The President, Mrs McAleese, dismissed calls yesterday to mark 60 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by withdrawing Ireland's condolences to Nazi Germany over the death of Hitler in 1945.
In Poland to attend a ceremony marking the Red Army's arrival at the camp, where the Nazis slaughtered more than a million Jews, she said Ireland's expression of sympathy to the Third Reich may stand in perpetuity.
"I don't know," Mrs McAleese replied when asked if Dublin would ever withdraw the condolences that then taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, extended to the German ambassador, Edouard Hempel, on May 3rd, 1945, at a time when the gruesome scale of the Holocaust was already becoming clear.
"It's not part of this trip," she said during a brief interview with The Irish Times.
"The focus here is on commemorating those who died here. The more than a million Jews, Poles, Roma and gays, and all those who died during that appalling, evil period in our history . . .
"Wouldn't it be wonderful to have easy, easy words to blot out that period of human history? Well, there are no such words."
Mrs McAleese flew into Krakow, about 40 miles from Auschwitz in southern Poland, to join dozens of other heads of state in paying tribute to survivors of the camp, and the Red Army veterans who reached it on January 27th, 1945.
They discovered about 7,000 people, who the Nazis had left behind as they retreated with tens of thousands of other prisoners on a "death march" back to Germany.
As Soviet troops descended upon Berlin a few months later, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. Despite the irrefutable evidence of Nazi mass murder on an industrial scale, Mr de Valera paid a controversial protocol visit to the German embassy.
"If anyone thinks there is an easy way with words to make amends then they are very, very much mistaken," Mrs McAleese said of the horrors of the Holocaust.
"It is not just important for me to be here but for the Irish people to be represented, and for the world to focus on what today's commemoration is about: it's about the importance of recalling this story to memory."
Growing up in Northern Ireland and seeing recent immigrants to Ireland stigmatised had steeled her to fight prejudice, she said.
"The Nazis didn't invent racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, prejudice - they built on them, triple-distilled them into a murder machine. But wherever they lurk they are capable of being triple-distilled again . . .
"By calling these stories very powerfully to memory, I hope to emphasise that every person has a role in ensuring that those toxins don't run out of control again."