Jewish people, members of the Roma and Sinti, LGBTQI+ and differently abled communities, militant communists and anti-fascist dissidents, Slavic citizens were rounded up by the millions in every part of Europe, imprisoned, humiliated, stripped of all human dignity, tortured and killed with summary executions and in gas chambers. In the name of the 'purity of the race', an attempt was made through horror to turn the wheel of history backwards, reducing humanity into first-class and inferior persons whose every right, including the right to life, was violated.

Nazi-fascism was born from the fertile womb of Europe: that of racism, of nationalism, of the ideology of white supremacism, of the traumas and brutalities produced by the First World War, of colonialism according to which there are chosen peoples to whom everything is due and peoples who must give up their land, leave or be subjected to a regime of occupation and oppression.

MEMORY is not only the dutiful remembrance of what has been but also imperative so that those horrors are NEVER repeated. On this day so sacred to humanity, our thoughts go not only to the victims of that time, but also to the civilian populations suffering the brutality of war, the destruction of their homes, hospitals, schools, universities, civil infrastructure. To those deprived of food, drinking water, medicine, and forced into the cold and weather. To the children who are cannon fodder for collective punishment or attempts at ethnic cleansing.

Un Ponte Per unites yesterday's memory with today's: we do so in our daily commitment to stop the massacre in Gaza, stop the bombing in Syria, support the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian conscientious objectors. In standing side by side with Iraqi, Jordanian and Lebanese civil societies and in supporting those in Israel who shun war and oppose their government's apartheid policies. We recall how the preamble of the United Nations states that the peoples of the world united 'TO FREE HUMANITY FROM THE FLAG OF WAR'.

A commitment that must be carried on every day.