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Remembrance Day: Strasbourg, inauguration of garden for Holocaust victims. Mr Berset, “we have not forgotten you”

“Today we are gathered here to say: we have not forgotten you. We will never forget you!”, said the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Alain Berset, at the inauguration ceremony of a garden and memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Strasbourg, on the Quai Kléber, where the synagogue burned down by the Nazis in 1940 once stood. Now a wall of names “reminds us of the obligation we have towards them, a duty of remembrance and transmission to future generations”, Mr Berset continued, addressing the French Minister for Equality and the Fight against Discrimination, the Mayor of Strasbourg, the representatives of the Lower-Rhine Jewish community and the Chief Rabbi of Strasbourg. The old synagogue which was burned down is “a scar on the city”, where one of the largest Jewish communities in France once lived, just as the many “signs in the flesh” that have remained throughout the region. And as the last survivors of the concentration camps pass away, taking with them the “living memory of the Holocaust”, the memorial garden inaugurated today “is a ray of light in one of the darkest moments of our history”. Mr Berset then recalled how the Council of Europe was created out of the desire “to ensure that the horrors of the Second World War would never happen again and that a lasting peace based on human rights, democracy and the rule of law could be established in Europe. Let us never forget that either”. And citing Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, deported in 1944, he concluded: “Forgetting the dead would be like killing them a second time. Let us never forget that. Let us never forget them”.

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