This year the International Holocaust Remembrance Day coincides with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Nazi concentration camp. Socialists and Democrats will participate next Wednesday in a European Parliament ceremony to commemorate this anniversary and to pay tribute to all the victims of Nazism.

The leader of the S&D Group, Iratxe García Pérez, said:

“The most horrendous crimes against humanity were committed in concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. The planned genocide of Jews in Europe took the life of six million Jewish children, women and men, as well as other targeted victims such as political opponents, Roma, gay and handicapped persons.

“We must never forget those victims, because they remind us that the foundations of Europe after World War II rely on the universality and inviolability of human rights. We owe them a lot. We now have the responsibility to ensure a society free of intolerance and discrimination, be it based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or any other ground.

“Unfortunately we see that anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and the extreme right are again on the rise in Europe. That is why remembering the Holocaust and the anti-Semitic propaganda that led to it in the 1930s should shake our conscience and wake us up against new forms of hatred and discrimination.”