Distinguished friends, your excellencies,
Today, we gather in the shadow of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Allies and the public had a good idea of the murder of the Jews long before the gates of Auschwitz were opened by Soviet Troops eighty years ago.
But listening to rumours and reading secret reports does not prepare anyone for the naked brutality. The Nazis and their collaborators are an indelible stain on European Civilisation and on World History.
We come together to honour the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But we do not come with clean hands. Many fellow European citizens’ fate was to be shot in ditches, gassed in industrial murder centres or worked to death because World governments turned their backs on the Jews. Migration was restricted, making flight impossible for most. We know the poor results of the Evian Conference encouraged the Nazis into more extreme measures. Appeasement and doing nothing encouraged bullies and fanatics.
The Nazis did not invent antisemitism, nor did they need to explain it in lands they occupied what antisemitism was.
As Professor Yehuda Bauer of blessed memory said, “No one comes away clean” from the history of the Holocaust.
Legislation restricting Jewish employment, property and civil rights was present in countries years before the Second World War. Signs saying, “forbidden for Jews” and “Jews not welcome” were present long before the Nazi occupation. When the Nazis arrived, the restrictions and the notices were quickly adopted.
While there is no state policy, the signs “Jews not welcome” and “Jew Free Zone” are back on our Streets along with chants and slogans that distort and demean the Holocaust.
The Holocaust began with words of hatred, laws of exclusion, and acts of humiliation.
The strength of liberal democracy is tolerance of other people’s views and a willingness to accept some disruption in the interest of free speech.
Across our member countries, the forces of law and order have floundered against the waves of antisemitism. At times, they seem incapable of identifying breaches. Senior UK police officers saw the slogan “From the River to the Sea” as a harmless folk scene rather than the reality of a chant of ethnic cleansing.
The risk is that opponents of an open society misread tolerance as weakness and become emboldened to use increasingly extreme language and actions.
Holocaust distortion has moved from the fringes to mainstream public life.
Distortion does not deny the Holocaust outright. Instead, it minimises, excuses, or misrepresents it.
It builds a bridge between mainstream careless indifference and extreme ideologies.
As the last survivors move from contemporary memory to the pages of history, we are the custodians of the truth.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is committed to countering distortion. We uphold the truth and protect the facts.
The OSCE’s mission aligns with this responsibility.
Both our organisations are in the business of building a safer and more inclusive society.
To support governments in this vital work, IHRA has developed essential tools, including its internationally recognised definitions on antisemitism and on Holocaust denial and distortion.
These provide governments, institutions, and educators with a framework for identifying and effectively addressing these issues.
To combat these scourges, we must be able to recognise them.
Additionally, the IHRA provides comprehensive recommendations for Holocaust education.
It also provides guidelines for the preservation and accessibility of archives and memorial sites.
Together, these tools lay the framework for preserving memory and the truth.
The UK Presidency of IHRA has pursued a triple-track approach to strengthening archives: including sharing of information between institutions and the public, using personal possessions to tell a story in human form, and preserving the sites of murder and destruction.
Deniers and distorters can lie and twist. We will preserve the memory of the Holocaust by telling the unvarnished truth. And the truth can never hurt us. Thank you.
