World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

On January 27, 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. In 1996, then German President Roman Herzog marked it as a day to commemorate the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. In 2005, the United Nations named it a day of international day of remembrance. Since then, people gather across the world to remember those who lost their lives.

Dozens of Auschwitz survivors commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day and paid homage to the Holocaust's victims by returning to the camp 72 years after it was liberated. Survivors placed wreaths in front of the camp's infamous shooting wall. Around 1.1 million people were murdered or died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, 90 percent of them were Jewish.

Germany's Bundestag commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a series of speeches. Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Joachim Gauck joined parliamentarians in listening to Felix Klieser, who was born without arms, play Norbert von Hannenheim's "Todeserfahrung." Hannenheim, who suffered acute psychological problems, was admitted to a Nazi "euthanasia" hospital.

The Vice-President of Germany's parliament, Claudia Roth, laid a wreath commemorating the Sinti and Roma people murdered by Nazi regime. Next to the Jewish communities, the Sinti and Roma were also widely persecuted and then deported to concentration camps. Still, today they continue to make up one of Germany's largest ethnic groups.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wore a kippa as he entered the synagogue at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem a day prior to International Holocaust Memorial Day on January 26. In his speech, Netanyahu addressed the threat posed by Iran and pointed to new US President Donald Trump as a strong ally of Israel's.

The Chief Rabbi of Russia, Berel Lazar, attended a candle lighting ceremony at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. Although the Soviet Union suffered a number of anti-Semitic controversies, Moscow openly received tens of thousands of Soviet Jews from the Pale of Settlement into its newly industrialized cities.

At York Minister in England, Canon Chancellor Christopher Collingwood lit 600 candles in the shape of the Star of David. In 1942, the Archbishop of York was one of the first people to condemn the Nazi Holocaust. Long before the Holocaust, the city witnessed the worst Jewish massacre in British history when, in 1190, some 150 Jews were targeted and killed in a series of anti-Semitic riots.

Italian Holocaust survivors Sami Modiano, right, and Piero Terracina embraced each other during a commemoration ceremony in Rome's Capitoline Hill. Dozens of guests, including Rome mayor Virginia Raggi, attended the ceremony.

A wreath from Croatia's president, prime minister and the parliament speaker was laid at the monument for Jewish WWII victims in Zagreb's "Mirogoj" cemetery. However, Croatia's Jewish community boycotted Friday's remembrance ceremony, accusing the conservative government of not doing enough to curb pro-Nazi sentiment in the EU's newest member state.

Holocaust survivor Edmund Zeligman lit a candle during a commemoration ceremony in the synagogue in Vilnius, Lithuania. Around 95 percent of Lithuanian Jews were massacred during the country's three-year occupation by the Nazis. No country saw a larger share of its Jewish community executed in the Holocaust.

A number of Belarusian students marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by attending the Belarusian Jewish Resistance Museum in the city of Navahrudak. In 1941, under Nazi occupation, German soldiers established a Jewish a ghetto at the site where the museum now stands.