Today's Date:

Speech by Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic, at the opening of the European Center for Deported Resistance Fighters

Struthof camp, November 3, 2005

Ladies and gentlemen,

Here for a long time, silence prevailed. There was even an attempt to forget: so great was the evil, so weak the words to describe it…

But letting time erode memory meant letting darkness shroud the memory of the victims and the atrocity of the crimes. It meant allowing the torturers to get away with what they did.

It meant taking the risk of one day seeing history repeat itself.

Opening the European Centre for Deported Resistance Fighters, which we are inaugurating today, symbolizes the refusal to remain silent and forget.

With both Struthof and the Alsace-Moselle memorial, the Bruche valley is more than ever a place of remembrance. Everything here now prompts reflection and vigilance.

This is why I want to thank and congratulate those who, in France and abroad, have worked on this major project, which I know was so important to my friend Léon Boutbien. And I particularly want to commend Jean de Roquette-Buisson and the architect Pierre-Louis Faloci.

Night and Fog… The two words for ever associated with Struthof. “Nacht und Nebel”, “NN”, a decree, a statute. Most often death, at the end of terrible suffering.

Here thousands of admirable men and women shared one martyrdom.

Everywhere, cold, hunger, blows, terror.

In the quarry, in the huts, in those sinister “blocks”, the same violence, the same suffering, the most despicable treatment, the most appalling experiences.

Resistance fighters, political deportees, brothers-in-arms of all persuasions, civilians and military, heroes of the army in the shadows, Jews, all those whom the Nazis had excluded from their insane vision of society, were delivered into the same barbaric hands.

Today, in their place of torture and suffering, before the handful of survivors who returned from that terrifying journey to the heart of darkness, I have come to pay the nation’s homage to the victims of Nazi lunacy.

Imbued with respect and emotion, I have come to say again that they will always be remembered, not forgotten. Here, in the European Centre for Deported Resistance Fighters, this is the message I want to send to the youngest among us: always remember! Never forget the victims of the darkest days of mankind’s history!

Always remain vigilant, be capable of resisting and acting when what’s vital is at stake. Since nothing is ever secured for ever.

Always apply the full force of the law against those who try to deny the horror of what happened.

Fight relentlessly against those in France or elsewhere in the world who advocate hatred, racism, anti-Semitism and intolerance.

You are honour and duty bound to do so, in homage to the victims and for the sake of the future./.