Seventy years after the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp Jews in the EU still fear for their safety, the president of the European Parliament has said.
Drawing a comparison with last week's attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, president Martin Schulz said: "Seventy years on from the liberation of Auschwitz we must fight for the rights of each and every human being".
Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps, was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27th, 1945. More than 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives there between 1940-1945.
Mr Schulz visited the camp during an official visit to Poland in 2013. "The visit to Nazi German death camp Auschwitz changes you. It changed me," he said. "There are no words to describe the enormity of this crime. We must never, ever forget," he said.
Simone Veil, the first president of the directly-elected European Parliament was an Auschwitz survivor.
Born in Nice, France, in a Jewish family in 1927, she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and deported to the camp. She served as MEP from 1979 to 1993 and as president of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982.
Commemorating the anniversary of the liberation in Strasbourg yesterday Mr Schulz said what the liberators saw shocked the world as a whole and continues to do so to this day.
“The heaps of corpses, the piles of shoes and human hair, the evidence of stolen lives, the thin, hungry survivors, the proximity of death has been stamped on the collective memory of humankind”.
He recalled Roma people, disabled people, sick people, homosexuals, political prisoners, prisoners of war and, “countless” children who were interned and died at Auschwitz.
“All of these peoples were declared sub-human by Nazi ideologists. They were not deemed to have a right to live. Their lives were to be destroyed and these people exterminated.”
Mr Schulz said “history does not repeat itself but the past breeds the present and the way we deal with history will determine our future. That is why we want to know why the unimaginable happened in Auschwitz, day after day.
"That is why human dignity must be inviolable for us and every day we must counter ideas and ideologies that we thought we had overcome: hate, xenophobia, intolerance, anti-Semitism. We thought they were gone, but seventy years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, Jews in Europe still fear for their safety"
He said it was the task of Europeans “to fight for the rights of the individual”.
Mr Schulz was followed by president of the EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker who took time to pause and reflect on the role of the EU, particularly as the European council presidency was passing to Latvia.
He asked who would have thought Latvia in 1957, the year it was agreed to found the European Economic Community, would some day hold the presidency of a European Union.
