Matt Ortega, Democratic candidate for California’s 14th Congressional District, issued the following statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

We are called upon, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, to remember and honor the lives of the millions of people who were systematically murdered under Nazi persecution.

The Shoah claimed the lives of six million Jews and millions more from the LGBT community, persons with disabilities, ethnic and racial minorities, and prisoners of war. Those lost were sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, spouses, neighbors, and friends. People loved them and missed them.

Let us also pay tribute to survivors whose lives were forever changed. Their testimonies compel us to reckon with the horrors human beings are capable of inflicting upon others.

In this unsettling era of rising antisemitism, resurgent nationalist movements, and open bigotry from behind government seals, we are once again confronted with, as the German diarist Victor Klemperer described in 1933, “barbaric opinions … undisguised as official decree.”

Industrialized mass murder of millions of people did not begin at death camps. The ground was plowed with hatred and scapegoating of vulnerable communities long before the first prisoners were marched into “protective custody.”

With each passing year, we lose more survivors and soon the Holocaust will cease as a lived memory. The burden rests upon our shoulders to carry the memory of victims and survivors with us and tell the truth to fight hatred and bigotry here at home and around the world.