Holocaust Remembrance Day: Europe remembers Nazi genocide

Starting at noon on Tuesday, the European Parliament will be holding a special plenary session in Brussels in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

The session is to be opened by European Parliament President Roberta Metsola with a video, who will then deliver a speech followed by a musical interlude. 

Holocaust survivor Tatiana Bucci, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp after being deported there aged 6 in 1944, will then address the assembly.

The commemoration is to conclude with a minute’s silence followed by a second musical interlude.

A ceremony will also take place on Tuesday afternoon at the site of the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp established in occupied Poland by the German Nazis.

All Auschwitz survivors have been invited to attend the event, which will commemorate the 81st anniversary of the camp’s liberation.

The Holocaust Memorial in the German capital, Berlin, will be the site for another commemorative event in the afternoon attended by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, and the European commissioner for internal affairs and migration, Magnus Brunner.

Dobrindt will lay a wreath at the memorial in honor of the millions of Holocaust victims.

A ceremony is also to take place in Moscow, with some Western diplomats reportedly in attendance despite the rupture in relations caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The German parliament, or Bundestag, is expected to commemorate Holocaust victims on Wednesday.

Guest speaker there is to be Tova Friedman from the US, who is also an Auschwitz survivor.