

Remembering the Holocaust is only possible by communicating facts and knowledge – in schools, but not only.
Never forget holocaust remembrance day images how to#
And last June it adopted a report with recommendations on how to further improve measures against anti-Semitism in Switzerland. The Swiss Federal Council speaks out clearly and unequivocally against anti-Semitism and racism. We have a responsibility to stand up against anti-Semitism, racism, hatred and violence, and totalitarianism. But we do have a responsibility to remember and to do everything we can to ensure that history does not repeat itself.

It is true that the generations born after the war bear no responsibility for the Holocaust. Only if we understand how something could happen can we prevent such atrocities in the future. But we also do it for those who were left behind. When we remember the Holocaust, we do so for the millions of people who did not survive. Engrave them on your hearts / When you are in your house, when you walk on your way, / When you go to bed, when you rise. The Italian poet and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi said it so forcefully: “Consider that this has been: / I commend these words to you. But what they have to say is important – perhaps more important now than ever.

We can still meet these people, shake their hands and sit down with them. Today we can still hear these testimonies directly from survivors. Seeing these pictures and hearing the incredible life story of Fishel Rabinowicz in person was deeply moving. Over the years, his passion has produced 50 works of art – a powerful visual exploration of Judaism and the Shoah. “With my pictures I want to make sure we never forget what happened back then,” he explains. Rabinowicz had always been a gifted painter, and after he retired, he turned to art as a means of processing his experiences. After some time spent recovering in a Davos sanatorium, he went on to complete an apprenticeship he then got married and moved to Ticino. He came to Switzerland as a young man, in 1947. On the day he was liberated, Rabinowicz weighed less than 30 kilograms – but he was alive. His parents and seven of his nine siblings did not survive the Holocaust. Born in Poland in 1924, he was deported in 1941 and spent almost four years in a number of different labour and concentration camps.

One of them was Fishel Rabinowicz, and just a few days ago, I had the great honour of meeting this remarkable man in person in Ticino.įishel Rabinowicz is now 97 years old and one of the last Holocaust survivors living in Switzerland. The prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp had to hold out for another eleven weeks. It is 77 years to the day since the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on 27 January 1945. That is why every year on International Holocaust Remembrance Day we remember the six million Jewish men, women and children killed and all the other victims of the Holocaust. We remember, because we do not want to forget. Bern, - Bern, – Message by Ignazio Cassis, President of the Confederation and Head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs FDFA on the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
