In the opening pages of his autobiographical novel, The Truce, Primo Levi described the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on 27 January 1945 through the eyes of a survivor.
Fiftyfive years on, that day, 27 January, is marked on the calendar as Holocaust Memorial Day.

Holocaust Memorial Day to honour the memory of the six million Jews - men, women and children - exterminated in the camps solely by reason of their birth and their faith.
Holocaust Memorial Day to honour the memory of everyone who shared the fate of the Jews, simply because their origins, political ideas and customs were different.

Holocaust Memorial Day to pay homage to those who risked their own lives to protect and save the victims of persecution.

Holocaust Memorial Day - the day of remembering which, ultimately, I hope will become more and more important for young people and in schools - because, to draw from the Nobel prize-winner Josip Brodsky, we must challenge the horror, amnesia and moral blindness. We must keep saying: it happened.

Fiftyfive years have passed since 27 January 1945. Half a century of peace and security in Europe in places which, for hundreds and hundreds of years, had known war, wholesale slaughter and destruction.

The miracle of this peace, this security, this respect for life and humankind is called a united Europe.

Having extended and ensured peace and security throughout the nations of Western Europe in the space of two generations, the European Union is now facing the historical, political and moral challenge of guaranteeing the same peace and the same security in and between the nations of the other half of Europe.

For us this means the enlargement of the European Union. The grand design for constructing a Europe of peace, of security, of freedom and of equal rights, where each and every of us is a minority because there is no majority, no domination of the smallest and weakest by the biggest or strongest.

Ever since the day I was appointed President of the European Commission I have often spoken, to the European Parliament and elsewhere, of the need to rediscover and emphasise the importance of a European soul.

Jewish culture and identity are precious parts of this soul.

They are precious parts because they have been preserved and defended through the centuries and in the face of persecution.

They are precious parts because they have provided the basis for a network of links crossing and helping to unite it.

They are precious parts because they have enriched and often inspired the cultures of the various European nations.

Jews and Europeans at the same time: this is how I see European Jews.

At the end of a century in which we Europeans have written one of the most horrible pages of human history, at the dawn of a century that we wish to see, in Europe and the rest of the world, become a century of rights, freedom, peace, respect for our fellow man, the renewed presence and rediscovered vitality of European Judaism offer us all a reason for hope and a chance to grow.