The Department of Public Information will screen the documentary film Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald on Wednesday, 28 January, at United Nations Headquarters as part of a week of Holocaust remembrance activities which coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi concentration and extermination camp (1940-1945).  The film showing and discussion will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium.  The film also will be screened this month at 20 United Nations Information Centres around the world.

The film highlights the lives of four men who were imprisoned as boys in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, and return in April 2010 to commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the camp’s liberation in 1945.  The film tells the story of how the communist-led underground created a children’s block — block 66 — in the camp to help protect the Jewish teenage boys who were arriving in large numbers in 1944 near the end of the War.  The film’s executive producer, Steven Moskovic, is the son of Alex Moskovic, one of the four Holocaust survivors featured in the film.  The other three men are Naftali-Duro Furst, Pavel Kohn and Israel-Laszlo Lazar.

Maher Nasser, Acting Head, Department of Public Information; Heiko Thoms, Deputy Permanent Representative, Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations; and the film’s executive producer, Steven Moskovic, will speak before the film is shown.  Following the screening, Kimberly Mann, Manager of The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, will lead a discussion with the audience that includes director Rob Cohen and Holocaust survivor Alex Moskovic.

The film is part of a series of events and exhibits held this month to mark the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.  Inspired by the theme “Liberty, Life and the Legacy of the Holocaust Survivors”, the events help recognize the enduring legacy left by those survivors seven decades after the end of the Second World War.  The theme also reflects how deeply the Organization was shaped by the experience of the Holocaust during its founding seventy years ago.

The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme was established in 2005 with the unanimous adoption of United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 to further education about and remembrance of the Holocaust, in order to help prevent future genocide.  For more information about the programme, please visit www.un.org/holocaustremembrance.

For more information about the film, please visit www.kinderblock66thefilm.com.

To register for the film, please visit www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/2015/calendar2015.html.  Admission is open to the public and free of charge.  Guests must enter the United Nations building at the First Avenue and 46th Street gate.