Holocaust Remembrance Day online this year under coronavirus
The coronavirus pandemic forces Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies starting Monday night to be conducted online. The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center launches the events on Monday night with a pre-recorded ceremony. Testimonials of survivors, most of whom are held in quarantine due to their age, and speeches are to be streamed online. On Sunday night, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas pledged to fight Holocaust denial.
The events are also reduced to symbolic occasions by travel restrictions which prevented participants from attending ceremonies at the Nazi concentration camps across Europe. Memorial ceremonies that were scheduled for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camps at Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrueck, and Bergen-Belsen were scaled down. So too were the annual observances honoring the heroes of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
