Spanish Senate, Madrid

The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, stressed that “memory challenges us to continue building a society free of hate speech and to weave alliances based on respect, human rights and coexistence. This is the Europe we have built since 1945 and the one we want to continue to defend in the present and the future.” Ángel Víctor Torres, who spoke on behalf of the Government of Spain at the event held in the Senate on the occasion of the Official Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes of Humanity, said he was “excited” to intervene in an event to remember all the victims of the Holocaust, among them, “more than 9,000 Spaniards imprisoned in different Nazi concentration and extermination camps for their commitment to freedoms, democracy and the fight against fascism.” He pointed out that, today, when it is 79 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, “Europe has the duty to continue remembering barbarism and all the people who were close to being erased from history: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities and a long etcetera of victims that the Nazi regime pointed out to be exterminated.” Ángel Víctor Torres has assured us that the Holocaust taught us the existence of the darkest and perverse side of the human being and its weaknesses, “only memory is the dam of containment to avoid a repetition of a barbarism of that magnitude.”

Ángel Víctor Torres, who was accompanied by the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez, stressed that “it is our institutional responsibility as a democratic government and as convinced democrats to maintain and spread the memory of resistance to barbarism.”