European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek starts the second part of his official visit to Middle East at the Yad Vashem memorial. President Buzek said:

"I was deeply shaken and moved by my visit to Yad Vashem. Those crimes are beyond human imagination but yet they happened. The faces that look at us from the past leave a stamp in our hearts forever. 

We want to remember, we must, and we always will remember.  On behalf of the European Parliament, I came here to pay our deepest respects to the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah.

I have carried a memory of the Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau since my childhood. I was born in occupied Poland a few dozen kilometres from where the camp was being built.

The scale of the Holocaust puts a very important responsibility for those who look after the memory of that tragedy. Because this is one memory that we can never forget.

The Holocaust must always be prominent in our minds and in the conscience of humanity, and serve as an unequivocal warning forever.

It is our duty as Europeans to ensure remembrance and to educate.

The Holocaust is a symbol for the European Union too. Simone Veil, a former extermination camp inmate, was the President of the first democratically elected European Parliament.

We will never forget." 

*** 

Background:

The President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek is on an official visit to the Palestinian Territories and Israel from 12-15 June 2011.

Note to editors:

TV footage of today's visit will be available for download in broadcast and web quality after its broadcast on Europe by Satellite at 20.30 CET:

http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/ebs/schedule.cfm?page=1&date=06/14/2011

TV footage of yesterday's visit to the Gaza Strip is available here:

http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/video/videoplayer.cfm?ref=77951

Photos of the visit will be made available for download as they come in at the following link (tick photo icon and type search word: Jerzy Buzek):

http://audiovisual.europarl.europa.eu/Search.aspx

 

• Marcin Grajewski

  Press Team Leader

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Richard Freedman

(Press Officer)

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