REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY, DUBLIN CITY HALL, SUNDAY, 25TH JANUARY 2004
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY, DUBLIN CITY HALL, SUNDAY, 25TH JANUARY 2004
I am very grateful to have been invited to this solemn commemoration and to join with you in this act of remembrance as we call forcefully to mind the enormity of the Shoah, the barbaric human wasteland that was the Holocaust.
Seamus Heaney has written that:
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
And certainly no words of mine can diminish the suffering or sooth the continuing anguish caused by that outrageous period of genocide when humankind’s capacity for evil was stoked to manic heights by bigotry and racial hatred on a vast scale. When all is said and done our primary task is to ensure such things can never happen again and one important tool we have is that of memory.
In the words of Rabbi Julia Neuberger :
“ It is a lesson which matters.”
How I wish we could say that the world learnt that lesson so well that never since have we witnessed such suffering, but the abysmal truth is very different. Our world is pockmarked by acts which echo the unthinkable and unspeakable evils that were perpetrated on the Jewish people within living memory. It is intolerable that in such a short space of time the lessons of the Holocaust could so easily be overlooked. The poet, Czeslaw Milosz, questions in a recent work whether even Europe has learned the lesson of the holocaust. He writes, in his poem “Sarajevo”:
“While a country murdered and raped calls for help from the Europe which it has trusted, they yawn.
While statesmen choose villainy and no voice is raised to call it by name …
Listening with indifference to the cries of those who perish.
Because they are after all just barbarians killing each other”.
Those words hit home with me for how often have I heard in the past the violence of Northern Ireland dismissed in similar terms. Sectarian hatred, racist hatred are awesome when they run amok. The Holocaust told us that so emphatically when it confronted the world with ‘the crashing fires of Hell’ to use that phrase from the song of the Warsaw Ghetto sung in Auschwitz.
I visited Majdanek in Poland last year. Today that former Concentration Camp looks so innocuous, so silent and yet even after all these years it has an overwhelming atmosphere of despair and anger, of disbelief and rage so powerful it robs you of speech and of any lingering complacency. It is one of the most tragic sites of European History and one of the most powerful reasons why the European Union is so important and why the forthcoming enlargement is so vital to the future well-being of Europe’s children. As we approach the Day of Welcomes on 1st May we give thanks for the stability, peace and respectful dialogue between nation states which are the greatest gift that membership has given - the economic dimension after all is ultimately a means and not an end in itself. The end is self-evident after two bloody world wars whose epicentres were in Europe, their legacies a mind-numbing destruction of Europe’s Jews and mile after mile of young men’s graves.
Many of you will know that building bridges is the theme I chose for my Presidency. It has many meanings and manifestations but one particularly close to my own heart arises from my experience of living in a violent society, where sectarian hatred and bigotry robbed so many of their lives, their health and their peace of mind. There is nothing humanly uplifting in the sheer wastefulness of it all, nothing but heartache in the empty depravity of it all. At last the voices of peace on all sides have, together, created the great bridge of hope that is the Good Friday Agreement. For all its frailty it is an infinitely better road to travel to the future on than the one that lies behind us.
In Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East, where dreadful conflicts consume so many lives, human beings yearn for such a bridge to their own future. In all the places in Ireland and around the world where a person’s culture, colour or religion provoke others to irrational and outrageous hatred, men and women and children face each day trembling in fear. That hatred is the seed-bed of the holocaust. It is the toxin, the virus we have to stop in its tracks mindful of the words of one of the founding fathers of the E.U. - Robert Schuman – “Le pire des préjugés est de croire que l’on n’en a pas” (The worst prejudice of all is believing that one does not have any).
Those whose lives were ended too soon by that toxin rely upon us to vindicate their deaths, to end the slaughter and the misery it brings. Blessed be the peacemakers, said the remarkable young Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. On this third day of Sh’vat we dedicate our time here today as a Yahrzeit for all those who suffered and died in the Holocaust and for all who survived but carried the memory through broken lives. In their name we call on all peacemakers to do the work, to take the risks, to cross the divides to make our world a better place, a blessed place. May they bring peace upon us and upon all the earth.
Go raibh maith agaibh.