International Holocaust Remembrance Day
On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember the six million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime, as well as Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, political opponents, trade unionists, communists, socialists and all those persecuted and killed by fascism.
Holocaust remembrance demands that we confront today’s resurgence of the forces that once led to genocide.
The Holocaust was made possible by racism, antisemitism, authoritarianism, extreme nationalism and the systematic dehumanisation of entire groups of people … combined with silence and complicity. These forces did not disappear in 1945. Today, we see the rise of the far right, growing antisemitism, racism against migrants and minorities, attacks on democratic rights, and attempts to relativise or distort historical truth across Europe and beyond.
Remembering the Holocaust is not an abstract moral exercise. It forces us to confront how fascism took hold through laws, institutions, economic interests and everyday compliance. Genocide was prepared long before it was executed.
The responsibility that follows from this history is therefore political. It lies in recognising familiar patterns when they reappear, in refusing the normalisation of exclusion and repression, and in taking sides when people are targeted, stripped of rights or rendered disposable in the present.
“Never again” cannot be treated as a ritual phrase repeated once a year. If it has any meaning, it lies in concrete political choices: in whether resistance to fascism is practised rather than declared, and in whether Europe is shaped by solidarity, equality and peace instead of exclusion, militarisation and fear.