Stand up to hatred: Holocaust Memorial Day

The picture to the right is not of a cattle shed on some farm: it's of one of the barracks prisoners at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camps were crated in until they met their fate. Prisoners typically were crammed in four to a bed, with up to a thousand in each shed.

Holocaust Memorial Day is held on 27 January because it marks the day towards the end of the Second World War that this concentration camp was liberated.

The Nazi Holocaust is of course the most shocking and largest in size in modern history; but today is also about far more than commemorating an event that happened 60 years ago: We also remember the victims of far more recent tragedies in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur - all of which have occurred in my lifetime: one since 2000.

The Holocaust Memorial Day website contains a huge amount of information and background resource to today's events - please find time to visit it:

http://www.hmd.org.uk/