Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I’m honoured to be here to speak at Ireland’s 13th Holocaust Memorial Day. Thank you for inviting me.
We meet in witness, mourning and memory of the millions of innocent Jewish men, women and children, and others, persecuted and murdered because of their ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, political affiliations or their religious beliefs.
Sometimes, fleetingly, on crowded platforms of European train stations, you get that sense of fear, shock, confusion.
Adult children shepherding parents. Mothers and fathers trying to keep hold of young children, and some vestige of hope, equanimity.
‘What will become of them, what will become of us, our small, sweet family?’
In his book, Search Warrant, on the disappearance and eventual death in the Holocaust of the young Parisian Jewish girl, Dora Bruder Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano writes about last letters thrown from cattle trucks by deportees to be found and posted to families by kind and random strangers.
Browsing in the bookstalls along the Seine, he found, tucked into a book, a letter written by a young man awaiting transport from Drancy Camp in Paris. His name was Robert Tatakovsky. Born in 1902 in Odessa.
Before the war he wrote a column on art forL’Illustration.
He writes to his mother in Paris’s 11th arrondisement
“Yesterday I was picked to go. I’ve been mentally prepared for a long time. The camp is panic stricken, men are crying, they are afraid.”
He ends
“I’m leaving this letter unfinished…with all my love. Be brave. It’s 7 am. Be back soon”.
According to Modiano the fact this letter was abandoned suggests his entire family and milieu perished.
Parisians poor or rich or sophisticated united in their belief that despite the Russian or Polish names, their Parisian accents made them immune.
The same could be said of the hundreds of thousands of names read in the snow at the Remembrance at Auschwitz Birkenau as in city after city Jews believed ‘we are not other, we are citizens, we have our papers, nothing will happen to us.’
And it is good that Europe remembers that it did. Particularly, in the current refugee crisis.
Because in 1938 Europe met at Evian to discuss the perils facing its Jews and having discussed those perils closed its borders to the men, women and children facing them, for some here, your own families among them.
Today with the refugee crisis from Syria, the men, women and children are from another faiths, but Europe shares with them something so profound, both estimable and inestimable, our common humanity.
If we keep our focus on that, there can be no ‘them’, only ‘us’.
And all those fleeing war and terror must be treated with compassion and respect according to our shared human and their rights under international conventions and the law.
Around this time last year, I walked side by side with President Hollande, in Paris in the aftermath of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.
As we marched through the city I thought of Voltaire’s words that ‘tolerance is the consequence of our humanity’.
And how vital it was that we would defend that tolerance and humanity, against the hatred and extremism, that would dismantle and destroy them.
That in our solidarity, we would show the agents of such destruction that to us their actions areanathema, their propositions absurd.
But Voltaire wrote too that‘those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities’.
Something the city of Light would see again not even a year later.
Something Europe’s Jews were forced to live by, and die by, in their millions in the Holocaust.
Six million people, every one of them an individual.
At the Auschwitz museum the curators keep.
more than a ton of human hair;
110,000 shoes;
3,800 suitcases;
470 prostheses and orthopaedic braces;
379 striped uniforms;
246 prayer shawls;
more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed, or hoped, they were bound for resettlement.
A curator told the New York Times “The eyeglasses in the exhibition are one big pile. But in the lab, he began to examine them one by one. One had a screw replaced by a bent needle; another had a repaired temple. And then this enormous mass of glasses started becoming people”…so began the“search for the individual.”
And it is that search for the individual that we will make sure that we see people as ‘who’ they are, not ‘what’ they are.
- The woman from Aleppo who is a teacher.
- 17 year old Aslan who carried his dog for 500 kms.
- The man in the Calais jungle, a professor of English, an expert on Shakespeare.
Tonight we remember other individuals who sought to protect those in need. Not because they were Jews or Christians or Mulims, or German, or Russian or Dutch. But because they were human.
Thanks to them other individuals survived and some of them are heretonight,
· Suzi Diamond
· Jan Kaminski
· Tomi Reichental
Each year those who survived the Holocaust grow fewer in number.
So their testimony grows more crucial.
I am struck by how that for each of them they don’t as much tell their story, as relive it.
And we are privileged to be in their presence.
This year, we in Ireland commemorate the events of 1916 and reflect on the journey we as a people, as a nation have taken over the past 100 years, a century in which the world witnessed the horror of the Shoah. We reflect on how we have developed... how we have changed. While no journey in social development is ever complete, and while many challenges remain, I think we have witnessed a new Ireland, more generous in spirit, open minded and accepting of change. So much positive change that has led us develop a modern nation which encourages diversity and acceptance of others.
Last year, we became the first country in the world to make marriage equal, a huge and proud statement by the people of this country, and one I felt deeply proud to be a part of.
Education
Educating our youth on the events surrounding the Holocaust lessens our chances of repeating the past.
The ongoing work of the Holocaust Education Trust Ireland is crucial in ensuring that those whose voices are muted by death still speak to us today.
In December 2011, Ireland became a full member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. We undertook to promote education about the Holocaust in our schools, universities, communities and encourage awareness in other institutions.
The Standing Committee on Holocaust Education, Research and Remembrance was established in 2012 to carry out this work. It consists of representatives of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Education and Skills, the Department of Justice and Equality, Holocaust Education Trust Ireland, the Irish Jewish Museum, and academia.
It is vital work that keeps the necessary horror and memory of the Shoah alive.
Crocus Project
And so too does the Crocus Project.
This schools initiative was set up in 2005 by the Holocaust Education Trust Ireland for pupils aged 11 years.
The children plant yellow crocuses in autumn. This is done in the memory of the one and a half million Jewish children and the hundreds of thousands of other children who died in the Holocaust.
This year 70,000 children across Europe are involved, every one of them a witness, to the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear under Nazi rule.
The Crocus project helps to stimulate and initiate discussion among young people, people who will themselves one day take positions of standing within our communities.
Those crocuses come up though the snows of winter.
From darkness and death comes new hope, new life.
As at Auschwitz the Cantor sings Eil Malei rachamim,the traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead.
In Europe we have sat our own Shiva for our Jews, not seven days, but seven decades.
And we will never stop, our mourning or our remembering.
I don’t watch much television but I have an abiding memory of the violinist Maxim Vengerov playing part of a Bach Partita in the deserted buildings of Auschwitz.
Barracks 28. Surviving accounts show it housed mainly those who were seriously ill with bronchitis, pneumonia, typhus.
Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote of Auschwitz,
“Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent”.
Today we still refuse.
And because we do we say, never again.
ENDS