Luxembourg Royals, PM Commemorate 80th Anniversary of Auschwitz Liberation

On Monday 27 January 2025, Prince Guillaume and Princess Stéphanie, together with Luxembourg's Prime Minister, Luc Frieden, attended a ceremony to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in Poland.

As reported by the Grand Ducal Court, Luxembourg's Hereditary Grand Ducal couple and Prime Minister Frieden laid a candle in front of the International Monument to the Victims at the end of this commemoration held at the former camp.

Following the ceremony, Prime Minister Frieden issued a statement, in which he reflected: "Time stood still and I was lost for words as I stood at the camp in Auschwitz, Poland. A place and a name that are forever engraved in history as synonymous with the lack of humanity. 80 years have passed, but the shock remains. It upsets the silence that weighs on these desecrated grounds and calls us to action".

"80 years since millions of people fell victim to one of the greatest horrors ever committed in human history, here and across Europe, by the Nazi regime. 80 years since the world discovered the scale of the murder machinery designed to execute the meticulous massacre of six million Jews and millions of other innocent lives. 1.1 million people brutally murdered in Auschwitz alone, with shocking banality. Only 7,000 saved when it was liberated," the statement continued.

"As we commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is still difficult to fathom the heinous savagery that took place at this site, marked by the cruelty of which humans are sometimes capable," the Prime Minister said. "And yet Auschwitz is proof that it happened. The shoes and clothes, the suitcases and glasses that are still there, are proof. The muted screams of babies, children, women and men that echo across time are proof".

"This is a place for reflection. But above all, it must be a place for reaction. If it does not spur us on to act, we risk becoming moral accomplices. History will judge in equal measure the perpetrators of these acts, as it will those who have not learnt the lesson," the statement added. "Attacks on our universal values of freedom, democracy and equality start, always and everywhere, by a feeling of superiority towards others whose human dignity is denied. And, seeing the state of the world around us, such ideas and their indecent peddlers, are regaining confidence."

The Prime Minister concluded: "Never again, this has been our credo for 80 years. If this is the goal, we need to resist any resurgence. Before action, there's speech. Before speech, there's thought. Let us fight, now and forevermore, against ideas that trivialise this human catastrophe and seek to divide us by inciting hatred of others. Let us fight instead for a world in peace, built on the respect of human dignity and fundamental freedoms. For a better world and the economic and social progress of all people."