Mr. Speaker, this week marks the United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorating the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945, and serving as a poignant reminder of our obligation to confront and combat racism, hatred and anti-Semitism, the paradigm of racist hatred. Simply put, Jews died in Auschwitz because of anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism did not die.
We must confront and combat the growing evil of both Holocaust denial and Holocaust inversion, the Nazification of the Jew and the Jewish state, thereby demeaning, distorting and diminishing Holocaust remembrance. We must confront and combat the indifference and inaction that took us down the road to the Holocaust, as it was revealed on this international day of Holocaust remembrance that the existence of the Nazi extermination program and the death camps was already known as early as May 1942.
Finally, we must remember and honour the heroism of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish non-Jew who saved more Jews in four months in Hungary in 1944 than any single government, as the European Parliament did this week and as Canada Post did this month by issuing a stamp in his memory.
By remembering the suffering of the Holocaust victims, we honour them and their spirit of resistance. Never again.