Verbatim report of proceedings

Thursday, 19 September 2019 - Strasbourg

Importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe (RC-B9-0097/2019, B9-0097/2019, B9-0098/2019, B9-0099/2019, B9-0100/2019)

  Antony Hook (Renew). – Mr President, I was pleased to support this motion to remember the victims of totalitarianism. For many of us this is very personal. My wife’s grandfather was an Auschwitz survivor and it chills me to the bone that things could easily have been very different, and my wife and my daughter would not exist. My own grandfathers were a paratrooper who fought in the war and a railwayman who had to keep trains at the docks moving while bombs fell from the sky.

We Europeans are united by history, by memory and resolve to make a better future. But I voted for the motion in spite of one reservation, which was that the motion speaks only of brutality by Europeans against other Europeans on the continent of Europe. The weight of our history is that Europeans have committed atrocities elsewhere too. There are Europeans today whose ancestors come from Asia, Africa and the Americas, and we must be clear that all atrocities are to be remembered. All our ancestors matter. Our Europe is part of the globe.