Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

80 years ago, on January the 27, 1945, Soviet forces overran a section of German-occupied Poland.

The Nazis had been on the run for a couple of years by that time near the end of World War II,

so it wasn't the retreat that shocked the Soviets. No, in the neighborhood of Auschwitz-Burkanow,

the Soviets discovered 600 corpses and 7,000 live but emaciated prisoners. It was only the

beginning of the discovery, of the horrors of the Holocaust, a word now used as a synonym

for evil itself. In 12 years of Nazi power, and particularly after the 1942 started the so-called

final solution, some six million Jews, along with five million others, were worked, shot, or

gas to death. The bulk of these victims were taken from modern-day

Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, but Hitler's apparatus netted victims from all across Europe,

sometimes with the complicity of local governments. The Nazis claimed that the Jews would be

resettled in newly conquered areas of the USSR, but instead they were systematically executed. Those who could work

were work to death. Those who couldn't work, including children and the elderly, were often

killed with the industrial genius of the German nation. Now, what should be a source of shock for us

today is the increasing number of young Americans who deny or doubt that the Holocaust,

one of the most well-attested events in all of human history, even happen.

The records are there.

There were a number of eyewitnesses.

The Nazis said they were going to do it, and Germans today admit they did it.

Yes, this evil happened.

That's why Holocaust Remembrance Day is such an important day to note and observe,

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