In a residential building in Odesa there is today, somewhat hidden, a small Holocaust museum. There, in a glass case, lies a thick piece of rope as long as a person’s arm. The photograph that I saw of it some time ago has stayed with me ever since.

Mr Schwarzman, we met four years ago at the memorial at Babyn Yar. When we met again yesterday, you told me the story of this rope. It is the only object that still preserves the memory of a girl from Odesa. The girl was called Rosa. Rosa was still in school, and she had a good friend, Yakov. They sat next to one another in the classroom.

Rosa was 16 years old when she was murdered in the autumn of 1941. In those days and weeks, thousands of Jewish children, women and men were killed in Odesa or driven out of the city to nearby ghettos. When Rosa was hanged, solely because she was Jewish, her friend Yakov watched her die. She was left hanging from the rope for a week. Yakov saw her corpse and could do nothing. When they finally took down her body, only this rope was left behind. In his grief and despair, Yakov took it – the only thing he could keep as a memory of his friend. A piece of the rope that killed her.

Many years later, an old man carrying an old bag came to the museum in Odesa that you, Mr Schwarzman, had founded together with others to gather and preserve survivors’ recollections of the Shoah. This man was Yakov. He brought them the rope, told the story of Rosa’s murder and said: "Now I can die in peace, because my childhood friend will have a dignified form of remembrance.” Two months later, he died.

What the Germans and their fellow perpetrators carried out in the area that is now Ukraine was a campaign of annihilation. It began even before the Germans had implemented their plan to systematically murder Europe’s Jews in death camps. Jewish life was extinguished, in Odesa, in Babyn Yar, in Chernivtsi, in Kherson, Kharkiv, Dnipro.

Today we remember Rosa and all of the other children, women and men who were murdered at that time in Ukraine and across Europe. We owe the victims a dignified form of remembrance. We will not forget them.

Mr Schwarzman, you yourself are a survivor of the Shoah. You were trapped in the Bershad ghetto in what was then Transnistria – as a five-year-old boy, with your mother and your siblings. You went hungry. You were afraid. You saw your brother die. As a small boy, you were surrounded by pain, horror, barbarity. You bore witness to a mass murder.

The incredible suffering that you had to endure did not break you. You made it your mission in life to give a voice to the victims and the survivors of the Shoah in Odesa and the whole of the area that is now Ukraine. Without people like you, Mr Schwarzman, there would not be a place for Yakov’s memory of Rosa to live on. Today, you are campaigning for a memorial to the victims of the massacre in Odesa, and Germany is supporting you in this.

I am deeply thankful to you for travelling from your suffering home city to be here with us. It is an honour for me to have you speak to us today. And I can assure you that my country stands by your important work for remembrance, just as it stands by your country in this terrible war that Putin is waging against Ukraine, its freedom and independence, against the people of Ukraine. We will continue to support you; we stand by your side and will remain by your side. Thank you, Mr Schwarzman, for being here!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have come together today to remember the victims of National Socialism. Eighty years have now passed – a long time, measured against a human lifespan. Eighty years have now passed since the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945.

We all have images in our hearts and minds that represent to us the horror of the Shoah. In recent days, we have once again seen those photographs that have long since become symbols. We have seen the black-and-white videos filmed by the liberators. We have seen the heaped bodies of the dead, the gaunt faces of the living. We have seen all of this time and again. For eighty years. It is necessary. And yet there is a danger in it, too. The oft-seen images, the well-known words of warning, the routine of remembrance bring the danger of a false and deceptive certainty. They make it easy for us to believe that we have fully understood what happened. They make it easy for us to believe that we know everything. And they make it easy for us to give in to the temptation to file away all of these images, stories and words in a large box in our minds labelled: "This was all a very long time ago.”

But time does not change what happened. Historical truth cannot be packed away in a box! We must face up to this truth anew, time and again. And we cannot let up in our efforts to tell later generations about it.

However, we will have fewer and fewer opportunities to hear from survivors and witnesses themselves. For young people in particular, we will have to find new ways of remembering. Ways that first and foremost emphasise wanting to know. Ways that make it clear that all of us – not just young people – are still seeking, still learning. It is a duty for our generation to work against forgetting, everywhere in Europe. A duty that we cannot fail in.

This is why I am so thankful, at this time in particular, for the people who research, teach and work at German memorials. The fact that these memorials are today defiled and attacked for political reasons, that staff are insulted and threatened, must be a wake-up call for us! These systematic attacks aim to intimidate, to destroy, and ultimately to discredit remembrance and rewrite history.

When memorials have to spend an ever greater amount of their budgets on security measures instead of on educating young people, it is a shameful thing! We cannot accept that in this country!

Two days ago, I joined Holocaust survivors and German political representatives at Auschwitz. It is not far from Berlin, our capital, where everything that happened there was thought up. Standing there between the barracks means standing before an unavoidable truth: Germans organised and committed this crime against humanity. Germans opened up this inhuman abyss, they planned, measured and calculated it. The victims walked into this abyss and on to the end.

This place makes it clear to us that the Shoah is a part of German history. It is a part of our identity, whether or not we want it to be. There is no end to remembrance and thus no line that can be drawn under our responsibility.

"Never again!” does not only mean that Jewish people are able to live safely in Germany, in Europe, in Israel. It means that they are and will remain a part of our shared "we” in our country. And it has long since ceased to mean simply "nip it in the bud!”, tackle evil before it takes hold, as Michel Friedman has rightly pointed out. We must now understand it to mean "consider the end!”, when antisemitism is an everyday reality in our country, on our streets and public squares, in schools and universities. In our country, with our history, we can never allow this!

We Germans have learned from our past. We built our constitution on the lessons we learned. "Human dignity shall be inviolable” – that is the response to the monstrous German crimes against humanity. Our democracy is the response to racist fanaticism and nationalism.

These lessons remain right and relevant, even in a changing country. They have borne us, guaranteed us decades of peace within and without. They have allowed trust to grow, among our partners in Europe and the world, and even among those – what a gift! – who were once the Germans’ victims. Our commitment to our ongoing responsibility, and the success story of our democracy – they belong together, and I would like for this to remain so.

To suppress, trivialise, forget the Shoah today is to shake the foundation on which our democracy grew. And, vice versa, those who ridicule, disdain, attack democracy today also pave the way for hostility, violence and hatred.

This is precisely why, at Auschwitz the day before yesterday, the survivor Leon Weintraub – now 99 years old – warned us so urgently and almost desperately: "Take the enemies of democracy seriously!” And I will repeat it here in the German Bundestag, ladies and gentlemen: Take the enemies of democracy seriously!

We have reached a time in which we must decide. We have it in our power to preserve the achievements that have been made and to protect our democracy. Let us not return to a dark age. We know better. Let us do better!