80 years after the liberation of the death camps, Pierre-François Veil, president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, speaks on RTL in Focus Sunday, on the rise of anti-Semitism in France.
While Emmanuel Macron is due to participate on January 27 in the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, Simone Veil's son, who has already made the trip several times, speaks of a “poignant” experience. “We don’t come back from this trip the way we left,” he says, explaining that this year, the event will have a special flavor.
“It will be a ceremony in a Europe which is experiencing war again, which we thought had become impossible,” he regrets. “It turns out that the President of Russia will not be there, although it was the Soviet troops who liberated the camps in the east and in particular the Birkenau camp“, also underlines Pierre-François Veil, expressing his wish that Europe finds “the path to peace”.
Sound and fury cannot be guides for a society
Pierre-François Veil
Concerning the rise of anti-Semitism in France, the president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah says he is “appalled by the people who are fueling this.” Indeed, the year 2024 saw an increase in anti-Semitic acts, with 1,500 acts recorded on French territory. He denounces the presence “in our society of people whose pleasure or ambition is to walk around with a can of gasoline in one hand and a lit match in the other hand.” To the question of whether he thinks of a politician in particular, namely Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Pierre-François Veil acquiesces by saying “obviously”. He believes that “sound and fury cannot be guides for a society”.
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