Speech by René van der Linden
President of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly

on the occasion of the Commemoration ceremony of the
60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
(Strasbourg, 25 January 2005)

25/01 2005

Six million Jews died during the Holocaust. Six million faces, six million names, six million human fates. Together with millions of other Europeans, who were killed because of their ethnic origin, disability, political views or sexual orientation, they were the victims of the worst crime in the history of mankind. A crime conceived, planned and carried out here in Europe, less than a lifetime ago.

To mark today’s occasion, I have chosen to speak of two out of these millions of victims. I do not know their names; I do not know exactly where they lived. What I have is a blurred black and white photo of the last moments of their lives which I have seen in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I believe that the tragic and horrifying story of the two persons in this photo- even if it represents only one tear in the sea of sorrow - is emblematic of what has happened, and deserves to be told.

On the photo, taken, during the mass-murder operations of the Einsatzgruppen in one of the Baltic states, a woman is holding a child, four, perhaps five years old. We cannot see if it is a boy or a girl, because it is burying its head in the shoulders of its mother, seeking protection from the horror that surrounds it. The mother’s head is tilted gently downwards, as if whispering in the child’s ear a few last, desperate words of consolation. But there is nothing she can do. In the last instinctive and futile attempt to protect her child, the mother has turned her back to a soldier, standing a few steps behind her, with his rifle raised and ready to shoot…

There is the young child in its mother’s embrace. It is paralysed with fear, yet still believing that its mother will not let anything bad happen to it. Because this is what parents are supposed to do, aren’t they? Can we even try to imagine the desperation of a mother unable to protect her child from such a fate? The woman in the photo died as a mother even before she was killed as a human being.

Finally, there is the executioner. He seems composed and organised. His posture is perfect, straight out of a military manual. The right leg is half a step behind to give him better support; the butt of his rifle is placed securely against his right shoulder. He is taking aim calmly, as if he was at a shooting range, and not about to murder two human beings.

There is a total absence of emotion. The soldier in the photo is just carrying out his orders. This is the ultimate illustration of the horror of the Nazis’ “final solution”. The mother and her child, and millions of their fellow victims, died as a result of a crime which was conceived by politicians, meticulously planned by bureaucrats and carried out by soldiers. They were murdered through protocol and procedure, with methods prescribed and quotas to be attained.

This episode of the Shoah did not take place in Auschwitz, the liberation of which we are commemorating this week, but this is a geographic coincidence. I have chosen to tell the story of one mother and her child because I believe that we should remember the individual fates of those who died in such horrendous circumstances, and not abandon them to statistical anonymity.

The mass murder of six million of Jews, but also of Poles, Russians and other Slavic people, of Roma, homosexuals, disabled persons and political opponents of the Nazi regime, is a crime of such horrifying proportions that it transcends the boundaries of time. It is, and will be forever, a burning wound on the collective conscience of humankind, a part of our yesterday, our today and our tomorrows.

We cannot and must not tolerate the revival of the ideology behind this crime, we must not accept that the horrors caused by the Nazi regime and the memory of the Shoah are banalised, questioned, denied or even ridiculed. I wish I could have said that Europe is free of anti-Semitism, that it is free of hatred and intolerance and neglect for human life and dignity, but we all know that this is not yet the case.

A compatriot of mine, a young girl named Etty Hillesum from Amsterdam, wrote these words just over sixty years ago:

“If all this suffering does not help us to broaden our horizon, to attain a greater humanity by shedding all trifling and irrelevant issues, than it will all have been for nothing…”

Etty Hillesum was Jewish. She died in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-nine, two years before the Russian troops arrived and freed the survivors. The liberation brought an end to a crime, but not to its consequences. In the aftermath of war, Europe was devastated and traumatised. It took time before wounds started to heal and hope began to gain against despair. Our organisation was created to nurture and protect that hope, and to make it a reality for all the citizens of Europe. This is what we have done for the past fifty years, and this is what we shall continue to do. Because we owe it to the mother and child in the photograph, and to all the other victims of Nazism. Because we are determined to honour Etty Hillesum’s plea…