The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27th, was marked yesterday in Sarajevo’s Jewish administration with the prayer for the dead and honoring the Jews and all other innocent victims of the Second World War.
Six million Jews tragically were killed in this war, dying in the most terrible torment, burned in gas chambers in numerous camps, from which the most terrible and deadliest was Auschwitz, where more than a million people were killed, yet at the beginning of the trial for criminals at first it was not considered a genocide.
Initially at the trials, it was presented as crimes against humanity, and only in 1948, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, while in 2005 the resolution on marking the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th was adopted, since it was the day of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
Then it was said “never again,” but something like that happened in the 20th century after the Holocaust, such as genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, but also in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
The President of the Jewish Community in BiH, Jakob Finci, recalled that back then, there was an intention to destroy Jews, while the word “Holocaust” refers to mass murder and is the most terrible crime because those who entered the camps, were leaving them through chimney crematoriums.
Among the six million killed people, there were also several thousand Jews from BiH, most of whom were Sephardi Jews, who found shelter in BiH after being banished from Spain in 1492.
Therefore, Finci believes that BiH has a reason to remember the Holocaust victims when 85 percent of Jews from BiH were killed, as well as a large number of people who were part of the Romani population, and all those who were not, as he said, were left to the Nazis.
Religious officials in BiH, reisu-l-ulema of the Islamic community – Husein ef. Kavazovic, and metropolitan dabrobosanski – Hrizostom reminded of the terrible crimes committed in that war, stressing that it is of extremely importance to remember the killed ones.
(Source: klix.ba)
