The UN General Assembly will convene Friday to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Noah Klieger, a survivor of Auschwitz who has become of symbol of the holocaust and the need to commemorate the victims, will be the keynote speaker at a ceremony marking the day.
Born in 1926, Klieger and his Polish-born parents, Esther and Abraham, fled Strasbourg in 1938 to settle in Belgium, while Jonathan, his older brother, went to London to study.
At the outbreak of World War II , Klieger co-founded a Zionist youth movement, which helped Jews to cross the Swiss border. He was finally arrested and deported in January 1943 in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. He managed to survive by playing boxing matches and entertaining German officers, even though he had never boxed before,
Noah and his parents, scattered in three subsets of the camp of Auschwitz (Monowitz concentration camp for Noah, his father in Auschwitz, his mother in Birkenau) all returned alive. After his release he served as a journalist covering Nazi war criminals' trials in Belgium, France, Germany, and Israel including that of Adolf Eichmann.
Klieger served for a long time in Yediot Aharonot and in other journals. A sports enthusiast he was also the president of the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team for 18 years.
During the course of the ceremony there will also be speeches by the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, President of the General Assembly Peter Thomson and the deputy head of the American delegation to the UN, ambassador Michele Sison.
Danon said in advance of the event that "the UN must take a central role in the battle against anti-Semitism and in perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust. The members of the UN must proclaim in a loud and clear voice against hatred and not allow the UN to be a stage for anti-Semitism.