REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY COMMEMORATION CEREMONY, MANSION HOUSE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY COMMEMORATION CEREMONY, MANSION HOUSE, DUBLIN SUNDAY 25 JANUARY 2009
Is breá liom bheith anseo i bhúr measc ag an ócáid speisialta seo, agus ba mhaith liom mo bhúiochas a chur in iul díbh as an chuireadh agus as fáilte fíorchaoin.
I am very grateful to have been invited to this solemn commemoration and to join with each of you in memory and in grief for those millions who were murdered with such evil calculation in the Holocaust.
The wickedness and cruelty of the Holocaust lacerate our hearts to this day, as they should. God forbid that any generation will ever know the indulgence of forgetting or ever cease to probe how it all came to be. For somewhere in our world today there are men and women who are teaching their children to hate the otherness of others and, in that toxic teaching, there germinates the seed that makes such a nightmare possible all over again. So we deliberately choose to remember those terrible, terrifying names - Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka. We remember the millions of European Jews whose suffering as a people is beyond all imagining, and who were systematically wiped off the European map in an industrial scale genocide whose horror and consequences will resonate for centuries to come. We remember the Roma, the Slavs, the gay men and women, the disabled, the mentally ill, the political and religious dissenters and the many brave but doomed others whose voices from beyond the grave challenge us to uphold the rights and dignity of every individual and to build a world free from such blind, malicious prejudice.
Eli Wiesel in his book “Night”, says, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp .... Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent sky.”
Never forgetting is our duty and our responsibility - that is why we are here today. But we must remember to a purpose and work to that purpose of building in our homes, on our streets, in our communities and in our countries, cultures of acceptance, of tolerance, and of respect for difference. We are challenged to work to build structures which protect the human and civil rights of all. We are challenged to work to courageously contradict and to stand up to the voices that carry the baton of hatred from one generation to another for, as Martin Neimoller’s famous statement reminded us, “In Germany they first came for the communists; and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews; and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists; and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics; and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Catholic. Then they came for me – and by that time there was nobody left to speak up.”
Our world is still sadly a place where people do not speak up enough and where the human rights are dreadfully abused. The recent 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) provided us with a moment in which to contemplate the many advances made since that awful decade which gave us both the Holocaust and the Declaration. If ever a document was written in blood it was those thirty precious Articles adopted by a horrified world that set its collective face to a different future. The human rights set out in that Declaration were not conceded by governments or created by governments. They were then and are now and will forever be the natural birthright of every human being. Days like today remind us that the Declaration was the beginning of a journey for all of humanity and the destination is still a considerable way off. Europe, which was the seat of and the shameful home of the holocaust, has set its face in the direction of partnership and peace with our Union underpinned by a profound adherence to the inviolability of fundamental human rights. Our citizens in Ireland and in Europe are entitled to protection from intolerance and discrimination whether that discrimination raises its ugly head in the form of bias against a person’s religion or belief, race, gender, disability, age or sexual orientation. Europe’s laws and protective structures have progressed considerably these sixty years but for all that, hate-filled ideas are still touted and individuals still live in fear and our job is not done until all can sleep easy in their beds at night and freely go about their business by day.
Many of you will have read or seen the movie version of ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ by the Irish author John Boyne. The little children who were victims of the Holocaust are probably the hardest for us to contemplate. How could the suffering of little children, some one million and a half of them, not have pierced the hearts of their oppressors? But as the book subtly reminds us there were other child victims too - those who grew up in loving homes, where they were indoctrinated in the ways of hatred that would in time unleash hell on earth. The children who died had their futures cruelly robbed. The children who lived had their futures cruelly compromised by the embedded prejudice that would make bullies of some and the bullied of others.
The most powerful voices in our world today are the now dwindling number of Holocaust survivors, among them, some adopted citizens of Ireland. These are not easy stories to tell and we are grateful to them for sharing with us their memories of those days whose reality is so hard to bear. We honour them in a special way today and hope that despite the heavy burden of suffering that they have borne over a lifetime, that they have faith in this Ireland and this Europe to be a place of deep and uncompromising human decency. Right now, thanks to the Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland, crocus blossoms planted by our school children are flowering all over Ireland in remembrance of each of those little ones who died. The yellow flowers are reminiscent of the yellow Stars of David that all Jews were forced to wear under Nazi rule. As they push through from bulb to flower they disturb the soil.
May the name of the Holocaust continue to disturb the landscape of our thinking and may the seeds of horror which it sowed bring forth a harvest of determination strong enough, tough enough to face down the extremist bigot whose greatest friends are silence and neglect of truth. I thank the Trust for all the fine work it does to ensure no seal of silence ever blots out the truth of the Holocaust and I welcome the ongoing Government support for the work of the Trust.
My thanks to each and every one of you who have come here this evening and by your presence made your own statement of remembrance and witness.
Go raibh maith agaibh.