Mr. Speaker, yesterday I participated in the annual Montreal Holocaust Remembrance Day gathering where Canadian Jews, in concert with their fellow citizens, came together to remember horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened; to remember the Holocaust as a genocidal war against the Jews where not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims. Six million Jews were killed, of whom one and a half million were children.
We remember each of the six million, not as a statistical abstraction, but onto each person there is a name, an identity, chacun a un nom, une identité. We remember that whoever kills a single person, it is as if they killed an entire universe; and whoever saves a single person, it is as if they saved an entire universe.
We remember the heroic resistance of the starved, decimated Jewish remnant on this 60th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. We remember and we pledge that never again will we be indifferent to racism and anti-Semitism. Never again will we be silent in the face of genocide. We will remember and we will act.
May this Holocaust Remembrance Day be not only an act of remembrance, but a remembrance to act against injustice, against hatred, against racism, and to act for real peace, for genuine human rights, for tikkun olam , the betterment of the human condition.