place at the upper house of the Czech Parliament with Holocaust survivors. Pavel Jelinek, a 90-year-old survivor from the city of Liberec \u2014 a Czech city with a prewar Jewish population of 1,350 \u2014 told those gathered that he was now the last living of the 37 Jews who returned to the city after the war.<\/p>\n