Written by Magdalena Pasikowska-Schnass with Alexander Tyssen.
‘Auschwitz didn’t appear from nowhere’, remarked Marian Turski, Holocaust survivor and child prisoner in the Auschwitz death camp, in January 2020 at the solemn ceremony on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The former Auschwitz prisoner described the path from tiny hardships in everyday life and growing discrimination and persecution laws, to the genocide of Jews, the Holocaust. The consecutive stages of shrinking freedom can be summarised as 10 stages of genocide, in a process that could happen anywhere, with perpetrators potentially from all walks of life and ethnicities. However, anyone with enough courage can stop it at any stage.
Every year in January, the EU institutions honour the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and pay tribute to the survivors, of whom fewer and fewer remain to bear witness to the horrors of the Nazi persecutions. The EU bears a responsibility to keep the painful memory of those darkest days in Europe’s history alive. Repeating ‘Never again’ is not enough, and that is why the EU, which emerged from the ashes of World War Two, and is based on the principles of peace, freedom, human dignity and fundamental rights, has a duty to protect minorities, the Jewish minority in particular, from discrimination, hate speech and violence.
The EU strategy on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, the nomination of the coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, European Parliament resolutions condemning growing antisemitism and warning against neo-Nazi organisations making their come back across the EU, all demonstrate the EU’s awareness of these dangerous phenomena and its determination to halt them.
Read the complete briefing on ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Day: The fragility of freedom‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.
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