Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, anti-Semitism is on the rise across the Western world. This trend, and the weak response to it, is a harbinger of democratic decay, writes Ana Palacio

Below is a join-the-dots of some of 2020’s cultural anniversaries around Europe.

A mosque in Tralee has been targeted in a graffiti attack with the words “Islamic State out” as gardaí in Cork confirmed they are treating the appearance of a Nazi slogan over a social welfare office as a potential incitement of hatred incident.

The Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection has alerted gardaí after wording from a sign displayed over Nazi concentration camps appeared on one of its offices in Cork.

Cork — and Ireland — has had the honour this week of welcoming two extra-special guests; two people who as young children in 1942, in Vichy France, were saved from what would have been their guaranteed deaths in Auschwitz.

We must never forget. Four simple words, yet they have breath-stopping resonance when they are spoken by Charlotte Berger-Greneche, one of the children saved by the Cork woman who was memorialised yesterday at the official opening of the Mary Elmes bridge.

Incarcerated in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps Zuzana Ruzickova somehow survived and went on to create the complete recordings of her beloved Bach, writes James Lawless.

The appeal of vacations linked to sites connected to death, destruction and atrocities is a fast growing global sector known as 'dark tourism'.

When you replace what you can’t say with what you have to say you have the same outcome — censorship, writes Richard Hogan

A short story I read a few months ago postulated the trains are still running to Auschwitz. Fantasy, of course, but does anyone believe that genocidal racism died with the Third Reich?

Ahead of National Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow, we talk to three of the four remaining survivors left in Ireland. Their stories have never been more important, writes Áilín Quinlan.

ELLA Van Poucke’s career took a big leap forward last July when she emerged as the “Golden Star” of the prestigious Premio Chigiana held in Siena in Italy, writes Cathy Desmond.

A German court has rejected the appeal of a former Auschwitz guard against serving his sentence on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.

An Indonesian museum that encouraged visitors to take selfies with a waxwork of Adolf Hitler against a giant image of the Auschwitz extermination camp has removed the exhibit after protests.

The family of a holocaust survivor who was murdered 27 years after being liberated from a Nazi concentration camp have made a fresh appeal to bring her killer to justice - nearly half a century after her death.

IT is a tenet of today’s Europe, even if it is not articulated too often, that the barbarism so active in the middle of the last century could never, under any circumstances, be repeated. 

Donald Trump’s yearning for authoritarian rule is clear for all to see, writes James Q Whitman.

German authorities are seeking to end the prosecution of a former SS medic who served at the Auschwitz death camp, saying lengthy delays mean that the elderly suspect is now no longer fit for trial.

The head of the Polish national tourist organisation has been fired after he said he wanted to remove the Auschwitz memorial and a Jewish history museum from tours for foreign journalists.

Israel Kristal, the world's oldest man, who lived through both the First and the Second World Wars and survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, has passed away just a month short of his 114th birthday.

TWO reminders of the horror of the Holocaust emerged yesterday, one in the German town of Luneberg near Hamburg; the other in Dublin.

IF it was possible to encapsulate the recent history of Europe and humanity’s determination to survive and do nobel, uplifting things in one life then that person might well be Simone Veil, who died yesterday.

Sunshine giving you that festival buzz? We've got the ultimate guide to some of the best festivals around!

What possessed seemingly cultured men to implement a policy of barbarism against the Jews of Europe? Laurence Rees seeks the answer in what JP O’Malley considers to be a magisterial undertaking of research.

Thousands of Hungarians have taken part in a march in remembrance of the 550,000 Hungarian Jewish people who died during the Holocaust.

In David Cesarani’s posthumously published book on the Holocaust, Neil Robinson learns that the Nazi policy of murdering millions of Jews was more complex in its origins and implementation than is traditionally believed.

Pope Francis has paid a sombre and largely silent visit to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, becoming the third consecutive pontiff to make the pilgrimage to the place where Adolf Hitler’s forces killed more than a million people.

IF YOU haven’t yet seen the footage, find it. Hundreds of people streaming towards Central Park, New York, abandoning their cars and friends, like the gates of heaven had opened for three minutes only. 

Cycling enthusiasts may be tempted by a week-long offering from a company recently set-up by Corkman Brian Canty in Girona, Spain. 

Staff at the Auschwitz museum have uncovered jewellery secretly hidden in an enamel mug since the liberation of the wartime Nazi death camp in 1945.

Following a ground-breaking case in Germany last week, in which a former Auschwitz guard apologised for his crimes, Andrew Nagorski looks at the refusal of many former Nazis to say sorry.

A 94-year-old former SS sergeant has told a German court he is “ashamed” that he served as a guard in the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.

László Nemes tells Helen Barlow how his Oscar-winning Auschwitz drama, Son of Saul, is still relevant for today’s world

OPENING its gates in May, 1939, four months before the outbreak of the Second World War — to be liberated by the Russians six years later — Ravensbrück, 50 miles north of Berlin, in Germany, was the only concentration camp the Nazis built to house only female political prisoners.

It may have changed name from the Impac, but the International Dublin Literary Award is still one of the most lucrative in the world. Alan O’Riordan reveals the shortlist for the €100,000 prize

A 93-year-old German who worked as a guard at the Auschwitz death camp has died days before his trial was due to open.

What was not highlighted in the story of 1916 was the strong vibrant faith of the Irish volunteers.