Photo Story: EU Parliament commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance

Margot Friedlander, aged 101, a German Holocaust survivor and President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola (L) attend a mini plenary session of the European Parliament to commemorate the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Brussels, Belgium, 27 January 2022.

During the special plenary session on Thursday, MEPs paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. The event was organised 77 years after the liberation of the Nazi camp Auschwitz. Parliament President Roberta Metsola opened the event and Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer, 100, addressed MEPs.

Centenarian Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlaender urged the young generation on Thursday to always remember the Nazi genocide and denounced the use by some anti-COVID vaccination protesters of the yellow star Jews were forced to wear.

“Today, I see the memory of what happened being abused for political reasons, sometimes even derided and trampled all over,” she told EU lawmakers in Brussels at a ceremony marking the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

“Incredulous, I had to watch at the age of 100 years how symbols of our exclusion by the Nazis, such as the so-called ‘Judenstern’, are shamelessly used on the open street by the new enemies of democracy, to present themselves – whilst living in the middle of a democracy – as victims,” Friedlaender added.

She was referring to some demonstrators at anti-vaccination protests who have pinned yellow star badges to their clothes, reminiscent of the cloth badges the Nazis forced Jews to wear to mark them as outsiders.

Photo – EPA-EFE/OLIVIER HOSLET