International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day of remembrance, but also a day of learning.

Today we remember the millions of innocent victims of the greatest evil the world has ever seen.

The Hitler regime opened a wound that humanity has been trying to heal for decades.

A wound for which, however, the Bulgarian people and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church found a cure when, in 1943, they refused to hand over their nearly 50,000 Jewish brothers and sisters to the Nazis, saving them from certain death in the concentration camps.

At the same time, however, we bow our heads with pain to the memory of those 11,343 deportees from Vardar Macedonia and White Sea Thrace, whom we Bulgarians failed to save.

Never again!