In a ceremony marking 80 years since Soviet authorities deported 70,000 Eastern Europeans on the eve of Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, Members of the European Parliament read out names of the victims, including whole families that perished in the gulags.
The EPP Group's Rasa Juknevičienė of Lithuania, Coordinator of the informal MEP Group on European Remembrance, read from the memoir of her deported mother who wrote of her horrific ordeal in which her father and others died.
European Parliament President David Sassoli, MEPs and diplomats also joined in the ceremony.
