Bore Da/Good Morning and thank you to AVOW for inviting me to speak at today’s Holocaust Memorial Day Event.
(As you have heard) Holocaust Memorial Day remembers the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi Persecution and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
(As you have also heard) Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) 2020 marks 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp in Poland as well as the 25th anniversary of the Genocide in Bosnia.
In commemoration of this landmark anniversary the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust have been running an exciting project that organisations and community groups all over the UK have been taking part in.
From art groups to faith groups and charities to schools, groups of all kinds have come together to make their own Memorial Flames.
Each one commemorates 75 years since the end of the Holocaust, the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews in Europe.
I recently attended the Holocaust Memorial Event in the Senedd which included speeches from Holocaust Survivor, Mala Tribich MBE, and a speaker from the Romani Cultural and Arts Company, as well as a representative of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation.
I signed the Book of Commitment that the Holocaust Educational Trust had provided.
This gave Assembly Members the opportunity to reflect on and sign a 7 point commitment to remember and educate future generations about the atrocities committed during the Second World.
As I wrote “The past informs the future. If we do not learn the lessons of the past, we will be doomed to repeat them. Let us never forget”.
I also painted a “Foundation Stone”, writing “United Together – Unedig Gyda’n Gilydd”.
“Foundation Stones” is a unique project that invites people to paint a commemorative stone that will be placed within the foundations of the new UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre.
You can also choose to dedicate your stone to those murdered in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
Each Foundation Stone will represent a commitment from communities across the United Kingdom to learn from the past and to build a future free from all forms of prejudice, discrimination and hatred.
The BBC is marking Holocaust Memorial Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau with a special televised Holocaust Memorial Day event, as well as a range of content across TV and radio.
This year will also Mark the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration camps by British Forces on the 15 April 1945.
This year’s Memorial Day is also special due to two anniversaries related to the memory:
- The 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Stockholm Declaration, under which the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research was established, known today as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance;
- and the 15th anniversary of the adoption of 27 January as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations General Assembly.
Both events symbolically took place on 27 January, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Consequently, the major international commemoration event will be organized at the Auschwitz Memorial.
Auschwitz Survivors will be the most important guests at the event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
It is expected that on January 27, 2020, about 200 of them will come to the Memorial from all over the world.
A delegation of approximately 120 Auschwitz and Holocaust Survivors from the United States, Canada, Israel, Australia, and several European countries will be able to take part in the main commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz thanks to the support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation.
On January 18, 1945, the three Auschwitz camps, called Auschwitz I, II and III, and the 40 satellite camps had been abandoned by the Germans. The gassing of the Jews at Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, had stopped at the end of October 1944.
The Nazis had already begun the evacuation of the Birkenau survivors to other concentration camps in the West in early October.
Aerial photos taken by the Allies showed that the roofs of crematoria buildings Krema II and Krema III at Birkenau had been removed in November 1944, so that the cremation ovens could be removed by cranes.
Anne Frank and her sister Margo were on one of the first transports out of Auschwitz, which took them to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died.
Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, said that the Auschwitz prisoners were given a choice between staying in the camps until the Soviet troops arrived or going on a 50-kilometer fast hike through two feet of snow to the border of the old German Reich where they would be put on trains and taken to camps in Germany.
This was a "death march" with those who couldn't keep up being shot and left alongside the road, including SS guards, according to a survivor. Those who were too young, too old or too sick to march were left behind. The VIP prisoners, a group of famous scientists and intellectuals, were also left behind.
Elie Wiesel, the most famous survivor of the Holocaust, was in a hospital at Monowitz, recovering from an operation on his foot, when he chose to join the march out of the camp, and eventually ended up at the Buchenwald camp.
In his book entitled "Night," Elie Wiesel wrote the following regarding his decision to join the Germans on the march out of Auschwitz:
“The choice was in our hands. For once we could decide our fate for ourselves. We could both stay in the hospital, where I could, thanks to my doctor, get him (his father) entered as a patient or nurse. Or else we could follow the others. "Well, what shall we do, father?" He was silent. "Let's be evacuated with the others," I told him.
Around 60,000 prisoners chose to go with the Germans and many of them didn't survive the march. Those who couldn't keep up were shot and their bodies were left in the snow. Many more died on the trains taking them to Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen or Mauthausen. Otto Frank chose to stay in the camp and he survived.
After the three Auschwitz camps were liberated, the survivors were on their own.
Unlike the concentration camps in Germany, where the liberated prisoners remained in the camps as Displaced Persons and were cared for by the Americans or the British, the Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners from 29 countries were released to find their own way home.
Primo Levi was one of the survivors who wrote a book, later made into a movie, about his long journey home to Italy, which took him many months. He describes how the Jewish prisoners were greeted with hostility in every country along the way.
