Today, we remember the six millions Jews who died in the Shoah and also other victims of the barbarity of the Third Reich: the Roma and Sinti communities, Slavs, gay men, disabled persons, Jehovah witnesses and dissidents.
We remember that erasing European Jewish civilisation from the face of the earth was a German war aim. Indeed, if Nazi Germany’s wartime objectives had been fulfilled we should never forget, in this State, that the thoroughness of the planned liquidation of European Jewry included the elimination of 4,500 members of the Irish Jewish community.
We remember that the Nazis murdered each day of the war, on average, 3,000 Jews. To achieve this average required and included the elimination of 10,000 Jews a day in Auschwitz - Birkenau, in the final months of its industrial killings. The Nazi’s death machine showed no mercy and was devoid of morality. The destruction ensured the elimination of never to be known future generations by the murder of over one million Jewish children. In the ghettoes and camps, beating, torture, and starvation were the daily routine, ending for those victims who were still alive in murder by gas or bullet.
To the killers, the victims were mere numbers that they wished to see perish in the anonymity of smoke and ash. There was no limit to their cruelty, malice and lust to kill. No limit to the shame, indignity, humiliation, torture and anguish they were willing to inflict. No limit to their capacity to produce what the poet Paul Celan called the ‘black milk’ of the inhuman.
Some ask what lessons might we learn from the Shoah. A simple reply is that no assumptions about normality, no philosophical or psychological enquiry, no analysis of human behaviour can provide any explanation for what happened. It does not require learning lessons to state one simple moral fact: the Shoah was a bottomless and infinite evil.
In the post-Shoah time nothing should hide the nature of that evil. No search for its meaning, no profaning of history, no perverting of language, no consoling story of salvation, no trivialising of images can be allowed to diminish the memory of the cruel inhuman and the degrading ordeal of brutal enslavement and criminal mass murder inflicted upon innocent European Jewish men, women and children. Inflicted simply because they were a people and Jewish.
The Shoah not only eliminated the dead, it remained with the living. Those who survived did not understand why and, for too many survivors, following liberation, what was normal for those who had not experienced the hell of the camps became for them the abnormal.
The experience left many survivors so traumatised that, after the death camps, they struggled to survive survival. In the book Witness, a record of survivors’ testimonies, Rabbi Baruch G – his surname is not given - said that he had to discover again that existing meant more than simply eating and existing. If another person spoke with him he would cry. He would say to himself, ‘Is it true that you’re talking to me? Why should you talk to me?’ He explains that the Nazis ‘got me to think of myself so little that nobody should talk to me’. Witness – Voices from the Holocaust (Touchstone, 2001) pp 230-231.
The question I would like us all to reflect on is, ‘How do we ensure that new generations know of and understand the terrible past of the Shoah?’ Because for the sake of today’s and tomorrow’s world it is vital that the young understand the depth and scope of the catastrophe. It is vital that they do, so that the Shoah of the 20th Century is never again repeated.
The catastrophe was communal. From the shtetls and cities of Europe, we have lost the Rabbis who taught Talmud in the Yeshivas, the Cantors who sang the prayers in synagogues, the families gathered for Shabbat, the physicians, philosophers, musicians, authors, artists, actors, poets, scientists, geneticists, entrepreneurs and farmers. We have lost the millions of voices who would have made up the colourful palette of future generations. And we must not forget the comedians lost, for the Jewish people have of necessity always embraced comedy, even amidst tragedy. It is not for nothing that the Austrian Nazis targeted the leading wit of Vienna’s café cabaret scene, Egon Friedell, whose books they had burnt on Kristallnacht.
The catastrophe was personal. In Lawrence Langer’s book Holocaust Testimonies, a survivor, identified as only as Mrs B, says: ‘We are left with loneliness. As long as we live, we are lonely.’
Mrs B was sitting with her husband and children. But she could feel behind her the empty spaces where the absent were present. The grandparents, grand-uncles and grand-aunts, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces, the ever present ghosts of a different life. She was utterly lonely in the midst of her memories of the irretrievably lost.
The important moral challenge for the young is to become active witnesses to the testimony of the survivors.
The survivors bore witness by giving us their testimony. They realised that those they spoke to might not want to listen or that those who listened might not understand. Although some feared that telling the dreadful truth might be futile, they allowed their distressed memories to speak. Thus, they thwarted the Nazi conspiracy of silence and the silence of those who looked away and either pretended they didn’t know or didn’t want to know of the unprecedented barbarity of the organised industrial slaughter that befell the Jewish people. They also put their faith in the moral ability of the young to bear witness. Bearing witness to survivors’ testimonies denies the Nazis a victory.
