EU Observes Holocaust Remembrance Day

From the Statement of European Commission Vice-President Franco Frattini, on behalf of the European Commission, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"On behalf of the European Commission, I want to join in today's universal commemoration of the six million Jews and all the other victims of the Holocaust. On 27 January 2007, sixty-two years after the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the inherent abjection of the very design of the Holocaust, together with the horrors, suffering and death it caused, still defies human understanding. As human beings, we remain shaken by the barbarity that took place.

"Today, we pay tribute to the victims, we remember facts and events. I also believe that remembrance must go beyond the ultimate abyss of extermination camps; we must remind ourselves of how it all became possible. We must remember how entrenched hatred and prejudice was spread through speech, and how it became official State policy, law and practice. We must remember how, at the bottom of the stairs leading down to utmost human indignity, there were ghettoes, camps, torture, abject experimenting with human beings, torture, death by exhaustion and hunger, mass executions and genocide.

"In this International Day of commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust, I also want to restate the Commission's firm condemnation of any attempt to deny, trivialize or minimise the Shoah, war crimes and crimes against humanity….  The Commission firmly condemns and rejects all manifestations of anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia. The Commission is determined to make full use of the powers conferred by the Treaties to fight these repugnant phenomena."

FULL STATEMENT

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