Sixty years ago, the fate of Nazi Germany was sealed.  Its total defeat was imminent, and the salvation of humanity broke through the darkness like the dawn at the end of a long night. 

But even in its death throes, as its armies were forced to retreat on all fronts, the monster did not relax its grip.  Even as it lay crushed and beaten to a pulp, its lust for Jewish blood did not abate.  Using the last vestiges of its strength, until its absolute demise, it sought to exterminate every last Jew.   Its armies had been driven back, its cities destroyed, its country in disarray; only one mechanism was left whole, and worked precisely and efficiently until the very end: the mechanism of the destruction of the Jewish people. 

The accursed Nazis knew and felt in the depths of their being that the Jewish people embodied – in their bible and in the teachings of their prophets – the total and complete opposite of the racist ideology and evil of the Third Reich. Jewish values: peace, sanctity of life, human dignity, the Ten Commandments, are the cornerstones of human culture, of freedom, equality and progress. Hitler and his followers sought to undermine these, to uproot, sever and destroy them, in order to impose an era of darkness on the human race in which the “super race” would tyrannize the world.

The Nazis realized that as long as Jews were living on this earth, as long as there was even one Jew bearing his faith and the message of Jerusalem like a torch of liberty, the Reich would not prevail but would fall before him.  As had happened so many years before, the Nazi foe sought “to destroy, to kill and to annihilate, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women” [Megillat Esther] and it too was defeated, and held in everlasting ignominy. 

Nazi Germany’s defeat at the hands of the Allies was a victory for the spirit of man, the spirit of Zion and Jerusalem.  The rebirth of the State of Israel symbolized above all the victory of light over darkness, the victory of justice and hope.  The existence of the State of Israel guarantees that the memory of our brethren murdered in the Holocaust will be perpetuated forever. Our commitment to them is to remember and memorialize each and every one of them: their names, how they looked, their life stories; to take advantage of every technological means at our disposal, to reach every person all over the world, to plant the image of the victims in our hearts and into the hearts of our children and grandchildren.  That is the least we can do for them.

“I was not one of the six million,” wrote the poet Yehuda Amichai

“I was not among them

But the fire and the smoke remain within me

And pillars of fire and smoke show me the way night and day…” 

The State of Israel does not forget.  We know what antisemitism caused in the past; we see clearly the beacons of animosity and hostility around us, and we have learned our lesson.  We will never allow the murderers of today or those of tomorrow to harm our people.  Anyone who dares to do so will be harmed.  We seek peace – it is our wish and our dream – but we will not return the sword of defense to its sheath.

Israel calls upon the free world to stand with her against the danger in the struggle for the preservation of light and liberty.  Israel calls on everyone to remember, and never to forget.