I am a former leader of the Liberal Democrats group in the European Parliament. After the collapse of the Santerre-led Commission, I wanted the group to discover what was the Europe that had, in a different way, gone through that crisis. We travelled to Krakow in Poland with four Holocaust survivors and travelled on to Auschwitz. An old rabbi who had escaped from a holding camp in the Netherlands with the father of one of our Jewish MEPs travelled with us. This old man lit a candle and chanted the Kaddish, the sacred Jewish prayer of remembrance. He then lit the candles of the survivors and they in turn lit the candles held by me and my colleagues. In doing so they passed to us a duty of memory about the essential reasons for reconciliation – fighting anti-Semitism and racism and achieving real, deep and meaningful values.