European Parliament to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day

77 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp on 27 January 1945, MEPs will honour the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

The ceremony will be opened at 12.30 with a speech by the President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola, followed by a musical interlude.

100-year old Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer will then address MEPs.

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

You can follow the ceremony live on Parliament’s webstreaming and on EbS+.

Margot Friedländer

Margot Friedländer was born in 1921 in Berlin. In 1943, her mother and brother were deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. At the age of 21 she went into hiding, but was tracked down in 1944 and deported to the concentration camp Theresienstadt. She was the only member of her family to survive. Together with her husband Adolph Friedländer, whom she knew from Berlin and met again in Theresiensadt, Margot moved to the US in 1946. She moved back to Berlin in 2010. Margot Friedländer still travels around Germany, telling her story and life experience, particularly in schools. “They listen to me intently,” she has said in an interview. “I have received — I don’t know — a thousand letters. I’m speaking in the name of those who cannot speak. And not just the six million Jews. I’m speaking on behalf of all who were murdered and who suffered.”