‘Never Again’: Greece marks Holocaust Remembrance Day

Citizens and officials across Greece marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday.

Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, released a statement on social media to honour the day, stressing “we do not forget” those who lost their lives during the Holocaust.

“We do not forget our fellow Greeks and all other Jewish people who perished at Auschwitz and other camps of horror,” he said on Twitter.

“International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a guiding beacon for our daily action against racism and antisemitism.”

The Greek Foreign Ministry also touched on the need to fight anti-Semitism across the world.

“It is our duty to never forget what happened in Europe just eight decades ago. Let us ask ourselves, as did one of the first Holocaust survivors who wrote about his inhuman experience, Primo Levi, ‘If This Is a Man’,” the Ministry said in a statement.

The ministry remarked that the memory of the Holocaust is disappearing, with one in twenty Europeans never having heard of it.

“At the same time, new threats are emerging. Hate speech, racism, discrimination, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial. It is our duty to build a wall against these threats. To put more emphasis on education,” it added.

Elsewhere, the Greek President, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, attended an event at the Holocaust Memorial of Greek Jews in Thiseio.

Sakellaropoulou laid a wreath at the memorial and stressed that the message “Never Again” was a call to actively remember and ponder the reasons that gave rise to Nazism, racism and anti-Semitism in order to prevent such crimes from ever happening again.

“Only then will ‘Never Again’ take on its true meaning,” she said.

The Greek President also encouraged people to remember the tens of thousands of Greek Jews that perished during the Holocaust, wiping out a significant part of Greece’s multicultural tradition and almost the entire Jewish communities of Thessaloniki, Ioannina and Corfu.