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UNESCO marked the  with a ceremony at UNESCO headquarters on 26 January 2023.

“Commemorating victims, protecting the memory of the Holocaust, fighting hatred and conspiracy theories: These are our collective duties,” said UNESCO Director-General Ms Audrey Azoulay as she opened the event. She was joined by the President of the Memorial de la Shoah, Mr Eric de Rothschild, and composer Mr Jorge Grundman whose work entitled Shoah was performed by violinist Mr Robert Davidovici. The commemoration event featured the , President of the Union of Auschwitz Survivors, France.

“My very happy childhood came to an abrupt end at the age of 11,” said Ms Choko who was interned in the Lodz ghetto with her family, between early 1940 and August 1944. Her father died in the ghetto in February 1942, and she was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with her mother in August 1944. They were then sent to the Celle labour camp, near Hanover in Germany in September 1944, then in February 1945 to Bergen-Belsen. Ms Choko’s mother died at Bergen-Belsen of hunger and illness in March 1945. “When British troops liberated the camp on 15 April 1945, I was 16 and weighed only 25 kilos,” she said. Death was so close.” “It is necessary to transmit to the youth, that they know the history, that they are wary of the circumstances,” said Ms. Choko. “May our past serve as a guide for young people and may their future never suffer our trials.”

“It is more urgent than ever that we all take on the responsibility of ourselves becoming witnesses to this history,” said Ms Azoulay in her message for the Day. “We must make sure that the victims are never forgotten. Moreover, we must remember that such horrors can always happen again.”

Mr Eric de Rothschild, President of the Memorial de la Shoah, underlined the joint work and efforts undertaken by UNESCO and the Memorial de la Shoah to educate about the Holocaust and genocide, and ensure that “tolerance and education triumph over all the evils that we have known in the past and which have had disastrous effects.” He said: They are unfortunately still particularly virulent today. If is therefore our duty to continue this fight.”

As part of the ceremony, violinist Mr Robert Davidovici performed the movements YomHaShoah and The Last Breath from Shoah for solo violin and sacred temple, in the presence of the composer Jorge Grundman.

Mr Jorge Grundman, the son of a Holocaust survivor, was inspired by Freidl Dicker-Brandeis during a visit to the the Jewish Museum in Prague. She was a painter and artist from Vienna who became a heroic educator for the children of the Terezin ghetto. Freidl was executed in Auschwitz in 1944, but she previously had rescued 4,500 drawings from her students, who were able to portray what their lives were like as a family or at school before the Nazi terror. These drawings sparked the beginnings of Grundman’s creative process, leading to the composition of Shoah.

 “I wanted to write music that would directly honour the memory of the Holocaust victims,” Mr Grundman said. “I knew that in this way, every time you hear a note, every time you long to hear it again, or every time you study or perform it, you will be reminded of why it is written.”

This year’s commemoration also included an exhibition entitled ‘‘There was a time…’: Jewish Family Photographs Before 1939’, jointly organized by UNESCO with the Wiener Holocaust Library, with support from the Permanent Delegation of Germany to UNESCO. The private family photographs shared in the exhibition reveal a hidden history of pre-Nazi era Jewish life in Germany and Austria.

To mark the International Day, UNESCO Field Offices in Accra, Almaty, Mexico City, Venice and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning in Hamburg hosted the special premiere of the film “Where is Anne Frank” organized in partnership with the Anne Frank Fonds. This film shares an account of Anne Frank’s life and suffering as a Jewish girl hiding from Nazi persecution through a contemporary lens and explores her questions about humanity and what it means to be a citizen of the world, in the past and the present. The film is accompanied by teaching materials, published in collaboration with UNESCO. The film will also be screened by UNESCO offices in Brasilia and New Delhi.

To address the problem of Holocaust denial and distortion, UNESCO, the UN, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the OSCE/ODIHR and the European Commission have teamed up for the digital campaign . The campaign explains why and how Holocaust denial and distortion spreads antisemitism. A recent , finds that over 16 per cent of material (more than 3 in every 20 posts) on social media platforms talking about the Holocaust denies or distorts its fundamental facts.

UNESCO also took part in the global campaign, organized by the World Jewish Congress to preserve the memory of the victims and ensure that the past is never forgotten.

In addition, UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress are working with Facebook and TikTok to redirect users searching for terms related to the Holocaust or Holocaust denial to the website . The website provides factual answers to fundamental questions about the Holocaust. The initiative now extends to 19 languages for social media users around the world.

• Teaching about the Holocaust and genocide