Holokaust
Холокост
Holocaust

I stand here today, a proud Israeli, a representative of the Knesset, a symbol of the sovereignty of the State of Israel in the land of Israel. I stand here with you, as many other Israeli representatives stand every year in the many sites in Europe, all too many sites, where the ground is drenched with the blood of my people. They who were brutally consumed by blind hatred, by pseudoscientific racism and by that damnable disease, anti-Semitism, that keeps claiming victims even today, some 70 years after the Holocaust.

If you close your eyes and listen carefully, you will hear in this terrible silence the silent screams of over 2500 children, women, men and the elderly, killed and burned here because of one terrible sin: they were born to a Jewish mother or father.

From all over Europe, Jews were transported by train to the death camps in Germany, Poland and elsewhere. In the Baltic countries they were spared this trip, as they were killed by the Nazi murderers and their local collaborators. So it was too, in Rumbula forest near Riga, in Ponar and the Ninth Fort near Vilna and Kovno (Kaunas), and here in Klooga, not far from Tallinn. So was the Baltic soil sown with mass graves of Jews.

Over the horrors of those years, the memory of the Holocaust towers like a huge lighthouse - but instead of spreading light it spreads the darkness of death and genocide. The eternal memory of a wound that cannot and should never heal - to remind younger generations and those to come after them what an abyss of xenophobia Europe could fall into. To remind them, to remember, and to never forget!

Heads of state and many religious leaders who visited Israel sought forgiveness from the Jewish people for their countries' part in the death machine that destroyed half of my people. We, as the children and grandchildren of the victims, can hear this plea, and respect and understand those who bring it forth, but we cannot forgive, we have no right to forgive in the name of those six million…

Forgiveness means turning over a new page, closing the subject, and I wish to tell you that instead of turning over that page, it’s a human duty to read it again and again, to study it and to teach it, because only that way we might know how to avoid in the future the recurrence of such hate crimes and genocide. I say might because, unfortunately, we have not been so successful. Massacres, mass killings and contempt for human life continue to happen around us, and we have all recently heard of a regime that’s currently slaughtering over 100,000 of its people and even strangling its children with gas.

In 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, Estonia was declared as "Judenfrei " (free of Jews). In 1943 there were about 3,000 people held in the Klooga concentration camp, the great majority of them Jews brought here from the ghettos of Vilna and Kovno. The camp commanders were SS officers, and the camp guards were the men from 287 Battalion of the Estonian police.

On Sept 19 1944, just a few days before the camp was liberated by the Soviet Army, all those who still survived were executed and their bodies were burned in order not to leave any trace and evidence. While the bodies have been turned into ashes, the truth has survived..

Unfortunately there are those in the world today, more than a few, who would deny the Holocaust happened. The most famous example is the former president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who also spoke often of his desire to destroy the Jewish State. There are Neo-Nazi, fascist and anti-Semitic movements that openly deny the memory of the Holocaust. Thus the victims are murdered a second time.

On the other hand, there are peoples and nations that have bravely admitted their past, have looked straight at their recent history, have repented of their sin and have instituted Holocaust studies programs in their education system, training teachers for this with courses at Yad Vashem.

Then there are those few, too few, Righteous Among the Nations, who risked their lives and the lives of their families to save Jews, hiding them or helping to smuggle them away from the clutches of the Nazis and their collaborators. They were bright spots in that terrible darkness. They chose to be human beings in a place where there were no human beings. They lived up to the verse "Whoever saves one life, has saved an entire world”.

On 1 November 2005, the UN passed a resolution to mark a Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, the date when the Auschwitz death camp was liberated by the Soviet Army. But Estonia started having a Holocaust Memorial Day two years before the UN resolution. On this day flowers are placed in sites of mass murders, and schools teach lessons about the Holocaust. We Israelis know and appreciate this. Likewise I celebrate important events such as the creation of the Pärnu monument in memory of the children who perished by Nazi hands, the building in Tallinn of a monument commemorating the Jews murdered in France, and the list goes on.

Against this background, the inauguration of the monument here in Klooga is an important milestone in the commemoration of the victims’ sacrifice, and an invaluable lesson for future generations – a lesson about pain, suffering and heroism. Time erases from memory the events of the past. Our mission is to keep the shared memory of the past, for the sake of the future. This monument is a symbol of the disaster that we will never in the world allow again!

One common characteristic of all monotheistic religions is the belief that all men are created equal and in God's image, and it is the duty of every human being to do everything in his power to act accordingly and pass this belief on to generations to follow.

On behalf of the State of Israel and the Israeli Knesset I would like to thank the Government of Estonia for its contribution to the commemoration of the Holocaust.

I thank you for the privilege and the honor of participating in this event.

Thank you.

Translation from Hebrew: J. Wolfson