The exhibition, featuring videos, testimonies and footages, is open to the public from January 23-25 from 9 am to 5 pm at the lobby of the Altiero Spinelli building.

In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly decided to designate January 27 as International Holocaust Day.

This event coincides with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp which took place on January 27th, 1945 signaling an end to the campaign of systematic murder which saw the extermination of over 6 million Jews and millions of other innocent citizens of Europe.

On Sunday, at the initiative of the European Friends of Israel (EFI), a delegation of 20 members of the European Parliament and of EU national parliaments will visit the former Auschwitz Nazi death camp in southern Poland.

They will be joined by a delegation of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, and will later visit the Auschwitz Jewish Center which opened in 2000 to teach future generations about the destruction caused by the Holocaust.

For 500 years, Jews called the town of Oswiecim, Poland home. Families grew. Businesses flourished. Synagogues filled with the sound of prayer and study. Then the Nazis came. Oswiecim was renamed Auschwitz, and Jewish life disappeared in the fires that burned in the concentration camps across the river.

Before Auschwitz became the ultimate symbol of the Shoah or Holocaust, it was just an ordinary town known as Oswiecim.

1.5 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau during WWII.

Special commemoration

On Monday 28 January, European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering and members of the assembly will attend a special commemoration in the parliament premises.

The event ceremony for the European Union member states will be addressed by Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress (EJC).

Kantor is the founder of the World Holocaust Forum, the international foundation for the commemoration of the Holocaust and its lessons.

“With the palpable rise in anti-Semitism and xenophobia felt in the European nations, the Holocaust is a crucial historical period to be memorialized and never forgotten,“ the EJC president said in a statement.

"The lessons of the Holocaust are universal ones which serve to remind all of humanity of the dangers inherent within hatred, intolerance and ignorance," he added.

"As an international community, it is critical that we welcome this occasion to once again educate people all over the globe that this darkest of periods must never be forgotten."