Warsaw pays tribute to Holocaust victims

The mayor of Warsaw has led a memorial service at the city's Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument for the millions of people who died during the Holocaust.

Rafał Trzaskowski said at the ceremony, organised to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, that remembrance of the Holocaust is a moral obligation today to ensure the ideology of hatred is never revived.

Flowers were laid by officials, accompanied by a Polish Army honour guard, at the base of the memorial, which commemorates those who fought in the 1943 Ghetto Uprising.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a recording of the ceremony was made available online, featuring speeches by Mayor Trzaskowski and Polish-Jewish actress Gołda Tencer.

"The Holocaust is and will remain a terrifying chapter in the modern history of mankind," Trzaskowski said in his address. "The scale of the tragedy is shocking, it is shocking that hate was sown in the minds of ordinary people, which led to the Holocaust."

The Warsaw Mayor added that "out of respect and tribute to the victims it is necessary to remember the unsettling truth of the words of (writer and parliamentarian - PAP) Zofia Nałkowska, who said that ‘people dealt out this fate to people’.”

"Let the horror of these words reach us," Trzaskowski said.