Binjamin Wilkomirski also describes this in his book, Fragments: "And the people outside the camp, in the countryside and the nearby town - they didn't celebrate when they saw us."
There were 611 children in the Birkenau camp who stayed behind when the camp was evacuated on January 18, 1945. According to Danuta Czech, the evacuation began in the early morning hours when 500 women with children were escorted out of the camp by SS guards.
During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted and killed other groups, including children, because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority:
Roma and Sinti Gypsies, Disabled Germans, LGBT people and some of the Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians).
Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioural grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
No single wartime document created by Nazi officials spells out how many people were killed and calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task.
However, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the estimated total number of people murdered during the Holocaust stands at 17 million: 6 million Jews and 11 million others.
An estimated 500,000 European Roma and Sinti were murdered during the Holocaust - victims of racist persecution by the Nazis, but this genocide is still largely unknown.
Roma and Sinti were also murdered in extermination camps and died of hunger and disease in forced labour and concentration camps.
Many more were deported and exploited as forced labour on farms, construction sites and in industry.
For decades after the war the survivors were not recognised as victims of the Nazi persecution and received little or no compensation or restitution for their lost property.
Severely mentally and physically disabled people, as well as those perceived to have disabilities, were targeted because of Nazi beliefs that disabled people were a burden both to society and to the state.
From 1939 to 1941 the Nazis carried out a programme of ‘euthanasia’, known as the T4 programme.
In 1933 the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ was passed, allowing for the forced sterilisation of those regarded as ‘unfit’. This included people with conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and alcoholism.
Prisons, nursing homes, asylums, care homes for the elderly and special schools were targeted to select people for sterilisation. It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1939, 360,000 individuals were subjected to forced sterilisation.
In 1939 the killing of disabled children and adults began. All children under the age of three who had illnesses or a disability, such as Down’s syndrome, or cerebral palsy were targeted under the T4 programme. A panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the ‘euthanasia’, or supposed ‘mercy-killing’, of each child.
Many parents were unaware of the fate of their children, instead being told that they were being sent for improved care. After a period of time parents were told their children had died of pneumonia and their bodies cremated to stop the spread of disease.
Following the outbreak of war in September 1939 the programme was expanded. Disabled adults, and those with chronic illnesses, mental health problems and criminals who were not of German origin were included in the programme.
Six killing centres were established to speed up the process – the previous methods of killing people by lethal injection or starvation were deemed too slow to cope with large numbers of adults.
The first experimental gassings took place at the killing centre in Brandenberg and thousands of disabled patients were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
The model used for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialised murder within Nazi concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It is estimated that close to 250,000 disabled people were murdered under the Nazi regime.
As Edmund Burke stated, “It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph”.
AND as Albert Einstein stated, “The world is dangerous to live in, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and let them do so”.
Churchill instinctively understood this.
Nobody did more than he to demonise the word ‘appeasement’ as a way of describing the belief that conflict could be avoided by compromises with and concessions to malign and evil regimes.
As he stated, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping that it will eat him last”.
We must remember that prior to coming to Power in Germany, the Nazis campaigned as a mainstream Political Party, reaching out in democratic elections to ordinary working men and women – and only burning the Reichstag and abolishing opposition Parties when they came to power.
They understood that it is easier to unite people against, rather than for something – so they turned ‘the minorities within’ - Jews, Slavs, Gypsies….even the disabled - into scapegoats for all Society’s ills.
The rest, as they say, is history.
BUT, as Churchill said, “What Hitler has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagrations….have been destroyed.”
Long may those fires burn in our hearts - because the tactics employed by the Nazis are all too familiar today – and will remain so tomorrow.
My Children attended Castell Alun High School in Hope, not far from here, and several of them visited Auschwitz-Birkenau with the school.
The impression this made on them was profound, providing a vital lesson that will remain with them all their lives.
Two years ago, my wife and another daughter also visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, staying in a wonderful family Hotel in the Jewish Quarter if Krakow.
They also described an overwhelming sense of horror and silence, of the terrible reality within the apparent unreality of the place.
In 2017 I visited the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre during a working visit to Israel and the West Bank with Assembly colleagues.
The Holocaust History Museum there brought to life the horrific experiences of the individual victims through original artefacts, survivor testimonies and personal possessions.
We visited its Hall of Names, a repository for the Pages of Testimony of millions of Holocaust victims, a memorial to those who perished.
We also signed the Memorial Book there and were privileged to light the Eternal Flame in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance.
Engraved on the mosaic floor are the names of 22 of the most infamous Nazi murder sites, symbolic of the hundreds of extermination and concentration camps, transit camps and killing sites that existed throughout Europe.
Buried beneath these are the ashes of victims.
As Churchill said ““The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
Shalom.