Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has awarded Pedro René Pérez, a Holocaust survivor, with the Commendation of Civil Merit for “the courage shown in telling the world about his experience and transmitting a message of peace and fraternity.”
Pedro René Pérez (Vienna, 1936) was forced to flee with his family from Nazi persecution in Austria. Together with his parents, he was interned in the Rivesaltes camp, located in Vichy France, where he shared internment with gypsy ethnic prisoners and numerous Spanish republicans who would later save his life.
The decoration, as the minister explained during the ceremony – which took place this past Wednesday at the Ministry’s headquarters- is awarded “in consideration of his bravery, together with that of his entire family and that of the Sephardic community that managed to flee from Nazi unreason, his courage in telling the world about his experience and transmitting a message of peace and brotherhood and his desire to preserve Ladino as a language of communication.”
Pedro René Pérez, son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, has traveled to Spain to offer his testimony within the framework of Holocaust Remembrance Month, organized by Centro Sefarad-Israel. Last Friday, he spoke in the Senate on the occasion of the State Act for Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity, in which he recalled the persecution he suffered in his childhood and assured that, as “the last Sephardic from the Vienna community”, he felt very happy to return to Spain.
In addition, René Pérez has participated in meetings with students and in different public events. In an interview with the Europa Press agency, Pérez defended the “two-state solution” (Israel and Palestine) to end the war in the Middle East, but warned that this measure would not guarantee that “an something like October 7”, in reference to the Hamas attacks in Israeli territory, which triggered the current Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.
