Opening of the exhibition “Let me be myself – The Life Story of Anne Frank” on the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust

Excellencies,
Dear students,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

Thank you for being here with us today, for this day to remember, to reflect and to look forward.

Thank you to the Permanent Delegation of the European Union, the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Anne Frank House for bringing this exhibition to the Palais.

We are together to mourn the loss of so many and of so much.

The sheer scale of the Holocaust overwhelms us. For five and a half years, three thousand Jews were murdered every day. If we were to observe a minute of silence for each of those victims, the silence would last more than eleven years.

The story of a single girl, of Anne Frank of Amsterdam, told through her own words, has become for many the first encounter with that crime unique in human history – the persecution and murder of six million Jews.

As you read her diary, it is a pleasure to get to know Anne Frank, to share in her humour, to marvel at her humanity, and to be taken in by her honesty. At one point she writes that she wants to become a journalist after the war. Think for a moment what a great journalist she would have become and in her fate alone you get a glimpse of the incredible promise of the million children like Anne that were lost to us forever, an entire murdered generation.

So we come together today to honour her memory and with her every victim of the Shoah, the lost lives and vanished communities.

We honour their memory and we reflect on our responsibility. There are fewer and fewer people who can bear direct witness. It therefore falls on us to keep their memory alive. Above all, dear students, it will become your responsibility that they are never forgotten. This memory is both a call to honour the past and take action to shape the future and prevent history from repeating itself. To stand up and fight for a world in which no one has to live in fear.

Anne Frank never became a journalist; she died in Bergen-Belsen when she was just 15 years old, we do not even know exactly when. She was sent to her death just for being Jewish, just for being different.
But we are all different, unique. That is what makes us human. A society that has no room for difference has no room for humanity. You see, the hate that begins with one group never ends there.
A pastor called Martin Niemöller, who first supported Hitler, realized this too late. “First they came for the Socialists,” he said, and “I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Socialist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. One day they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.”

So how do we recognize the danger when we see it? We recognize it when anyone says: “It’s all the fault of….”. It’s all the fault of those who believe in a different religion; it’s all the fault of those who come from a different country. Whatever the trait, dislike of the unlike is a dangerous thing. Whenever you hear the words “It’s all the fault of” then we are in the presence of danger.

For that one simple sentence was the breeding ground of evil acts that still stain the conscience of humankind. And every such evil act was never just committed by only a handful of individuals. They were carried out with the connivance and acquiescence of many people. Because the Holocaust was but the most awful extreme of the ignorance and intolerance that we see every day; the bigotry that says another person is less than my equal, less than human.

So that in the end is why we’re here. Not simply to remember, but to speak. To speak out wherever we witness hate.

Thank you.