Which day is observed as Holocaust Memorial Day?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, January 27. The day the question names is fixed by the United Nations as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, and the General Assembly chose 27 January for exactly one reason: it is the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex in German-occupied Poland by advancing Soviet troops on 27 January 1945, who found roughly seven thousand surviving prisoners still alive there. The designation came through General Assembly resolution 60/7, adopted by consensus on 1 November 2005 — the sixtieth anniversary year both of the liberation and of the United Nations itself. That single resolution did three things at once: it fixed the annual observance, it rejected any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event, and it created the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, which is why the day carries a standing education mandate and not merely a commemorative one. The shorter name used in the question — 'Holocaust Memorial Day' — is the title the United Kingdom gives its own national observance, first held on 27 January 2001 after the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust of January 2000; it falls on the identical date, so the UN's long title and the British short title point to one and the same 27 January. Auschwitz itself, where about 1.1 million people were murdered, roughly a million of them Jews, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979 and is preserved as a state memorial and museum at Oświęcim. Anchor the date to the liberation and you never have to memorise it as a bare number.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Fifteen January carries no Holocaust observance anywhere in the international calendar. In India it is Army Day, which marks 15 January 1949 — the day Field Marshal K. M. Cariappa took over as the first Indian Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army from General Sir Francis Bucher. It is set here purely as a same-month decoy for a candidate who has retained 'some day in January' but not which day, and an Indian candidate is doubly exposed, because the date really is familiar and the familiarity gets mis-filed.  (c) Wrong month, and the date is already taken by something unrelated: 10 February is World Pulses Day, designated by the General Assembly in December 2018 and led by the FAO, an observance about protein-rich food crops with no connection whatever to the Holocaust. It also catches anyone who half-remembers a '10' from the post-war human-rights calendar — but that 10 is 10 December, Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, not 10 February.  (d) Only one of the three dates is a Holocaust observance at all, so no combination can stand. This option deserves to be read calmly rather than selected defensively: 'More than one of the above' is offered on 44 of the 150 questions in this paper, yet the official final key marks it correct on only 6 of them — roughly one in seven. Treating it as a safe hedge on a plain date question, in a paper that deducts one-third of a mark for a wrong answer, is a reliably losing habit.

Concept: The Holocaust was the systematic, state-organised persecution and murder of about six million European Jews — some two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe — by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945, carried out alongside the mass killing of Roma and Sinti, disabled people under the 'euthanasia' programme, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians and political prisoners. Auschwitz-Birkenau, built from 1940 near Oświęcim in occupied Poland, was the largest of the Nazi camp complexes and combined a concentration camp, a slave-labour camp attached to the IG Farben works at Monowitz, and the gas chambers of Birkenau; about 1.1 million people died there, which makes it the single deadliest site of the genocide. Its liberation on 27 January 1945 is the moment on which the world's commemorative calendar now turns. What the 2005 General Assembly resolution did was convert what had until then been Jewish and national remembrance into a universal United Nations observance, and tie it to two forward-looking purposes — Holocaust education, and the prevention of future genocide. That second purpose connects the day directly to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted on 9 December 1948 largely on the initiative of the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who had coined the word 'genocide' in 1944.

State PCS 2025 Q33 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q33 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer