Holocaust remembrance reminds us, as the survivors know only too well, of horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened. The Holocaust, as Elie Wiesel reminds us again and again, was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews, but all Jews everywhere were targeted victims.
However, Yom Hashoah ve Hagevurah reminds us also, on this 70th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, of the heroic, defiant struggle of a starved, decimated Jewish remnant, the most heroic act of resistance in the whole of the Second World War and now a universal symbol of courage and dignity.
I say to the survivors here today that they are the true heroes of humanity. They witnessed and endured the worst of inhumanity, yet they somehow found in the depths of their own humanity the courage to go on, to rebuild their lives as they rebuilt our communities. Together with them, we pledge to never again be silent or indifferent in the face of evil and to speak and to act always on behalf of our common humanity.
Plus jamais. Never again.