Belgrade: Serbia marked the International Holocaust Remembrance Day by a central ceremony at Belgrade`s Staro Sajmiste concentration camp memorial to celebrate the day when the largest Nazi death camp in Europe- Auschwitz -Birkenau was liberated 68 years ago.
The central ceremony held yesterday included laying wreaths and paying tributes to the victims of the Holocaust, and Serbian Parliament Speaker Nebojsa Stefanovic said that this day needed to be a call to everybody to remember the victims because many brutal crimes had not been punished.
"A monstrous plan to destroy the entire Jewish people, but also members of other peoples, obliges us to continue to educate the youth and point our differences as something that brings people together in hope that such evil will never happen again," he stressed.
The speaker said that crimes against Serbs in World War II, concentration camps, deportations, mass executions, expulsions and other crimes must never be forgotten.
"We remember Auschwitz, Jasenovac, victims in Novi Sad, Jajinci, Staro Sajmiste.
We remember them with great sorrow," Stefanovic said at the commemoration.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day was also marked in Zrenjanin, eastern part of Vojvodina, by laying wreaths at a memorial plaque in Jevrejska Street (The Jewish Street), at the site where a synagogue was located until its destruction in 1941.
In August 1941, a total of 1,300 Jews were taken from this town on a journey of no return - to the Nazi death camps.
(Tanjug)
PTI
