Across the world, Jewish communities are commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, the day marks 79-years since the Allies liberated the infamous concentration and extermination camps: KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe killed 6 million Jews over the course of 12 years, representing two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population.
Today, fewer than 245,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust are alive. To preserve survivors’ accounts of the deadliest genocide in world history, historians work to compile their experiences into projects such as the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation , as well as local researchers at the West Michigan Holocaust Memorial.
Fox 17 spoke with Professor Rob Franciosi from Grand Valley State University on his contributions to the local project, as well as how the project looks to grow in the future.
The West Michigan Holocaust Memorial was launched alongside Ways to Say Goodbye, a 20-foot sculpture found in Frederik Meijer Gardens which commemorates Kristallnacht : one of the first pogroms committed by the Nazis against Jews during the early days of the Third Reich.