The Czech capital, Prague, will on Tuesday host its first public Holocaust Memorial Day to commemorate the victims of Nazi persecution and raise more awareness of terrible events that occurred before many Czechs were born.

"We will remember the fate of people who were both Jews and citizens of Prague. This commemoration in a public place is not only for the small group of survivors or the Jewish community but for everybody," organiser Michal Frankl said on Friday.

Holocaust Memorial Day, known to Jews as Yom HaShoah, is commemorated in the Czech Republic around the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April-May 1943.

In that spring 63 years ago the Warsaw Jews, who were forced by the Nazis to live in a ghetto sealed off from the rest of the Polish capital, rebelled against Nazi attempts to deport their entire community -- Europe’s largest -- to the Treblinka death camp.

Until now the Czech Republic has always commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day in a more low-profile fashion, either inside the Pinkas synagogue in Prague or in the former Jewish ghetto in Terezin, formerly known as Theresienstadt, 50 kilometres north of the capital.

Around 80,000 Czech Jews perished in the Holocaust. Many of them met their deaths in the Terezin Ghetto, a former military fortress where the Nazis rounded up Jews from across Europe from 1941 to 1945 before sending them to gas chambers, notably in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"It is all the more important to remember the Shoah now, when the
’Auschwitz Lie’ is spreading in the Czech Republic," said Frankl, who works at the Terezin Initiative Institute.

He was referring to the view that the Holocaust never happened.

The names of hundreds of Czech Holocaust victims will be read out during the four-hour open-air ceremony in Prague’s Peace Square on April 26.

Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning "desolation" has come to be the preferred term for the Holocaust among Jewish scholars.