EU Remarks by Ambassador Stavros Lambrinidis at the UN Holocaust Memorial Ceremony
Ambassador Stavros Lambrinidis
The European Union rose from the ashes of the Second World War, and of the biggest human rights violation in recent history, the Holocaust.
By choosing to unite, at the heels of that horror, we pledged, above all else, never to allow ourselves either the desire or the means to ever again perpetrate such atrocities.
In memory of the victims, we joined forces to make such moral and material self-destruction unthinkable, in Europe or anywhere else in the world.
To turn an unprecedented labor of hate into a labor of love.
Even today, 80 years to the day since its liberation, the name of Auschwitz-Birkenau is shorthand for one of the darkest periods of human history – a monument to hate.
On behalf of the European Union, I honor the survivors we heard from today. You are our connection with all the lives, the loves, the dreams interrupted there, of all those whose bodies may have perished in the Holocaust, but whose memory is everlasting: Jewish people in the millions, but also all others vilified and murdered, simply because of who they were or what they believed in.
Friends, as wartime memories fade, and first-hand testimony becomes ever more precious, we are all called upon to be guardians of that memory.
This means standing together against Holocaust denial, disinformation, conspiracy theories, distorted versions of history, and above all, the repeat of such violence and inhumanity in our world today.
It also means working -- every day -- to keep fighting antisemitism, and all other types of insidious discrimination, in our own societies and around the world.
This collective memory should be our spur to action -- to defend those universal human rights in their entirety, as our shared inheritance.
Because one big lesson of the Holocaust is that silence is complicity, and it is also dangerous, for each and every one of us. We are all expendable, when it comes to the whims of authoritarianism. In the words of Pastor Niemöller,
They came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
The great Nelson Mandela put it differently, but no less powerfully: “No one is born hating another person,” he said. “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”
We are proud to be here with you today, to keep the memory alive.
Let us hope that commemorations like this one can teach us, day by day, more and more, how to love.
