UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, warned on Wednesday that “racism and xenophobia are rising sharply”, highlighting violent attacks on Jewish sites and antisemitic incidents reported in many countries.
With millions of people displaced from their homes worldwide, a UN ceremony celebrating Holocaust survivors in Brazil, has provided a stark reminder that throughout the 75 years of the Organization’s existence, the plight of refugees has been an ever-present theme.
From the ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland to the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sachsenhausen, American Judge Thomas Buergenthal began life with all odds stacked against him.
Yet, his indomitable spirit pushed him through the Second World War and the atrocities of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically murdered.
Judge Buergenthal, now 83, served at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the UN Human Rights Committee, and was the first US national to be elected to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
A Holocaust survivor and former playmate of one of history’s most tragic figures has a message for the world about genocide: “We haven’t really learned.”
Eva Schloss was a neighbour of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl whose famous diary detailed her family’s life in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War.
Ms Schloss was just 13 when her own family of four was also forced into hiding in Amsterdam.
A Japanese diplomat who rescued 6,000 Jewish families fleeing Nazi persecution in Lithuania showed how one person can make a difference, Cellin Gluck, the Director of a movie entitled "Persona Non Grata" has said.
Recently screened at the UN, the film tells the story of how Chiune Sugihara disobeyed his Government during the Second World War and issued visas to these refugees.
The Nazi party in Germany used “strong graphic images” like the swastika to brand themselves and make the “jump from obscurity to political prominence”, Steven Luckert, Senior Programme Curator for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has said.
Mr Luckert opened the Museum's exhibition “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda” at UN headquarters ahead of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.