Here is the full text of Roger Cukierman’s speech in Krakow.
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It was in the last century, over 60 years ago. We have difficulty imagining it. We were plunged in the depths of horror of the Holocaust, the massacre of half the Jews of Europe, the disappearance of one third of the world’s Jews. 6 million Jews, 6 million innocent people.
(…)
Auschwitz is the world’s largest cemetery, a cemetery without tombstones and without traces. How is it possible, here in this factory of death, between these cold walls, to find the life of our loved ones? And yet, I believe I can recognise them in this landscape, the living shadows of my grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins…
They have no grave, no burial place where we may gather our thoughts. They were deprived of this elementary right of every human being.
(…) We must bear witness, we must let the dead speak so that they may live. We must bring them out of this deafening silence.
(…) The beast is not dead. We see it rebuilding its strength, we see negationist ideas developing.
We see the extreme right well established in our society, with its millions of voters and its armies of right-thinking people.
How can we not talk of the anti-Semitism which still today holds sway in Europe, even in those countries that are today Judenrein? No, the civilised world has yet to learn all the lessons from its past.
(…) We owe it to our missing people to remain Jewish, to have children, many children, and raise them in Judaism. This is to believe in the future.
But that isn’t all. We owe it to our missing people to not allow our culture, all our culture, to die out.
But that isn’t all. We have an immense duty toward the State of Israel.
For the State of Israel, that tiny place of refuge for Jews, survives in a hostile world that seeks its annihilation.
We must support the State of Israel, because it is the only and ultimate refuge for all the Jews who are threatened with persecution in the world.
Because the State of Israel is our pride.
Because it is a source of consolation when we think of the six million who vanished.
Because it needs us and we need it.
Once we have convinced our children of the need to defend Judaism, then we will have fulfilled our mission, our duty of remembrance towards our missing people.
May the shadow of our martyrs protect our children.”
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