68th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

The Speech of Zvi Rav-Ner, Israeli Ambassador to Poland

Honorable Marshal of the Sejm, Honorable Chairman of the State Duma,

Dear Survivors, Former prisoners of Auschwitz, Partisans and Veterans, Righteous  Among the Nations, Dear Guests,

We are standing here in the most horrific place in the history of mankind.

This was a terrible factory of death, where more than a 1.1 million innocent people, women and children were murdered systematically and then burnt.

More than 90 percent of those murdered here were Jews as part of the infamous Nazi  Final Solution plan to exterminate all the Jewish people in the world.

Many acts of genocide and mass crimes against humanity took place in history, but never before there was such an attempt to annihilate a whole nation and wipe it completely from the face of the earth.

Six million Jews were murdered.

The Nazis have also tortured and murdered here  more than 100,000 of Polish prisoners, Russian prisoners of war and prisoners of other nations, including  tens of thousands of Sinty and Roma people, women and children. It is therefore disgraceful and shameful that there are those, including leaders of big countries, who deny the Holocaust and call it a lie ,”the lie of Auschwitz”.

Moreover they are threatening to destroy the country that those survivors and refugees of Auschwitz and Birkenau have built as their shelter, the state of Israel.

We are gathered here today to remember those brave Russian soldiers who have liberated this camp and set free those few thousand prisoners remaining here. Russian army was fighting the Nazis, alongside the allies, all the way from Stalingrad  till  the victory in Berlin. We shall never forget them.

Here today we should also remember those brave people, Righteous Among the Nations, who risked their lives to save their fellow Jews, while they risked death punishment for themselves as well as for their families.  Poles are the largest group of the in Europe.

Above all, if we want the world to learn the lesson of what has happened here in Auschwitz and Birkenau, we have to remember the victims who were murdered here, Jews and all the other nations, so that it should never be allowed to happen again to any nations, to any people, to any human beings anywhere in the world.

To remember and never forget and to say: Never again, nigdy więcej,לעולם לא עוד