Cheshire East Council to mark Holocaust Memorial Day

Cheshire East Council will hold a Service of Remembrance to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex, and the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Bosnia.

The Mayor of Cheshire East, Councillor Marilyn Houston, will lead the service at Macclesfield Town Hall at 10.30am on Monday 27 January. 

Members of the public are warmly welcome to attend and will be joined by civic dignitaries representing communities from across the borough. The leader of Cheshire East Council, Councillor Nick Mannion, and deputy leader Councillor Michael Gorman will attend and give short addresses.

The hour-long ceremony will include readings of testaments from survivors of genocide, the lighting of memorial candles and a two minutes’ silence.

The guest speaker will be Ms Leah Burman, from the Northern Holocaust Education Group (NHEG). She will recount the story of her father, Ziggy Landschaft, who as a teenager survived the Krakow Ghetto, forced labour camps, the ‘death march’ to the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp and being shot while escaping just hours before liberation from the Nazis by the US army in May 1945.

NHEG was founded in recognition that the first generation of Holocaust survivors will not be able to continue to tell their stories for ever. Its aim is to ensure that future generations can continue to experience these life stories of victims of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust, in a way that is both meaningful and relevant to the issues of today. 

Invitations are being sent to all town and parish councils across Cheshire East, along with secondary schools in the Macclesfield area. Further information will be available on the council’s website. Any help to publicise the Macclesfield commemorative event in your local community would be much appreciated.

Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) is marked each year on or around 27 January – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp by the Soviet army in 1945. 

On and around this day, schools, communities, faith groups and others across the UK join together in national and local events to commemorate the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators, as well victims of other acts of Nazi persecution and of subsequent genocides.

Since 1945, there have been several other attempted genocides across the world – including Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur – and these are commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day.
HMD also provides an opportunity to reflect on the contemporary relevance of the Holocaust, an especially poignant consideration for this year’s commemorations, which take place against a background of rising antisemitism in the UK and globally.

Each year’s HMD has a different theme, chosen by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, as a focus for educational and commemorative events. The theme for HMD 2025 is ‘For a better future’.

We hope that HMD 2025 can be an opportunity for people to come together, learn both from and about the past and take actions to make a better future for all.