European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek said he was deeply shaken and moved by his visit Tuesday to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.
"I was deeply shaken and moved by my visit to Yad Vashem. Those crimes are beyond human imagination but yet they happened. The faces that look at us from the past leave a stamp in our hearts forever,” he said at the start of a two-day visit in Israel.
"We want to remember, we must, and we always will remember. On behalf of the European Parliament, I came here to pay our deepest respects to the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah," Buzek said.
He stressed that he had carried a memory of the Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau since his childhood as he was born in occupied Poland a few dozen kilometres from where the camp was being built.
"The scale of the Holocaust puts a very important responsibility for those who look after the memory of that tragedy. Because this is one memory that we can never forget," he said.
"The Holocaust must always be prominent in our minds and in the conscience of humanity, and serve as an unequivocal warning forever."
"It is our duty as Europeans to ensure remembrance and to educate."
He said that the Holocaust is a symbol for the European Union too, recalling the fact that Simone Veil, a former extermination camp inmate, was the President of the first democratically elected European Parliament.
“We will never forget," he said.