International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022

Eighty years ago, on January 20, 1942, a 90-minute meeting was held at a beautiful lake villa in the outskirts of Berlin at Am Groen Wannsee 56-58. There, a conference took place with an earth-shattering consequence: the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question. 

Since 1941, deportations had already been well under way. The Einsatzgruppen had been ravaging existing Jewish populations as the Nazi troops moved eastwards. But the 90-minute meeting set the means to systematically deport and assassinate all. 

Those 90 minutes which fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilisation and the magnitude of the Holocaust, planned and carried out by the Nazis, should forever be seared in the collective memory of humankind.

This January 27th marks the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest of the concentration and extermination camps. 

Stirred by Peter Hayes' book, 'Why? Explaining the Holocaust' and Primo Levi's urge to ensure that what happened doesn't happen again, we at Saffron advocate for the existential need to remember so that such atrocities are never repeated. 

Photo: Visit Berlin