See preceding page for earlier entries today, 1/27/11.
Remembering the Holocaust:
A path never to be repeated
Translated from the 1/28/11 issue of
The OR considered this item important enough to be the lead article in tomorrow's issue. Photo shows the entrance to the Auschwitz lager, with the infamouis railroad tracks that brought trainloads of Jews and other 'undesirables' to the camp.
WARSAW, Jan, 27 - As in past years, the principal ceremony on International Holocaust Remembrance Day took place today in the former Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
For the first time, both the presidents of Poland and Germany - Bronislaw Komorwski and Christian Wulff, respectively - took part in the rite together.
Both warned that the factors that led to the Shoah are still a daily danger in the world.
"After the Second World War, not a day has passed in the world without a war somewhere," German President Wulff said. "Everyay we are witness to massacres and genocide with an ethnic, racial, religious or linguistic origin".
"We have the duty to ask ourselves in this place how to protect the world against crimes of hatred and disrespect of human rights," said the Polish President.
In his message for this year's remembrance of the Shoah victims, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon paid tribute to the women victims. "Mothers and daughters, grandmothers, sisters, aunts saw their lives irrevocably changed, their families torn apart, and their traditions destroyed. But despite the horible acts of discrimination, privation and cruelty, they constantly found ways to fight their persecutors".
In Italy, President Giorgio Napolitano referred to national responsibilities in fostering hostility such as that which led to the Shoah. "Other than blind persecutory racism, nothing could have motivated the expulsion by the Fascists of Jews and their communities from the civilian consortium of Italy".
Warning against factional and sectarian hatreds today, Napolitano urged vigilance because "prompt responses are called for wherever the seed of such hostility manifests itself in whatever form".
The Italian service of Vatican Radio has compiled statements made by Benedict XVI about the Holocaust since he became Pope.