Holocaust victims remembered in Rome 75 years after liberation of Auschwitz.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January 2020 is being marked in Rome with more than 170 memorial events, organised by the city, the capital's Jewish community, cultural institutions, and partisan association ANPI.

"It will not be a day but a month, a season of reflection on a gigantic moment in human history that in no way should be forgotten", said Rome's deputy mayor Luca Bergamo.

The programme of commemorative events includes a screening at city hall of the documentary Kinderblock - l'ultimo inganno, which tells the harrowing story of Sergio De Simone, a 7-year-old boy used as a guinea pig for medical experiments by Nazi physicians, and murdered along with 20 other Jewish children in a former school in Hamburg.

Established in 2005 by the United Nations to commemorate the day in 1945 that the survivors of Auschwitz were liberated by the Russian army, the initiative honours the memory of the millions of Jews – but also homosexuals, Romany people and others – who suffered persecution, deportation, imprisonment and genocide.

Each January since 2010 Rome has installed a number of brass cobblestone-sized memorials commemorating victims of the Holocaust. Known as stolpersteine in German, or literally translated “stumbling stones”, the memorials are the work of Berlin artist Gunter Demnig.

The plaques are installed outside the last chosen place of residence of victims of the Holocaust, detailing their first and last names, date of birth, date and place of deportation, and date of death in a Nazi extermination camp.

Last week Demnig came to Rome to install 34 new stolpersteine in streets around the Jewish Ghetto area as well as suburbs around the capital.