Life marked by two totalitarian regimes. Watch this-year's 23 August clip

The European Day of Remembrance of Victims of Totalitarian Regimes is observed today (on 23 August). In order to mark this date, the ENRS has produced a clip presenting the story of Juliana Zarchi whose life has been impacted by both Nazi and Communist totalitarianisms.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that paved the way for the Second World War and its consequences: from mass expulsions, through slave labour and war crimes, to the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing.

Life of Juliana Zarchi, a Lithuanian of German-Jewish descent, was shaped by both of the aforementioned regimes. After having her Jewish father murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, Ms Zarchi, then a three-year-old child, was sent to the Kaunas ghetto. Although she managed to survive the Nazi occupation, after the war she was forcibly displaced with her German mother to Tajikistan as a part of the repressions conducted by the Soviets against citizens of German descent.

Ms Zarchi is the main protagonist of this year’s short clip produced by the ENRS as a part of the “Remember. August 23” campaign. Her testimony joins two other productions recounting the stories of Péter Mansfeld, the youngest victim of repressions after the 1956 revolution in Hungary, and of Mala Zimetbaum and Edek Galiński, who met and fell in love in the Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.