Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, addressed the plenary on Wednesday 19 April in Strasbourg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
She paid tribute to the courage of the Jews in the ghetto who rose up against the Nazi enemy. “They are our light of inspiration and the symbol of Jewish resistance against the Holocaust”, she said.
She invited the elected representatives to observe a minute’s silence and to wear a flower, a yellow daffodil, on their jacket.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first uprising in a major city and the largest revolt of the Jewish population during the German occupation. On the afternoon of 19 April 1943, in a symbolic gesture, fighters raised the white and red flag of Poland and the white and blue flag of their organisation on the roof of the fortress of the Jewish Military Union in Muranowski Square. This image of two flags – the white and red of Poland and the white and blue Zionist flag – flying together over the ghetto that was staging an uprising would become a symbol of Jewish and Polish destinies that were inextricably linked. In August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising broke out – a battle for free Poland and the largest uprising for independence in the history of the Second World War. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)