“Y’know Robin, I could’ve not been here, could’ve been dead. On the 17th of June 1940, when the war started, I was 11, and 12 when armed soldiers stormed into our house. I went out to the garden holding a bowl of fruits and soon heard gunshots. My mother lay dead at the door, trying to protect me.”
“My father was murdered in Auschwitz. My mother smuggled me away to save me. I grew up without anyone. No uncles, no cousins, no grandparents, no grandmothers.”
These are just two stories that the elderly, who survived various tragedies that occurred in Europe decades ago, narrate to their grandchildren and by extension to all of us, so we understand that democracy is not a given.
It’s a fragile state that was hard-won but can easily collapse.
The European Union, seeing the risks threatening the European project – which visionary leaders built a few years after the Second World War, aiming to create a unified continent where one country wouldn’t threaten another – created a video in which the elderly remind their grandchildren of their experiences with dictatorships and wars.
From World War II, concentration camps, the bloodshed of the Prague Spring, to the Berlin Wall.
All of this is not too distant, hence people who experienced them are here with us, still unable to hold back their tears when they recount them. Years of peace, recovery, and prosperity intervened.
For the young, they may seem distant, but a war has been raging for two years now on European soil.
The rise of the far-right now puts into question rights that were hard-earned. A new conservatism dangerously casts its shadow over liberal societies.
And the European Union is trying to convince us to come to the polls to halt this trend, as it is clear that the far-right is consolidating while others, perhaps thinking there’s no stake, choose – for the most part – abstention.
In 2019, in the previous European elections, only 50.6% of those eligible to vote participated.
“Democracy is our collective duty, not against a specific political idea or a specific purpose, but a duty we have towards one another,” according to European Parliament spokesperson Jaume Duch.
“European democracy unites us more than we believe: beyond borders, beyond political sensitivities, and beyond generations. In times of polarization, like the one we are experiencing today, it is easy to forget this.”
