Remembering Auschwitz
[1-26-04]January 27 marks the 60th
anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
camp which, with its gas ovens and crematoria, came to epitomize more than
any other the horrors and efficiency of the Nazi death machine.
Kofi Annan honors the victims, the
survivors, and those who tried to help - and reminds the nations that
massive horrors against humanity continue
Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations,
addressed a Special Session of the General Assembly on Jan. 24, remembering
the terrible deeds of the Holocaust, honoring the victims and those few who
tried to help them. He also recalled that other groups were subjected to
similar treatment by the Nazis, and that the world, to its shame, still
allows similar things to happen - in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in the former
Yugoslavia, and now in Darfur, Sudan.
| Also ... Survivor
Elie Wiesel looks back at the Auschwitz death factory 60 years later.
'This Cannot Be True' ... but It Was
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace laureate and a Holocaust
survivor and author of 40 books, writes a
Commentary essay in the Los Angeles Times. He notes that
today "the world has grown used to seeing pictures and hearing stories
of huge, frightening, nature-made or man-made catastrophes from places
like Bosnia, Rwanda and South Asia. But Auschwitz remains a case
apart. It is unique."
His closing lines:
One cannot conceive of Auschwitz with God or
without God. Ever since, all certainties need to be reexamined, all
theories reevaluated.
All we know is that Auschwitz did not descend ready-made from
heaven. Human beings imagined it, built it, served it, used it
against other human beings. When all is said and done, it represents
a grave theological challenge to Christianity, an immoral abdication
on the part of humankind.
Were the torturers still human beings? Was it human then to be
inhuman?
Today, when I think of the guilty, I sense despair. But when I think
of the survivors, I strangely discover a compelling promise of hope.
|
Commemoration of the 60th
Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
Statement to the United Nations General
Assembly
Special Session of the General Assembly
Kofi Annan
New York
January 24, 2005
Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you for your inspiring words.
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, and dear friends,
The date for this session was chosen to mark the sixtieth
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But, as you know, there were
many other camps, which fell one by one to the allied forces in the winter
and spring of 1945.
Only gradually did the world come to know the full
dimensions of the evil that those camps contained. The discovery was fresh
in the minds of the delegates at San Francisco, when this Organization was
founded. The United Nations must never forget that it was created as a
response to the evil of Nazism, or that the horror of the Holocaust helped
to shape its mission. That response is enshrined in our Charter, and in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The camps, Mr. President, were not mere "concentration
camps". Let us not use the euphemism of those who built them. Their purpose
was not to "concentrate" a group in one place, so as to keep an eye on them.
It was to exterminate an entire people.
There were other victims, too. The Roma, or Gypsies, were
treated with the same utter disregard for their humanity as the Jews. Nearly
a quarter of the one million Roma living in Europe were killed.
Poles and other Slavs, Soviet prisoners of war, and
mentally or physically handicapped people were likewise massacred in cold
blood. Groups as disparate as Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals, as well
as political opponents and many writers and artists, were treated with
appalling brutality. To all these we owe respect, which we can show by
making special efforts to protect all communities that are similarly
threatened and vulnerable, now and in the future.
But the tragedy of the Jewish people was unique. Two
thirds of all Europe's Jews, including one and a half million children, were
murdered. An entire civilisation, which had contributed far beyond its
numbers to the cultural and intellectual riches of Europe and the world, was
uprooted; destroyed; laid waste.
In a moment, you will have the honour of hearing from one
of the survivors, my dear friend Elie Wiesel. As Elie has written, "not all
victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims". It is fitting, therefore,
that the first state to speak today will be the state of Israel -- which
rose, like the United Nations itself, from the ashes of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust came as the climax of a long, disgraceful
history of anti-Semitic persecution, pogroms, institutionalised
discrimination and other degradation. The purveyors of hatred were not
always, and may not be in the future, only marginalised extremists.
How could such evil happen in a cultured and highly
sophisticated nation-state, in the heart of a Europe whose artists and
thinkers had given the world so much? Truly it has been said: "all that is
needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing".
There were good men -- and women -- who did do something:
Germans like Gertrude Luckner and Oskar Schindler; foreigners like Meip Geis,
Chiune Sugihara, Selahattin Ülküümen, and Raoul Wallenberg. But not enough.
Not nearly enough.
Such an evil must never be allowed to happen again. We
must be on the watch out for any revival of anti-Semitism, and ready to act
against the new forms of it that are happening today.
That obligation binds us not only to the Jewish people,
but to all others that have been, or may be, threatened with a similar fate.
We must be vigilant against all ideologies based on hatred and exclusion,
whenever and wherever they may appear.
Mr. President,
On occasions such as this, rhetoric comes easily. We
rightly say, "never again". But action is much harder. Since the Holocaust
the world has, to its shame, failed more than once to prevent or halt
genocide -- for instance in Cambodia, in Rwanda, and in the former
Yugoslavia.
Even today we see many horrific examples of inhumanity
around the world. To decide which deserves priority, or precisely what
action will be effective in protecting victims and giving them a secure
future, is not simple. It is easy to say that "something must be done". To
say exactly what, and when, and how, and to do it, is much more difficult.
But what we must not do is deny what is happening, or
remain indifferent, as so many did when the Nazi factories of death were
doing their ghastly work.
Terrible things are happening today in Darfur, Sudan.
Tomorrow I expect to receive the report of the international commission of
inquiry, which I established at the request of the Security Council. That
report will determine whether or not acts of genocide have occurred in
Darfur. But also, and no less important, it will identify the gross
violations of international humanitarian law and human rights which
undoubtedly have occurred.
The Security Council, once it has that report in its
hands, will have to decide what action to take, with a view to ensuring that
the perpetrators are held accountable. It is a very solemn responsibility.
Dear friends,
Today is a day to honour the victims of the Holocaust --
to whom, alas, no reparation can ever be made, at least in this world.
It is a day to honour our founders -- the allied nations
whose troops fought and died to defeat Nazism. Those troops are represented
here today by veteran liberators of the camps, including my dear friend and
colleague, Sir Brian Urquhart.
It is a day to honour the brave people who risked, and
sometimes sacrificed, their own lives to save fellow human beings. Their
examples redeem our humanity, and must inspire our conduct.
It is a day to honour the survivors, who heroically
thwarted the designs of their oppressors, bringing to the world and to the
Jewish people a message of hope. As time passes, their numbers dwindle. It
falls to us, the successor generations, to lift high the torch of
remembrance, and to live our own lives by its light.
It is, above all, a day to remember not only the victims
of past horrors, whom the world abandoned, but also the potential victims of
present and future ones. A day to look them in the eye, and say: "you, at
least, we must not fail".
Thank you very much.
This address is
also posted on the UN website
We found it first on the e-PRAXIS e-List, which is
edited and compiled by Rev. Gary S D Leonard Durban, South Africa [E-mail:
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