He is the first president to take part in this annual ceremony organized by the Union of Auschwitz deportees.
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Emmanuel Macron rekindled the flame on the evening of Thursday January 27 under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, on the occasion of the international day dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. He is the first president to participate in this annual ceremony organized by the Union of Auschwitz Deportees (UDA), according to members. He was in the presence of two Holocaust survivors: Esther Senot, deported at the age of 15 in September 1943, and Victor Perahia, deported to Bergen-Belsen. Accompanied by Geneviève Darrieussecq, minister delegate in charge of memory and veterans, he also paid tribute to Raphaël Esrail, the president of the UDA, who died on Saturday at the age of 96 in Lannion (Côtes-d’Armor).
In memory of the victims of the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/q8CqyM2EIi
—Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) January 27, 2022
In a video published Thursday by the Elysée, Emmanuel Macron insisted on the need to “this work of memory and humanism” on the Holocaust. “We owe it in particular to the younger generations: so that the memory of the Shoah will never be forgotten, so that the atrocity of our history will never be repeated, so that no young European can ignore it” because “to ignore it is to take the risk of letting some people reappear the words of the worst, of letting the bad winds return”. He added that initiatives will be taken “in the next weeks”, during the French Presidency of the Council of the EU, to “fight against all forms of discrimination and reaffirm the specificity of anti-Semitism”.