Holocaust survivor Tatiana Bucci will address MEPs.

Eighty-one years after the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp on 27 January 1945, the European Parliament will mark Tuesday International Holocaust Remembrance Day in memory of victims of the Holocaust.

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola will open the ceremony at noon with a video. She will then deliver a speech, to be followed by a musical interlude.

Holocaust survivor Tatiana Bucci will then address MEPs.

Tatiana Bucci was born in 1937 in Fiume, a town in northern Italy, now Croatia. In 1944, the Nazis arrested Tatiana and her family and imprisoned them at Risiera di San Sabba, a transit concentration camp in northern Italy.

Tatiana was just six years old when she and her four-year-old sister Andra, and their mother, aunt, grandmother and cousin were deported to Auschwitz on 4 April 1944.

The sisters spent 10 months in Auschwitz. Their mother, Mira, was transferred from Auschwitz to Germany for forced labor in a munitions factory. Their father, Giovanni, was a prisoner of war in South Africa during the war. Tatiana and Andra Bucci are among the youngest child survivors of Auschwitz who have memories of their experience.

After liberation, the sisters were sent to an orphanage, Lingfield House, in southern England. In December 1946, the girls were reunited with their parents in Italy. The sisters returned to Auschwitz for the first time in 1996. Tatiana now lives in Belgium with her family.

Tuesday’s commemoration will conclude with a minute’s silence in honour of the victims of the Holocaust and a second musical interlude.

“The International Holocaust Remembrance Day has a distinctiveness which transcends any political or any ideological divide,” Austrian MEP Lukas Mandl pointed out in a special edition of the European Report, hosted by Yossi Lempkowicz, Editor in chief of European Jewish Press. 

This video discussion was released on Monday on the eve of the ceremony in the European Parliament.

This year marks 81 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps which put an end to the systematic extermination of six million Jews, representing two third of Europe’s Jewish population alongside the death of millions of others perpetrated by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

In the European Report ECI Founding Director Tomas Sandell reiterated how his organisation initiated and hosted the first ever Holocaust Memorial in the European Parliament already in January 2005. He added that today two other dates are becoming increasingly important to remember, namely October 7, 2023, and May 14, 1948.

”October 7 reminds us of the tragic fact that antisemitism has not disappeared despite more than twenty years of Holocaust education but has simply mutated. Today the deadliest form of antisemitism around the world is Islamic Jihadism,” said Sandell.

“To organise Holocaust commemoration events on January 27 but not condemn the atrocities of Hamas on October 7 is simply hypocrisy. We should not fall into the trap of feeling pity for dead Jews while ignoring the fate of those Jews who today fight for their survival. Likewise we should not fail to make the connection between January 27,1945 and May 14,1948, the date of the rebirth of the Jewish state. If there had been a Jewish state in 1938, as promised at the San Remo Peace Conference in 1920, millions of more Jews could be alive today,” he added.

”It seems as if many of today’s antisemites can accept individual Jews as long as they are not Zionists and instead disassociate themselves from the State of Israel. This reminds us of the religiously motivated antisemitism in the Middle Ages which could accept Jews only as long as they were willing to convert to Christianity,” Sandell said.

United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 in 2005 designated January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. It is each year commemorated at the United Nations in New York as well as in national parliaments and educational institutions around the world. However, new data from the Holocaust Memorial Trust in the UK reveals that the number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has halved since October 7. It warns that hundreds of schools have stopped commemorations, with teachers increasingly fearful of backlash from parents and pupils.

To view the European Report: