The 65th anniversary of Soviet troops liberating the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps was marked throughout Europe, and by a group of 20 MEP's attending a ceremony at the camp itself. Israeli President Shimon Peres, chose to address the German Parliament, where the 86 year old spoke about his own memories of the holocaust, and of his grandfather, who put him on a train for Israel, ""I remember his last words to me, instructing me: 'My boy, always stay a Jew'. The locomotive whistled and the train pulled away ... it was the last time that I saw him." He went on to describe what happened to his family and the Jewish community in Wiszniewo, Belarus, "they ordered all Jews to gather in the Synagogue ... the doors were sealed from the outside and the wooden building was set alight, and the only thing that was left of the whole community were red-hot ashes and smoke... The fire destroyed their bodies but not their spirit.”

Looking toward the future, Peres added, "While my heart is breaking at the memory of the atrocious past, my eyes envision a common future for a world that is young, a world free of all hatred, a world in which the words 'war' and 'anti-Semitism' will be dead words", before reciting the Kaddish prayer of mourning. Also speaking at the ceremony was Polish historian Feliks Tych, a Holocaust survivor, who said that all nations who were involved in the holocaust should examine themselves, saying "The co-operation of the Third Reich with allies and police in most occupied countries was characteristic for the German genocide project,” he said, adding that “The perpetrators, profiteers, informers . . . the view of the Holocaust will remain incomplete and distorted as long as European complicity in these German capital crimes – planned and steered from Berlin – are not a part of our European historical consciousness.”

Echoing this view was Richard Howitt, MEP, who collaborated with MEP's from across Europe and the political spectrum, to lodge a calling on European politicians to accept that, although Germany executed the Holocaust, responsibility for involvement was more widely shared. Howitt said, "Those who seek to deny the Holocaust are given succour by all of us who condemn its horrors, but who choose to neglect or cover-up those in our own countries who supported it directly or indirectly. Our declaration also makes clear that the Western Allies ourselves should have done more to block the rail lines to the gas chambers and to welcome Jewish refugees."

The shock of the Holocaust was one of the driving forces behind the initiation of the European Union and the Parliament's President, Jerzy Buzek said "The Shoah is an incomparable tragedy. We are here together to ex. The European Union - whose citizens are represented in the Parliament of which I am the President - came into being in order to prevent any recurrence of the nightmare of war. We always have to remember the horror of Nazi death camps. The election of Simone Veil, a former extermination camp inmate, as the President of the first democratically elected European Parliament was symbolic and important."

"It is our duty as Europeans to ensure remembrance and to educate. Those who lived through the hell of the camps never forget. But there are fewer and fewer of them among us. The others - the younger generations - must not be allowed to forget."

However, there were also some disturbing signs. In Strasbourg, vandals desecrated a Jewish cemetary, painting swastikas on many tombs and "Juden Raus," or “Jews, out,” was written on one tomb. This happened on the same day that Polish senator Ryszard Bender opened the session of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Bender, a founder member of the extreme-right League of Polish Families, has, according to a radio broadcast in 2000 said "Auschwitz was not a death camp, it was a labour camp," Bender said in the radio broadcast. "Jews, Gypsies and others were annihilated there through hard labour. Actually, labour was not always hard and not always were they annihilated." Questioned by the British Guardian newspaper, he claimed the remarks were taken out of context and that he accepted that it was an extermination camp.