Monaco’s Minister of External Relations and Cooperation, Isabelle Berro-Amadeï, has told the official commemoration of the Roma and Sinti genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau that remembrance demands constant vigilance against every form of hatred, speaking in her role as president of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.

She was speaking on 2nd August, the European Holocaust Memorial Day for Roma and Sinti, which marks the night in 1944 when the SS murdered the last Roma and Sinti prisoners of Auschwitz — around 4,300 people, most of them women, children and the elderly — in the gas chambers. The ceremony was held at the memorial on the site of the former camp.

Monaco currently holds the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers for the first time, a role Berro-Amadeï chairs on the Principality’s behalf.

A call for vigilance

In her address, the minister said the duty of remembrance was not only about preserving the memory of the victims but about staying alert to every form of hatred, racism, antisemitism, antigypsyism and discrimination, and to the trivialisation of exclusion. Memory, she said, is one of the foundations of peace and of the defence of Europe’s democratic values.

She reaffirmed the Council of Europe’s commitment to Holocaust education, to combating denial, to preserving sites of memory and to the recognition of the genocide of the Roma and Sinti — a persecution that claimed an estimated half a million lives across Nazi-occupied Europe.

Passing on memory

On the margins of the commemoration, Berro-Amadeï joined a meeting between young Roma and Sinti and survivors of the Holocaust, devoted to passing remembrance on to new generations.

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Photo source: Government Communications Department