International Holocaust Remembrance Day: What is its significance & How to observe the day?

"They saved 20,000 Jews and if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be able to talk to you now," says Vienna-born Wick, who was taken by his parents on a ship from the port of Trieste for the long voyage east. "I would have been one of the ashes in Auschwitz, like my other family."

(In pic: A statue of Ho Feng-Shan (also know as He Fengshan), a Chinese diplomat in Vienna who saved thousands of Jews between 1938 to 1940.)

Wednesday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. Six million Jews perished during the worst genocide in human history but Wick and six other members of his family were able to escape Europe for Shanghai because it was one of the very few destinations that did not require an entry visa.

(In pic: The infamous German inscription that reads 'Work Makes Free' at the main gate of the Auschwitz I extermination camp.)

"People should know about it because it was the only place in the world in 1939 that opened its gates," Wick said by telephone from his home in London. "Even many Jews don't know about it." Shanghai was a strange and faraway land for the European Jews, and would soon be completely occupied by an increasingly aggressive Imperial Japan.

(In pic: Statues of Jewish refugees looking for names of their relatives in an exhibition hall at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum.)

It also highlights how the Jews never faced any prejudice from the Chinese -- an assertion backed up by Wick. But he is also keen to stress that the Japanese, although allied to Nazi Germany, were also not anti-Semitic and it was "mainly the Japanese" who allowed them refuge. Chen Jian, the museum's curator, said there was a "special relationship" between Shanghai and the Jews which pre-dates the refugees and continues to this day.