Enlarge image Marcel Reich-Ranicki speaks in the German Bundestag on January 27, 2012. (© picture alliance / dpa) The entire German Government leadership and parliament gathered today on the floor of the Bundestag to remember the victims of the Holocaust on what was the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. They were joined by survivors of the Holocaust and descendants. January 27 has been declared by the United Nations as International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, and each year on this day in Germany, the Federal President, Chancellor, President of the Bundestag and all government ministers, legislators and other top officials come together in the Bundestag for an hour of remembrance.

This year’s guest speaker, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, gave a gripping account of his memories of the “resettlement” of the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis. In 1938, he had been deported out of Berlin and brought to Warsaw with his parents and brother.

Now 91 years old and a celebrated author and literary critic, Reich-Ranicki was then a translator for the ghetto’s leadership council and recalled the moment on July 22, 1942, when SS officers told the council that the residents were to be transferred East immediately. The officers left the council house after delivering their fateful message, and “the deathly silence transformed almost at lightening speed into noise and tumult,” said Reich-Ranicki. Though many in the house did not know what had just been decreed, “it seemed as if they already knew or sense what had just happened – that the sentence had just been pronounced over the largest Jewish city in Europe, the death sentence.”

Reich-Ranicki and his wife, who he met and married in the ghetto, managed to escape deportation and survived the Holocaust by going into hiding, but his parents and brothers were killed.

Enlarge image Marcel Reich-Ranicki, at the podium recieves applause after his speech. Federal President Christian Wulff (right) and the President of the Fedral Constitutonal Court, Andreas Voßkuhle (left) stand next to him. (© picture alliance / dpa) “Your fate represents that of millions of people,” Bundestag President Norbert Lammert said in his address. “All those who, during the national socialist tyranny were excluded,  humiliated, robbed, expelled, persecuted, tortured and murdered, we remember today on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.”

 Lammert also pointed out that moral courage is still called for today in Germany to fight right-wing extremism and latent anti-Semitism. Many of the former sites of the National Socialist regime, such as the house where 70 years ago Nazi officials gathered for the Wannsee Conference to plan the genocide with military precision, are today places of reminding and admonishment, Lammert said, “that we stand up for all people in Germany being able to leave freely and equally and without fear.”