On 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated. Established by the UN General Assembly in 2005, the day honours the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of Nazism.
More than 80 years later, this date continues to prompt fundamental questions: why do we return to these events so many decades on? Why does Auschwitz-Birkenau still command global attention? And is remembrance alone sufficient to ensure that such crimes are never repeated? These are the questions the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS invites reflection upon as part of its annual campaign marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on 27 January, also raises another pressing question: how do we speak about the Holocaust as its last direct witnesses pass away? One possible answer lies in art – created in extreme conditions, often in defiance of the logic of the camp system, and today serving as a unique form of testimony. This perspective underpins ENRS’s information and education campaign “The Art of Remembrance”.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest German Nazi concentration camp and extermination centre. Between 1940 and 1945, approximately one million Jews and around 100,000 people of other ethnicities – including Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war – were murdered there. The systematic extermination continued until the final days of the camp’s operation. On 18 January 1945, just days before the Red Army entered the camp, nearly 60,000 prisoners were forced onto death marches, during which around 15,000 people perished.
While Auschwitz has become the most recognisable symbol of the Holocaust, this unprecedented crime against humanity took place wherever the reach of the Third Reich extended. As a result of the Shoah, nearly six million Jews were murdered, around half of them in concentration and extermination camps.
In the spirit of responsibility for the present and concern for the future, ENRS takes part each year in the commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 2026, this engagement takes the form of the “The Art of Remembrance” campaign – a multilingual set of educational materials that highlights a lesser-known dimension of the history of camps and ghettos: places designed for dehumanisation, where works of art nevertheless came into being. Sometimes created in secrecy, sometimes commissioned by the perpetrators, and sometimes serving as deeply personal records of a world meant to leave no trace, these works were made with whatever materials were available. Once a means of survival, they now serve as acts of remembrance.
This year’s edition of the campaign focuses on Marianne Grant, a Czech-Scottish artist of Jewish origin who survived the Holocaust, having endured the Theresienstadt ghetto as well as the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. A short film dedicated to her recalls the colourful drawings she created in the ghetto and the camps, often with children in mind, for whom drawing became a brief moment of respite from camp reality. It was this art, as Grant herself emphasised, that saved her life.
How can you join the International Holocaust Remembrance Day campaign?
- With a moment of silence and reflection,try to answer the question: “Why did Auschwitz not fall from the sky?”
- Watch a short film dedicated to Marianne Grant, recalling the colourful drawings she created in the ghetto and the camps — art that, as she herself emphasised, saved her life.
- Read the article “My Art Saved My Life”: Marianne Grant and the Fragile Power of Witness, exploring how her drawings became both a means of survival and a lasting testimony.
- Watch a short film, showcasing the work of Mieczysław Kościelniak.
- Discover how Gerhard Richter’s work confronts memory and trauma in “Post-remembering the Holocaust in German Contemporary Art”, an insightful article on ENRS.
- Read an interview “The Holocaust is not just a historical event. It is also our shared responsibility”, in which Prof. Jan Rydel and Prof. Piotr Trojański address questions such as why there are still groups that deny the Holocaust as a historical event or diminish its significance, and how Holocaust memory shapes our European identity.
- Watch a short animated film, “Memento”, prepared by the ENRS and the House of the Wannsee Conference for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day; the film is directed by the Hungarian auteur Zoltán Szilágyi Varga.
- Watch a short film, “Righteous Diplomacy” (2021) dedicated to diplomats who played an important role in saving thousands of Jews during the Second World War. The film is part of educational package “The Different Ways Jews Were Helped during the Holocaust” on Hi-story Lessons, an online educational platform.
- Study our special educational packageon the subject. The lesson plans and ideas for commemorating Holocaust-related remembrance days developed by educators refer, among other, to travelling exhibition “Between Life and Death […]” focusing on various forms of aiding Jews during the Holocaust and stories of their survival. The materials are available in Polish and English at Hi-story Lessons.
- Watch our webinar recordingson teaching about the Holocaust: “Resources for history teachers: an educational kit about the Holocaust” (M. Grądzka-Rejak), “Resources for history teachers: International Holocaust Remembrance Day”(U. Bijoś, J. Mayr), and “Against the Holocaust: Jewish Resistance. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and examples from Vilnius region” (J. Majewska, D. Ozacky-Stern).
- Find out more about the travelling exhibition “Between Life and Death. Stories of Rescue during the Holocaust” which tells the hidden stories of the selfless courage and incredible efforts made to save the lives of Jews, during the Second World War.
- Listen to an interview with one of the heroes of the exhibition “Between Life and Death […]” – Elżbieta Ficowska, and read about her love to both of her mothers in the article “In the name of her both mothers”.
- Read the Carol Elias’s pieceon the “Holocaust and Diaspora Survival: The Next Generations. Past, Present, Future” and Roman Żuchowicz’s article introducing the subject of “The Wannsee Conference”, a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders to discuss the implementation of the “final solution to the Jewish question”.
- Visit an interactive map of the Wannsee Conference.
- See how the participants of the “Sound in the Silence” transformed their knowledge and experiences from visiting memory sites—Wannsee and Stara Gradiška—into a moving performance evoking the voices of both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust, as well as young people’s reflections on experiencing history through art.
- Explore Holocaust issues from an academic perspectivewith video recordings and other materials from the conference „Genealogies of Memory 2020. The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives” (2020), and
- An issue of “Remembrance And Solidarity. Studies in the 20th Century” on the subject of the Holocaust/Shoah (2016).
- Once more listen to the Marian Turski’s, Auschwitz survivor’s, speech delivered at the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation and share your feelings.
- Follow us, commemorate with others and do not be indifferent.
Find out more about the ENRS’s commemoration of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day here.