European Parliament commemorates Remembrance Day with Tatiana Bucci’s testimony

Brussels – European institutions commemorate the darkest chapter in the history of the old continent. The European Parliament convened for a session dedicated to Remembrance Day, marking the 81st anniversary of the Red Army’s entry into the Nazi camp at Auschwitz. The guest of honour was Tatiana Bucci, an Italian Holocaust survivor, who received a long round of applause from MEPs. 

“You and your sister, Andra, were just children when you were deported to Auschwitz. Against all odds, you survived, and you have dedicated your lives to ensuring that the world never forgets what you witnessed,” said Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, introducing her. Before giving the floor to Bucci, now 88 and originally from Fiume, the EU leader issued a warning: “We believed that this was a lesson learned, a hatred confined to the past. But anti-Semitism has never died out. It has survived and adapted. And today it still casts its shadow over our continent and beyond. Today, anti-Semitism is spreading faster and more widely than ever before.” 

The data collected by the European Commission is disturbing: 55 per cent of European citizens consider anti-Semitism to be a problem in their Member State, and 47 per cent believe it has increased in the last five years. Almost 7 out of 10 Europeans believe that the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza influences the perception of Jews in their country. Outside Europe, this is confirmed by the chilling massacre at Bondi Beach in Australia, where Jewish families celebrating Hanukkah were killed in cold blood. 

Tatiana Bucci’s story is a manifesto of the old and new divisions of the old continent. Before her, her mother, a Ukrainian Jew, was forced to flee Ukraine in 1910 due to a pogrom ordered by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. She settled in Fiume, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later a territory disputed by Italian irredentism, annexed to Fascist Italy in 1924. It was in Fiume, in March 1944, that little Tatiana and Andra Bucci, their mother, grandmother and several relatives were arrested and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. She and her sister managed to survive because Josef Mengele, a Nazi researcher and doctor, mistook them for twins and therefore useful for his experiments.

After recalling the children deported in the infamous roundup of the Rome ghetto on 16 October 1943, Bucci concluded her testimony with a wish: “I would like all children in the world to have the life I had after the war.” This is not the case in Gaza, where the State of Israel has killed and deliberately starved tens of thousands of young people, nor is it the case in Sudan, Yemen, and too many other theatres of war and atrocity around the world. 

“Memory is not passive. It imposes a responsibility on all of us if we ever want it to mean anything,” Metsola warned. “Six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered by the Nazi regime in a deliberate, organised, and state-sponsored attempt to exterminate an entire people. Along with them, the Roma and Sinti communities, people with disabilities, minorities, and political opponents were all murdered by the same machine of hatred. This did not happen overnight. It happened step by step, law by law, train by train,” she continued. 

The issue of memory is now more crucial than ever. Because the debate on genocide has returned, precisely because of the atrocious military action of the Jewish state against the Palestinian people. And because “we are now reaching the end of the so-called ‘era of the witness’,” as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pointed out in a note. There are fewer and fewer survivors of the Shoah, such as Tatiana and Andra Bucci, who are able to convey first-hand testimony of that horror. “Our responsibility is increasing,” said von der Leyen, “we must find new ways to remember the atrocities, tell the truth about what happened, and learn from the past.”