We will remember them!

The ceremony begins

 by New Worker correspondent

New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks joined comrades, war veterans, diplomats and anti-fascists to remember the victims of the Holocaust at a ceremony in the grounds of the Imperial War Museum in south London last week.
    The annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration, organised by the Soviet War Memorial Trust and Southwark Council, could not be held last year because of the Covid lockdown but the recent easing of the restrictions meant that although the traditional commemoration in the halls of the Museum was still suspended the outdoor ceremony could once again go ahead.
    The solemn event organised by the Soviet War Memorial Trust and Southwark Council was held on Thursday 27th January, the day back in 1945 when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the largest death camp in the Third Reich.
    The Nazis killed six million Jews during the Second World War. There were hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens amongst them. About three million Soviet prisoners of war perished in extermination camps.
    The Act of Remembrance began with a procession led by veterans’ associations to the Holocaust Memorial Tree and the Soviet War Memorial, followed by the laying of wreaths and floral tributes by the company that included veteran organisations, representatives of the embassies of the Russian Federation and Belarus, as well as local Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors, the NCP and members of the Russian community in London. It ended, as always, with a minute’s silence and the Last Post.