(JTA) – President Joe Biden recalled the deadly “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi march in 2017 in his statement Wednesday marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, saying that Holocaust awareness must address current threats of genocide. “The horrors we saw and heard in Charlottesville in 2017, with white nationalists and neo-Nazis spewing the same anti-Semitic bile we heard in the 1930s in Europe, are the reason I ran for president,” Biden said in a statement. “Today, I recommit to the simple truth that preventing future genocides remains both our moral duty and a matter of national and global importance.”

Biden in his statement quoted the only Holocaust survivor to ever serve in Congress, the late Tom Lantos. “Silence is complicity,” the president said. “As my late friend and Holocaust survivor, Tom Lantos, so frequently reminded us: ‘The veneer of civilization is paper-thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest.’ When hatred goes unchecked, and when the checks and balances in government and society that protect fundamental freedoms are lost, violence and mass atrocities can result.’”

Main Photo: Joe Biden, then president-elect, delivers remarks at the Major Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III National Guard/Reserve Center in New Castle, Del., Jan. 19, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)