A small number of survivors are living here in Ireland and we are very grateful to them for joining us this evening. Suzi Diamond, Jan Kaminski and Tomi Reichental, thank you for so generously sharing your experiences with schoolchildren here and with the wider community. Let us also remember Zoltan Zinn-Collis and his sister Edit, both survivors of Bergen-Belsen, who passed away just a month ago.
Another important challenge is to keep the truth about the Shoah safe from distortion.
The bare facts include the role of indifference. Neighbours failed to protest against their Jewish friends being transported to their deaths. And there was indifference in the inaction of democratic states that invoked neutrality to become bystanders, and in the refusal of leaders to ease their immigration quotas. This indifference signalled to the Nazis that they could spill Jewish blood with impunity.
Of course, not all were indifferent. There were the righteous among nations who placed their own lives at risk to save Jewish lives. Just last Tuesday, I had the privilege of participating in the European Parliaments International Holocaust Remembrance Day, during which a room in the European Parliament was dedicated to the memory and courage of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jewish lives in Hungary.
We must also remember those who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. On the 19th of April next, we mark the 70th anniversary of that uprising. In the European Parliament last Tuesday, we paid tribute to and remembered the bravery of those who fought tyranny in the Warsaw Ghetto. We also remembered that they too were the victims of indifference. In Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah we hear the voice of Simha Rotem, who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943. He says, ‘I don’t think the human tongue can describe the horror we went through in the ghetto’. He adds that outside the ghetto, ‘life went on as naturally and normally as before’. We know from Czeslaw Milosz’s poem ‘Campo dei Fiori’ that neither the ‘sky carousel’ nor the ‘carnival tune’ stopped in Krasinski Square while the slaughter occurred inside the Ghetto walls.
Normality and inhumanity intersected on the axis of indifference.
We must never be indifferent. We must help to secure in the world the rule of law and the protection of human rights. We must always insist on the international order acting to stop genocide. And we must not silently observe the resurgence of anti-Semitic hate crime in Europe.
Martin Schultz, President of the European Parliament, reminds us the European Union was created on the basis that Auschwitz must never be repeated. The Shoah began not in the gas chambers but in words of hate. So we must stand up to those like the Hungarian Member of Parliament who recently demanded legislation for registering and identifying all Hungarian Jews. We must not forget that it is less than 70 years since 400,000 members of the Hungarian Jewish community were transported to the death camps and that, without the intervention of Raoul Wallenberg and others, 100,000 more could have died.
Recent reports by the European Fundamental Rights Agency indicate that crimes motivated by racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, extremism and intolerance of the other remain a daily reality across the European Union. The reappearance of anti-Semitism in some parts of Europe is a source of serious concern as are anti-Semitic utterances by a minority of individual politicians. There should be no place in public life for those who resort to racist or anti –Semitic rhetoric to inflame hatred and incite prejudice for political self-promotion. �
We must continue to make the protection of human rights a key part of our personal, community, national, and
international agendas. Modern international human rights law is a direct product of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis and their helpers. We must regularly reflect on whether we are doing enough today to confront racism and anti- Semitism in Europe and in the wider world. It is also right that we ask whether we are doing enough to ensure that every individual is treated with respect and dignity. Some of these questions I ensured were discussed just a week ago in Dublin Castle, when we held a meeting of European Union Justice Ministers, our very first ministerial meeting during Ireland’s Presidency of the European Union.
I have proposed to my EU Ministerial colleagues that we have a more coordinated and focussed approach in confronting racism, anti-Semitism and prejudice across Europe and my European colleagues supported my request to the European Commission that it facilitates this and reports back to Member States on measures that might be implemented. Whilst the uniform application of existing legislation is important, it is not enough. We must win hearts and minds and education has a key role.
In Dublin in May, as part of our presidency agenda, there will be a one day conference with participants from across the European Union to give further consideration to these very important issues.
The history of 20th Century Europe teaches us that indifference and complacency should never be the response to racism and anti-Semitism. A lesson of the Shoah is that those who engage in hate speech, who promote prejudice and anti-Semitism, should never be facilitated by the silence of good people.
Today, we remember those whom Hitler sought to consign to nameless oblivion. Today, we continue to bear witness to the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich. And today we dedicate ourselves to doing everything necessary to ensure that the horror of the Shoah, the greatest industrial mass killing known to humanity, is not repeated in this 21st Century or at any future time.
On this solemn day, we once more commit ourselves to remembering from generation to generation - L’Dor V’Dor.