Oswiecim (Poland) (AFP)

Visiting the Auschwitz camp 75 years after his liberation, Edouard Philippe stressed on Monday the "radical share of inhumanity" which led to the Holocaust and urged high school students to transmit the memory of it.

"When you come to visit the camp (...), the shock is clear," observed the Prime Minister, referring to "this terror, this absolute silence that prevails in the face of the discovery of this radical share of inhumanity".

"We are therefore divided between the will to know and understand and the certainty that there is something incomprehensible at bottom. We are divided between the need for silence and memory and the need to say things, to transmit them ", he continued, during an address on the site of the" Judenramp ", place of selection of prisoners on their arrival in captivity.

"A man who was cleaning the station approached me and despite the ban on speaking began to repeat very gently to me: + be careful. There at the end of the platform there is a selection. On the left it is life and right is death + ", she testified.

"So me, by training my mother and trying to go as quickly as possible, I started to say + go left +, so that as many people as possible can hear me," she said.

Before taking part in an international ceremony in the afternoon at Birkenau, the Prime Minister was accompanied on Monday morning during the visit to the Auschwitz I camp of a class of high school students from Jouy-le-Moutier (Val d ' Oise), winners of the National Competition for Resistance and Deportation.

"Let us hope that the students who accompany us become aware of what was the greatest genocide of the last century," pleaded another survivor of the Holocaust, Henri Zajdenwergier, 92 years old. The latter, himself deported to Estonia in 1944 in convoy 73, lost 13 members of his family to Auschwitz including his father.

"It will now be up to you, when you can, with your own words, without pretending to historical perfection, but with sincerity, to say what you saw," said Mr. Philippe to the students. "And to ensure that collectively we do not forget that there has been one of the worst examples of inhumanity here, that inhumanity is part of what we are, and that we must not forget it ", he concluded.

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