Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Speech at Yad Vashem on Holocaust Martyrs & Heroes Remembrance Day
May 4, 2005

As twilight falls around us this evening on the mountains of Jerusalem, we are alone with the victims of the darkest chapter in human history – and the most tragic chapter in the history of the Jewish people. A horrific night which lasted six long years and during which six million Jews were executed, thousands of Jewish communities were erased from the face of the earth, and a magnificent Jewish world was destroyed.

This year we mark 60 years since the Liberation of the Death Camps and the end of the Second World War. However, Liberation Day was not a day of joy for the Jewish people. It was not a day of joy for the survivors of the Holocaust.

The torturers – who stole their relatives, their names, their clothes, their shoes, their hair, and turned the victims into numbers – were defeated. However, the joy of the return to life was crushed under the weight of the pain awakening in the souls which, until that point, had bravely steeled themselves, in order to survive, not to feel anything: the pain of loneliness, the pain of friends who were dead, the pain of lost youth, the pain of land which transformed into the largest burial ground of the Jewish people.

Antek Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, among the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, told how they stood alone and orphaned on Liberation Day in a sea of celebrating Poles surrounding them, grieving in a wave of general happiness, among the kissing GIs and flowers thrown in the air.

They found themselves at a crossroads, and stood there lost and adrift. They could finally go home, but their homes were long destroyed. They asked a Russian Jewish officer where they should go, and he told them – “Do not go east and do not go west. There is nowhere where we are liked.” Like many Holocaust survivors, they chose to immigrate to Israel, and built their new homes here – in the State of Israel, the Jewish state.

Tomorrow I am travelling to Poland to participate in the March of the Living. With me will be Holocaust survivors who survived the inferno and also chose to make Aliyah to Israel and build their homes here. I asked them to bring their grandchildren, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, with them to the March of the Living.

Thus will they stand there tomorrow, at Birkenau, accompanied again by those who wear uniforms – but this time they will not be enemy soldiers lusting to murder. Rather, with their grandchildren who are currently IDF soldiers, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, who serve as the protective shield of the Jewish state. This is perhaps the most significant expression of the difference between those days when Jews were led on death marches, and today, when we walk with pride in the March of the Living.

For the Jewish people, the lesson of the Holocaust has been learned. Jews will never again exist in a world with no home, with no haven of rest to run to, and no Jewish defense force to protect them.

This is the lesson which the mother bequeaths to her son in Uri Zvi Greenberg’s poem, “Holy of Holies”:
“Of rough fabric is your apparel, my son. The apparel of a soldier.
And a rifle is on your shoulder…
Even on the Sabbath you will not change
This apparel, my son
Even when the redeemer comes and nations beat their swords
Into plowshares, and flung their rifles into the fire
You will not, my son. You will not!
Lest the Gentiles should rise again and collect iron
And they would rise against us again and we would not be prepared
As we were not prepared until now…”

Never again will we find ourselves unprepared. Never again.