Paris, January 28, 2010 -

Statement by Bernard Kouchner

MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND EUROPEAN
65th ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF THE CAMP Auschwitz extermination

Here 65 years with the liberation of the extermination camp of Auschwitz Birkenau, January 27, 1945, was revealed to the world the reality of the Nazi extermination industry, the absolute horror of a single criminal plan between All, whose aim was the annihilation of the Jewish people. To say that the shocking images that have marked forever have, as outlined in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "shocked the conscience of humanity".

To say also that this awareness has helped bring the idea of a world based on respect for the law, a world where impunity would no longer his place. It finally say that this battle is never finished, never completed and it is rooted in a memory ever more fragile.
Because we always know what was really the Holocaust? The term ghetto, genocide, too often misguided and wrongly pronounced trivialize the horror of this crime without equal. Some images, such as testimony of Primo Levi and Anne Frank, which will be read publicly in the French cultural centers in the world, give us perhaps the idea that these were victims, before being the tortured, had their dignity as human beings, living, loving, hoping.

We have entered a dangerous time: one where the last survivors of the Holocaust will soon disappeared, leaving us only with the overwhelming responsibility to pass on the memory.

Duty of memory or knowledge requirement? Everywhere I feel, despite the efforts of survivors and their children, one unacknowledged temptation to turn the page.

The erasure of history, its negation is not the monopoly of Holocaust deniers. She is featured in the commoditization of words. For the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers, it began with prejudices and speeches.

This whole issue of education than to transmit this knowledge, this memory and make the only lesson worth: a light for humanity and what it can do.

It is our responsibility. I know of no higher.