27 January was the date, in 1945, when the largest Nazi death camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland) was liberated by Soviet troops. It was the day when the scale of the atrocity of mass genocide became apparent.

The British liberated Belsen Bergen and were appalled. But the Soviets uncovered something far more sinister; systematic murder that involved every level of the Nazi administration of the time. It is estimated that some six million Jews were killed, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

Some maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis’ systematic murder of millions of people in other groups, including Romani, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses.

By this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims would be between 11 million and 17 million people. When one thinks, it is hard to believe that this mass extermination of people took place only 70 years ago. But it is one thing to merely stop and think and commemorate. It is something entirely different to experience Auschwitz in person.

When one enters the camp, one does so with a sense of foreboding – that something is not quite right; that something wrong happened on the ground you are standing on. As you tour the camp’s exhibits, the full scale of what went on inside hits you like a sledgehammer. Walking through the ovens where millions of corpses were carbonised is a surreal and emotional experience.

Of course we commemorate the Holocaust today in order to never forget what twisted minds can do. We remember it because we consciously choose to. It is a commonly accepted benchmark of what depravity and inhuman behaviour is. It was something that should never happen again. One will never fully understand the reasoning of Hitler’s mad mind. But what we can understand is that the attempted extermination of the Jews was, in essence, a very extreme form of intolerance. If we look around the world today, we still see intolerance. Sometimes it is seen in the form of violence and murder in deepest Africa. Other times it is the murder of people who are of a different religious denomination – Sunni and Shia, for example.

It also happens in Europe. Until only recently, Europeans killed Europeans with bombs and assassinations in Italy, Germany and Spain. And even in the past few years, France provoked outrage when it expelled hundreds of Roma people.

We also see it on our own doorstep. There are people who genuinely hate others because they are of different skin colour or political ideology. It might sound far-fetched to compare Maltese intolerances with the Holocaust, but fundamentally, the issues are one and the same. It is intolerance that leads to violence, oppression or fear.

The truth is that intolerance will probably never leave us. European attempts at multicultural societies are largely proving to be a failure as whole cities, or at least districts of cities become sectors for different strains of societies.

Sadly, as this is being written, news filters in of other stories of intolerance – as an Afghan couple are stoned to death for adultery. We are the most advanced animal on this earth – yet our intelligence and ability to adapt and manipulate has given us terrible power to kill our own kind for no good reason whatsoever.