Last Monday 27th January - Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) - coincided with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and with the 25th anniversary of the genocide in Bosnia.

The statistics of slaughter, prevalent throughout the commemorations, were (as always) harrowing and almost beyond comprehension.

Six million Jewish men, women, children and babies murdered in ghettos, mass-shootings, in concentration camps and extermination camps by the Nazis and their collaborators.

HMD also commemorated more recent genocides, in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur.

The Nazi regime not only persecuted and exterminated Jews but millions of others, including Romani, Sinti, Slavic and Russian people. They murdered Poles, Serbs, political prisoners, gay people, ethnic minorities, mentally and physically disabled people, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and those whose religious beliefs conflicted with Nazi ideology.

HMD’s call is to ‘Stand Together’, always remembering that “genocidal regimes throughout history have deliberately fractured societies by marginalising certain groups…We cannot be complacent. Even in the UK, prejudice and the language of hatred must be challenged by us all.”

Sir Nicholas Winton MBE rescued 669 mostly-Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in 1939, bringing them on trains to the UK (Kindertransport) and sparing them from the horrors of the Holocaust.

“Don’t be content in your life just to do no wrong,” he said, “be prepared every day to try and do some good.”

Folk who know the Impartial Explorer will know that my late mother Gertrude (Gerti) was from Vienna, the daughter of Leopold and Ernestine Kessler.

I went there last year, to dedicate two memorial stones in memory of my grandparents, at the block of flats where they lived and where my mother and her brother were brought up until Hitler cruelly devastated the happy little family.

The memorial stones - Steine der Erinnerung - are part of an ongoing project keeping alive the memory Europe’s Jews who died in the holocaust.

Over 75,000 stones have been laid in pavements and on the walls of holocaust victims’ homes throughout Europe and further afield.

Leopold Kessler was Jewish, born on 20 July 1902 in Vienna, the son of a jeweller/goldsmith from Poland.

He married Ernestine Anna Schrekinger and the last known family address in 1942 was Vienna 1200, Streffleurgasse 4/41, now marked by the memorial stones.

Leopold was a government official when Gertrude was born on 10 April 1924.

A younger brother Fritz, later called Fred, was born several years later.

Under the Nazi regime Leopold was removed from his municipal job and forced into manual labour in an abattoir.

Terrified, the Kessler family watched from their home as crowds rampaged against Jews on Kristallnacht on 9/10 November 1938.

My mother and Fritz and their Jewish classmates were ‘removed’ from their little local school, which the Gestapo used as a prison for Jews, and the Kessler family was ordered from their home into a ghetto.

Gertrude and Fritz escaped from Vienna by Kindertransport. Leopold and Ernestine were deported on Transport Train 4 to Modliborzyce, Poland, on 5 March 1941.

An archived list shows the deportees’ numbers and dates of birth. Leopold is number 129, listed with the middle name ‘Israel’ - allocated to all Jewish males.

Ernestine’s number is 130 on the list and her middle name is ‘Sara’ - allocated to all female Jews.

The archive states that Leopold did not survive, confirmed in

a letter from a survivor-deportee who was with Leopold and Ernestine on the deportation train.

The letter was to Ernestine, who also survived. It stated that Leopold was moved at the end of September 1942 from Auschwitz to Zaklików and was then put on a mass transport train to Treblinka concentration camp, where he died.

More documents show that he was held with Ernestine in Auschwitz, Dachau and Bełżec concentration camps, and that Ernestine returned with another woman-prisoner from Poland to Vienna - on foot.

Before WWII started there had been widespread anti-Jewish acts of violence in Vienna, witnessed by the Kessler family, and by the summer and autumn of 1938 there were numerous discriminatory decrees and edicts against Jews.

There had also been the closing or ‘Aryanization’ of many Jewish shops.

During and after the arson and devastation of Kristallnacht in 1938 over 6,000 Jews were arrested and by May 1939 over 120,000 Jews had been expelled from Austria.

October 1941 saw the start of mass deportations from Vienna to concentration camps and by the end of 1942 just over 8,000 Jews remained in the city.

Prior to dedicating my grandparents’ memorial stones I visited the solemn Memorial in Judenplatz to Vienna’s 65,000 Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Transport Train 4 deported Leopold and Ernestine and over 995 others from Vienna to Poland in 1941.

Just 13 survived to return to Vienna.