That day commemorates the liberation of the Nazis’ largest death camp, Auschwitz, by the Red Army.
Jews from more than 20 countries were deported to their deaths there. But in that talk I remarked that the prime focus on Auschwitz obscures a key aspect of the Holocaust that needs to be assimilated: that, on the eve of the Nazi invasion, half of the Jews who would be murdered in the Holocaust were citizens of Poland.
Jews comprised 10 per cent of Poland’s entire pre-war population. In Poland’s capital, Warsaw, and its textile centre, Lodz, Jews formed one-third of the population.