THE HOLOCAUST is “a huge stain on European history and shows the true evil that can emerge from hatred, prejudice and intolerance”, President Michael D Higgins has said.
The Holocaust, a systematic programme to annihilate the Jews of Europe, had highlighted the horrific consequences when genocide was “allowed to become state policy”. The consequences of such a silence “becomes complicity”.
Speaking at the 10th annual Holocaust memorial day commemoration in Dublin, Mr Higgins highlighted the Government’s commitment to ensuring the lessons of the Holocaust were promoted for the next generation.
“And because we remember, let us work to combat any discrimination or inequality in our society as we build a now richly diverse Ireland and a country that is mindful of playing its part in the global struggle for human decency.”
The President said the Holocaust showed the dangers of “looking the other way, of denial or of simply not wanting to know”.
During the moving service at the Mansion House, Mr Higgins acknowledged the presence at the ceremony of four survivors living in Ireland – Suzi Diamond, Jan Kaminski, Tomi Reichental and Zoltan Zinn-Collis. Some 500 people attended the ceremony, held on the Sunday closest to January 27th, marking the day in 1945 when allied soldiers liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
Music, readings and personal recollections of life and death under the Nazis were reflected on, and students from three Dublin schools – Stratford College, Loreto Foxrock and Larkin Community School – and from Gorey Community School in Wexford read the names of people who died in concentration camps across Europe who were related to members of the Irish-Jewish community.
A minute’s silence was observed and at the end of the ceremony candles were lit to remember the six million Jews who died along with at least 200,000 people with disabilities, up to 500,000 of the Roma and Sinti gypsy communities, hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian men and women, black and ethnic minorities and political opponents including tens of thousands of Polish intellectuals, business and church leaders.
There are an estimated 1,000 to 1,100 people in the Jewish community in Ireland and between 4,500 and 5,000 arrived immediately after the second World War.
Minister for Justice Alan Shatter spoke at the ceremony about the Wannsee Conference in 1942 outside Berlin at which top Nazis discussed the Final Solution – the total elimination of the Jews of Europe – and gave their endorsement for murder by poison gas.
Mr Shatter said a list from the period with the number of Jews living in each European country had included 4,000 living in Ireland. Last week, he sharply condemned the State for having chosen to “do and say nothing” at the time.
“The doors of this State were kept firmly closed to German Jewish families trying to flee from persecution and death,” he said at the opening at the Department of Justice of an exhibition on the Holocaust. He said Ireland should no longer be in denial that, in the context of the Holocaust, “Irish neutrality was a principle of moral bankruptcy”.
Speaking yesterday before the ceremony, Mr Shatter said: “I would hope that as a State we’ve learnt an awful lot from that experience and [that] the manner in which people were treated in the 1930s and 1940s in very difficult circumstances would not again be repeated in the future.”
At the ceremony, Minister of State for European Affairs Lucinda Creighton read the Stockholm declaration from the International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000 at which the international community pledged to fight the “evils of prejudice and other forms of bigotry”.
Ireland was not alone in ‘moral bankruptcy’ over Holocaust: Opinion, page 14
