Today's Date:

Speech by M. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Prime Minister, at the inauguration of the Yad Vashem Memorial.

Jerusalem , March 16, 2005

It is difficult to speak in this place. Silence is one’s instinctive first response and the only tribute one feels worthy of the memory that reigns here. Memory of unspeakable suffering, and of the crime which inflicted it – our words will always be too poor in the face of those things.

Our words come after the horror. They leave the gap forever yawning, that fault line in our memory.

Our voices are also heard after the voices of the victims. They did not remain silent, those singled out for a murder that was meant to be utterly ignominious. “More cruel forms of death have been invented over the centuries, but none has ever appeared so freighted with hatred and contempt”, as Primo Levi remarked.

Yet they did not remain silent. How many of those men, those women, risked their lives, lives that had to be snatched day by day, minute by minute, from the clutches of their executioners, in order to bear witness? To write, tell, make known what was being done, what depths of evil had been plumbed, that was a reason to live and hold on in those depths. From the ghetto newspapers of Lublin, Warsaw, Riga, from the sheets scrawled by members of the Sonderkommandos of Auschwitz or Treblinka, those words have shown themselves stronger, not than death, but stronger than the inhumanity in which their tormentors sought to plunge them.

They fought against the annihilation – deliberate, prepared, planned – of their, of our humanity, of that irreducible part that each of us bears and continues to bear with them. Their words abide, in and with us all. It is their voices that echo in this place. It is our shared responsibility to make them live and give them their full resonance.

The duty of remembrance is not just a word or an obligation to be discharged through a few official commemorations. I felt it yesterday, as did we all, visiting this new memorial: the tragedy of the Shoah is not just history. It has a weight of flesh, of blood and suffering which remains rooted in our hearts and minds.

For us Europeans, the Shoah, more perhaps than any other event, has shaped our present, our perception of the world. The values on which our democracies are based existed before the Shoah: but we now know how fragile they are. To forget that the defence of human dignity requires an unwavering commitment is already to betray that duty of remembrance.

That is why France will always be resolute in the fight for the promotion of human rights, and against all manifestations of racism or anti-Semitism. That last word too, alas, does not belong only to the past. The resurgence of this phenomenon cannot be denied.

My government is waging a determined battle against all forms of resurgent anti-Semitism in France. Tough measures are needed to stop it, and we shall not flinch from using them.

But just as important as repressive measures, it is education that counts. To these generations born long after 1945, we must unceasingly repeat that the Shoah remains a fault line through their history, an enigma at the heart of their identity. I would like to pay tribute to the tireless efforts made here, at Yad Vashem, to educate people in the memory of the Shoah.

The very name of this memorial recalls us to hope and to the promise in the book of Isaiah: “I will give them, in my house and in my walls, a monument (Yad) and a name (Shem) [...] that shall never be effaced”.

It honours the State of Israel that it chose to honour, in this place and by creating the title of the “Righteous among the Nations”, all those who risked their lives to help the Jews escape their persecutors.

It is our common duty to bow before the memory of all the victims of the Shoah. Those deaths speak to us. An essential part of our future will also depend on how well we heed them./.