LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — On this day 78 years ago, Jewish prisoners were liberated from the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.
To commemorate this moment in history, January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Rabbi David Wirtschafter said it's a day to reflect and honor the memory of the six million Jewish people killed in the Holocaust.
Artifacts from some of those victims are displayed in a museum at Lexington's Temple Adath Israel.
"As startling and overwhelming a number as six million is, when you look at this pair of shoes, you are reminded that this is a single human life with hopes and dreams and good days and bad days," Wirtschafter said. "A living breathing human being just like yourself."
The horror of what happened, he says, is often over-simplified.
"I think we do a huge disservice to history and to the memory of the tragedy when we simplify this to one man and one nation," he said. "It took an entire world of complacency and complicity to enable and empower a slaughter of this magnitude."
That's why he said we all have a moral duty to resist fascism and extremism and to understand that catastrophes like the Holocaust take an entire system.
"The phrase 'never again' is not just about the survival of the Jewish people and not wanting it to happen to us again, but that it should never happen to anyone again," he said.
