The day's events begin with a siren in memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis, followed by a wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem and the recitation of victims' names at the Knesset; in Poland, the March of Life will commence in Auschwitz camp at 2:30pm.

Israel commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday with ceremonies and events throughout the country.

The day's events began with a two-minute siren in memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis, which was activated by Holocaust survivor Stephanie Portnoy, 77, who survived the war as a child in Poland. Portnoy activated the siren with the help of her son, Lt. Col. (res.) Yoni Portnoy, who serves in a Home Front Command situation room.

"My mother's story is a life lesson for me," the son said. "The kindness she was shown by complete strangers is something I've adopted and implemented in my own life. At every point, you can do good for someone."

"Activating the siren helps me come full circle. As a reservist commander at a situation room, I'm responsible for alerting against threats to the citizens of Israel," he added.

The siren was immediately followed by a wreath-laying ceremony at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

Among those who attended the ceremony were President Reuven Rivlin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Austian Chancellor Christian Kern, Vice President of the Supreme Court of Israel Judge Elyakim Rubinstein, chairman of the World Zionist Organization Avraham Duvdevani, chairman of the Jewish Agency Natan Sharansky, Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh, acting dean of the Diplomatic Corps, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, representatives of survivor and fighter organizations and delegations from across the country

The wreath-laying ceremony was followed by a recitation of Holocaust victims' names by members of the public both in Yad Vashem and at the Knesset under the auspices of Speaker Yuli Edelstein.

"The last descendents did not have anyone left to say (the Jewish mourning prayer) Kaddish for them," Rivlin said during the Unto Every Person There is a Name ceremony at the Knesset.

"These were the fighters who, after experiencing the Holocaust and remaining the last remnant of their family, made aliyah, fought, and died in Israel's wars. In their death, they became the symbol that connects Holocaust and revival. But in their death, the memories of their families were also wiped from the world," the president lamented.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4952938,00.html

Stephanie Portnoy and her son Lt. Col. (res.) Yoni Portnoy activating the siren
Israelis getting out of their cars to stand at attention for the 2-minute siren
Drivers leave their cars to stand at attention during the 2-minute siren

The siren was immediately followed by a wreath-laying ceremony

Wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem

Na so. Buhari is very stupid & unfortunate. His brain must be paining him

I wish Adolf Hitler were still alive

ignorance is truly a diseases,aryan brotherhood dont accept black people so if u like love hitler till day kingdom come or pretend to be a communist,infact hitler need not be alive,look at ur backyard u have fulani herdsmen and bokoharam.nigerian government needs to start teaching history,someone needs to really educate u,again nairaland and kids is like 5&6.even when we come on nairaland and talk about things,not everything should be a joke

Persecution of black people in Nazi Germany

While Black people in Nazi Germany were never subject to mass extermination as in the cases of Jews, Romani and Slavs, they were still considered by the Nazis to be an inferior race and, along with Romani people, were subject to the Nuremberg Laws under a supplementary decree.

Background

Even before World War I, Germany struggled with the idea of black Germans. While interracial marriage was legal under German law at the time, beginning in 1890, some colonial officials started refusing to register them, using eugenics arguments about the inferiority of mixed-race children to support their decision.[2] By 1912, this had become official policy in many German colonies, and a debate in the Reichstag over the legality of the interracial marriage bans ensued. A major concern brought up in debate was that mixed-race children born in such marriages would have German citizenship, and could therefore return to Germany with the same rights to vote, serve in the military, and hold public office as white Germans.[3]

After World War I, French occupation forces in the Rhineland included African colonial troops, some of whom fathered children with German women. Newspaper campaigns against the use of these troops focused on these children, dubbed "Rhineland bastards", often with lurid stories of uncivilized African soldiers raping innocent German women. In the Rhineland itself, local opinion of the troops was very different, and the soldiers were described as "courteous and often popular", possibly because French colonial soldiers harbored less ill-will towards Germans than war-weary French occupiers. While subsequent discussions of Afro-German children revolved these "Rhineland Bastards", in fact, only 400-600 children were born to such unions, compared to a total black population of 20,000-25,000 in Germany at the time.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler described children resulting from marriages to African occupation soldiers as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe. He thought that "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."He also implied that this was a plot on the part of the French, since the population of France was being increasingly "negrified

In prisoner of war camps, black soldiers were kept segregated from white, and generally experienced worse conditions than their white comrades, conditions that deteriorated further in the last days of the war. Roughly half of the French colonial prisoners of war did not survive captivity. Groups such as North Africans were sometimes treated as black, sometimes as white



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5diz5py6ZrI