The International Holocaust Remembrance Day held on 27 January commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jews, 1 million Roma, 250 thousand disabled people, and 9 thousand homosexuals by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. On this day, 70 years ago, the largest Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by Soviet troops.
For Slovak Jews the Holocaust began with the declaration of the Slovak State in 1939. The new fascist state acted openly against the Jewish minority. From September 1941 the state made every Slovak Jew wear a yellow star. The tragedy of Slovak Jews was sealed by a constitutional law, which in May 1942 legalized their deportation to concentration camps. The statistics regarding the Slovak Holocaust are very vague; they report around 70 thousand deported Jews, which is approximately 75% of the estimated pre-war Jewish population in the Slovak area. The Slovak State was the first satellite state of Nazi Germany, which implemented these deportations by their own means.
