While at the Auschwitz Memorial, and speaking on the 90th anniversary of the Nazi book burning ritual launched on 10 May 1933, Christoph Heubner, author and Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee said:

"Today, throughout the world, Holocaust survivors are remembering that evening on 10 May 1933, when, in a large number of nationwide German cities, hate-inflamed young Nazi followers publicly burned blacklisted books by Jewish and politically undesirable authors on previously prepared bonfires in efforts to wipe them out forever. The authors, similarly targeted for cultural cleansing, were to be destroyed, banished and eradicated from their society and the German language. Many of those authors later fell victim to Nazi concentration camps, humiliated, tortured and murdered.

It is with profound sorrow and anger that we now remember all of these people who were cast out from their world and driven from their homeland. Those who, as writers, were never again able to recover from this night of hatred and destruction, and never again managed to find their way back to their language and their home. And we see before us those people who eagerly flocked towards the glare of the flames, blindly indifferent to the consequences of these public spectacles of annihilation, these irresistibly exciting experiences.

On the evening of 10 May 1933, Germany lost not only its human dignity, it also destroyed a huge amount of its creative potential and intellectual strength. And although it is somewhat consoling to know that it later became possible to revive those burned books from the ashes, we still need to recognize today that there are writers around the world who are being threatened, banished, imprisoned and persecuted. On this day the sympathy and solidarity of the Holocaust survivors goes out to these people in particular. Your thoughts and your words are alive, and they will reach the world."