German politicians mark Holocaust Memorial Day and urge world to united stand against anti-semitism

GERMAN parliamentarians marked International Holocaust Memorial day today urging the world to take a united stand against anti-semitism and xenophobia.

Bundestag President Barbel Bas opened a memorial in the country’s lower house of parliament warning against historical revisionism and ethnonationalism.

“Our country bears a special responsibility, the genocide of the European Jews is a German crime, yet it is also a past which is relevant to all,” he said. 

“Not only Germans, and not only Jews. Together with many others worldwide, we are taking a stance on remembrance of the Holocaust. A stance against xenophobia and against anti-semitism.”

The day marks the anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland.

It remembers all victims of the Nazi regime, including the six million Jews that were killed, many of them in gas chambers.

Inge Auerbacher, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor spoke of her memories as a child in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

“I still have very clear memories of that dark time, a time of terror and hate,” she said. 

“Sadly this cancer had returned and hatred of the Jews has returned to many countries of the world, including Germany. This disease needs to be eradicated as swiftly as possible.”

President of the Israeli parliament Mickey Levy stressed the need to protect the “fragility of democracy.”

“Keeping alive remembrance of the Holocaust is a difficult task that must be shouldered by each generation anew,” he said.

“The six million Jews murdered are six million individual stories. Stories of lives not lived, stories of people who are no longer with us.”