A Civic Remembrance Event, with the theme ‘For A Better Future’.

This international day of remembrance focuses on the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered in the Holocaust, and millions more people killed under German Nazi persecution, and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

The Lord Mayor will open this year’s civic remembrance event, which will include a keynote speech by Nick Winton, son of Sir Nicholas Winton MBE.

The Opera North Youth Chorus, the Junior performing wing at Opera North, has been working together with writer Tom Hastings to create a piece that reflects individual and corporate hopes ‘For a Better Future’ using source material as a basis for original writing. Marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the music that accompanies this writing has been selected from composers who lost their lives there.

The event will include a reading of the seven statements of commitments with candles lit by representatives of the different groups persecuted in the Holocaust, by German Nazi persecution and in the subsequent genocides which followed.  A memorial prayer will be sung to close the event.