Serb BiH Presidency member Milorad Dodik has told SRNA that the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an opportunity to remember all innocent victims who lost their lives due to the monstrous Fascist ideology only because they were of a different nation, religion or race.
“Holocaust victims are victims of a great crime from WWII. We should keep drawing lessons from this horrific and tragic history to the benefit of future generations. It is our obligation to teach our descendants that such evil must not repeat itself ever again and to point out the importance of human lives, dignity, freedom, and peace,” said Dodik.
He has said that with the liberation of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, a big victory was won against madness, dark ideology and crimes for which there can be no justification.
Noting that more than one million of innocent people were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp, including Serbs, but mostly Jews, Dodik has stressed that much was written about the Holocaust and the systems of death concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Mauthausen, and others, but even today, 75 years on, there is no exact data on the number of victims.
“We will never know the exact scope of the tragedy of the Holocaust. But, it is our human and moral duty to remember and pay our respects to victims in order to show the present and future generations that racism is an unprecedented evil,” Dodik said.
Dodik has said that despite millions of victims, evil has never disappeared, but has repeated itself in different places in the world and in different forms.
He has stressed that we should also remember today victims of Jasenovac, Brod na Drini, Jadovno and other WWII crimes, but also victims and internees of the death prison camps for Serbs, Silos in Tarčin outside Sarajevo, where more than 600 Serb civilians were held and which was closed on this day in 1996, two months after the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed.
“According to testimonies of numerous former internees, the Silos prison camp in some segments had elements of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp and this should be a warning that Fascism was unfortunately present in the recent history as well. I wish that such evil does not repeat itself ever again in the future in any place,” Dodik said.
The liberation by the Soviets of the largest Nazi concentration camp for mass extermination, Auschwitz, on January 27, 1945, is marked as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on marking this day in 2005 appealing to all member states to respect the memory of the Holocaust victims.
TST