May I begin by commending all the various partners who organized this timely and significant Yom Hashoah event.
En effet, on s’est réunis, en ce Jour du Souvenir, afin de nous rappeler notre devoir de mémoire: témoigner, réfléchir, et transmettre, par l’enseignement et l’action, les leçons universelles de l’Holocauste.
Indeed, we meet at an important moment of remembrance and reminder – of bearing witness – and learning/acting upon the universal lessons of the Holocaust.
As Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel put it: “The Holocaust was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews but all Jews were targeted victims” – of the demonization and dehumanization of the Jew as prologue and justification for mass murder – of the mass murder of 6 million Jews, 1.5 million of whom were children, not as a matter of abstract statistics, but as we say at these moments of remembrance: “On to each person there is a name – each person there is an identity – each person is a universe” – reminding us of the Talmudic teaching “If you save a single life, it is as if you have saved an entire universe”
And so the abiding first lesson: “We are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each others destiny”
Ce qui conduit à la seconde leçon: le danger et la menace existentielle de l’antisémitisme dont le camp de la mort d’Auschwitz est le message et la métaphore.
Which leads to the second lesson: the danger and existential threat of Antisemitism – for which the death camp Auschwitz is message and metaphor.
1.3 million people were deported to the death camp Auschwitz, 1.1 million were Jews. Let there be no mistake about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of Antisemitism; but Antisemitism did not die at Auschwitz; it remains the bloody canary in the mineshaft of global evil today – toxic to democracies – an assault on our common humanity.
May I close with a word to Holocaust survivors: for you endured the worst of inhumanity, and somehow found in the resources of your own humanity the courage to go on, to rebuild your lives as you built the communities in which you have made an enduring contribution.
And so may this day be not only an act of remembrance – which it is – but a remembrance to act – on behalf of our Jewish peoplehood and our common humanity.
The Honourable Irwin Cotler is the Founder and Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. He is a former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and long-time Member of Parliament. Cotler is a member of the High-Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University, international human rights lawyer, and counsel to prisoners of conscience.
