Auschwitz Pledge

From AOL/NY Daily News:

“Auschwitz Pledge Foundation launched to combat bystander discrimination ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day”

A new foundation was announced in Poland on Wednesday, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, to combat ambivalence to both hatred and discrimination. The Warsaw-based Auschwitz Pledge Foundation, also announced on the eve of the 77th anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, aims to fight societies’ indifference to hatred, which it says can precede violence and genocide. Bystander indifference “allows horrible things to happen,” Auschwitz Pledge Foundation Jacek Kastelaniec told The Associated Press. “Our goal is to find a ways [sic] to influence attitudes.”

The foundation will begin its mission by giving three grants, each donated by BNP Paribas bank and worth 30,000 euros ($34,000), to three projects, with hopes to expand over the years. The former concentration camp, now a memorial site and museum, is where over 1.1. million were systematically killed by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust — which itself led to the mass killings of 6 million Jews as well as the mass slaughtering of other marginalized groups. The foundation was announced on the heels of a 29-year-old Dutch tourist on Sunday making a Nazi salute at Auschwitz, which she deemed an “ill-considered” joke. Though she could have faced up to two years in prison, the woman pleaded guilty to promoting Nazism and was merely fined. The mannerism she used is “associated with terrible human suffering and filled with contempt and hatred,” a representative for the museum told CNN.

^ The rise of Holocaust Denying and Anti-Semitism around the world has shown that more programs and organizations like this one need to be done to combat the ever-increasing threat of Denial and Violence. ^

https://www.aol.com/auschwitz-pledge-foundation-launched-combat-192202884.html