March of the Living -- Auschwitz-Birkenau

Wilhelm Brasse took some 40,000-50,000 photographs inside Auschwitz for the Nazis including these shots of Czeslawa Kwoka after she was beaten by a guard

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.
Elie Wiesel, Night

Jewish virtual library -- Hungarian Jews arrive at Birkenau

"The United Nations was the institution the world set up to implement 'never again'. Its historical tutor is the Holocaust. Yet it seems hardly to have been an eager pupil. What was never supposed to happen again has [happened] again and again and again."
"Consider some of the events that have occurred around the world since then, notwithstanding the most sophisticated development of international law, treaties and conventions the international community has ever known, all stating that rights abuses will not be tolerated."
"[It is time to ask] the hard questions about the United Nations."
Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, Supreme Court of Canada, Nuremberg Symposium, Jagiellonian University, Poland

The Holocaust survivors in their late 80s, like 88-year-old Nate Leipciger, 15 when  he first arrived to Birkenau was informed his life expectancy in the camp would be four months. He keeps attending the March of the Living to speak with the young travellers who arrive there to see living history, to tell them what had happened to him and to so many others who did not survive the unspeakable ordeal of an organized blueprint to put him and all other European Jews to death. "We lost our humanity", he tells them.

Elie Wiesel, in his seminal book Night, describes in agonizing detail just how it was that he too felt he had lost his humanity. The struggle to survive against the impervious will of the Third Reich to destroy the Jews of Europe meant surviving the most extreme cruelty and deprivation, torment and violence that was ever devised to destroy a people's will to live so that when death came to those aware of it, it was a release.

Jewish virtual library -- The unaware last walk to the gas chambers at Birkenau

"I'm a Jew", says Holocaust survivor Bill Glied at Majdanek, another former Nazi death camp, "because I believe that all human beings are created in the likeness of God and therefore all racism is foreign to me ... because I have an obligation to help and be hospitable to strangers, to visit the sick ... and most of all, to make peace between people". This, from a man whom fate had exposed to the most devastating humiliation; the knowledge that the world did not much care what happened to him and his people during the Holocaust.

The genocide that succeeded in obliterating six million European Jewish lives should have led to "a desperate and unquenchable thirst for enforceable international norms that make human rights abuses intolerable", Madam Justice Abella informed those listening to her address in Krakow at ancient Jagiellonian University. No one pretends any longer that the United Nations, born of the League of Nations taking its inspiration from the Holocaust to provide a global forum for world peace, is capable of doing what it still pretends to represent.

The august world body has become a profit-oriented business, an immense bureaucracy providing employment to elites from across the globe, with handsome salaries and boundless opportunities to burnish their credentials, while member-states form their political/ideological cliques creating further divisions rather than the cohesion focused on human rights and liberties and where control rests with the international community's most egregious human-rights abusers.

71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York (Source: ArmRadio)