Wyre Forest Holocaust Memorial Day

Statement of Commitment...

Read by Walter Delin, Chief Executive of Wyre Forest District Council...

1. We recognise that the Holocaust shook the foundations of modern civilisation. Its unprecedented character and horror will always hold universal meaning.

2. We believe the Holocaust must have a permanent place in our nation's collective memory. We honour the survivors still with us, and reaffirm our shared goals of mutual understanding and justice.

3. We must make sure that future generations understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences. We vow to remember the victims of Nazi persecution and of all genocide.

4. We value the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives to protect or rescue victims, as a touchstone of the human capacity for good in the face of evil.

5. We recognise that humanity is still scarred by the belief that race, religion, disability or sexuality make some people's lives worth less than others'. Genocide, antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and discrimination still continue. We have a shared responsibility to fight these evils.

6. We pledge to strengthen our efforts to promote education and research about the Holocaust and other genocide. We will do our utmost to make sure that the lessons of such events are fully learnt.

7. We will continue to encourage Holocaust remembrance by holding an annual UK Holocaust Memorial Day. We condemn the evils of prejudice, discrimination and racism. We value a free, tolerant, and democratic society.

Cllr Mike Oborski, Consul of the Republic of Poland for the Wesr Midlands and Chairman of the Wyre Forest Holocaust Memorial Day Committee.

Cllr Mike Oborski, Chairman of the Wyre Forest Holocaust Committee read the following:-

Never, nowhere and with no one!

I want to remind you about Eva Mozes Kor. We talked about her here – exactly one year ago.

Mozes Kor lived in Hungary in a well-to-do Jewish family, but the coming of the Nazis changed everything. In 1944 the 10-year-old Mozes Kor and her identical twin sister, Miriam, were packed into a cattle car with their mother, father and two other sisters, aged 12 and 14, and taken to Auschwitz.

Mozes Kor said she remembers her very religious father in the corner of the stinking car, praying, probably for the last time. When they were herded off the train, Mozes Kor's father and older sisters disappeared into the crowd. She never saw them again.

A guard spotted Mozes Kor and her twin and after questioning their mother, grabbed the two girls away. "I never even said goodbye to her and I never got to do so, because this was the last I ever saw her," Mozes Kor said.

Mozes Kor and her sister had their hair cut off and were held down as a red-hot instrument was used to tattoo numbers on their arms. They were to be part of the medical experiments conducted on twins by Dr. Josef Mengele.

When Mozes Kor visited the latrine on her first day in the camp, the skeletal corpses of three children lay on the filthy floor. Then and there, as a 10-year-old child, she made a vow that she would do everything in her power to see that she and Miriam didn't end up on that latrine floor. She said, "From the moment I left the latrine, I concentrated all my efforts, all my talent, all my being on one single thing -- survival."

Mozes Kor was part of an experiment to see how much blood a person could lose and still live. In addition, every part of her body was examined and compared to charts and to Miriam's body, a process that was not dangerous but was terribly demeaning. Mozes Kor said she coped by blocking it out and kept her fierce determination to live one more day, survive one more experiment.

In another experiment, Mozes Kor was injected with a deadly germ and became very ill. She said she heard Mengele laugh sarcastically and say "Too bad she's so young. She has only two weeks to live."

Mozes Kor said, "I made a second silent pledge. I refused to die. I said I would do anything in my power to prove Dr. Mengele wrong and to get well."

She managed to recover from the illness and was reunited with Miriam. Mozes Kor said Miriam looked very ill but refused to talk about what had been done to her during their separation. It wasn't until 1985 that Mozes Kor learned that Miriam had been injected with something that stunted the growth of her kidneys. In 1987 Mozes Kor donated one of her kidneys to keep Miriam alive a few more years. Miriam died in 1993 of a cancer Mozes Kor believes is linked to the experiments.

Mengele used 1,500 sets of twins and other multiples as guinea pigs at Auschwitz and less than 200 were still alive on Jan. 27, 1945, when the camp was liberated.

Mozes Kor said she tells her tragic life story, although it is both difficult to tell and difficult to listen to, because she learned some very important lessons.

One lesson, that she didn't learn until long after the war, was forgiveness. She said, "I have forgiven the Nazis." She initially had no intention of forgiving anybody, but she explained how it came about.

She was asked to give a lecture about the Nazi experiments and was asked to bring a Nazi doctor with her. Her first response was, "A Nazi doctor? Where on earth do you think I can find a Nazi doctor? Last time I looked in the Yellow Pages, they weren't listed."

She remembered a German documentary she had participated in that also included an interview with a doctor from Auschwitz.

Through a Dutch friend, she contacted Dr. Hans Munch. He was not willing to come to the United States for the lecture but agreed to an interview on video tape. With a Dutch television crew, Mozes Kor went to Munch's house in Germany for the interview.

She had been yelled at by Nazis, but had never talked to one. Mozes Kor said, "I was very worried that Dr. Munch was going to treat me like I was treated in the camp."

She surprised herself by liking him because he treated her with the utmost respect. In response to her questions, he told her everything he knew about the gas chambers and said, "This is the nightmare I live with every single day of my life."

She was planning to visit Auschwitz in January 1995 and invited Munch to go with her. She said, "It's kind of a chutzpa to ask a Nazi to come and celebrate with you 50 years since the liberation, but I did. And he said, 'Yes, I would love to go.'"

Mozes Kor began looking for a way to thank him for helping her document the history of Auschwitz. After much thought she decided to give him a letter of forgiveness. She said, "I also immediately realized that I had the power to forgive. That no one could give me the power and no one could take it away. And for a little victim, who was a victim for almost 50 years, to realize that I have the power made me feel very good."

A friend asked Mozes Kor if her forgiveness also extended to Mengele. After thinking about it she decided she could forgive him too. Then she said, "Well, if I'm going to forgive Dr. Mengele, I might as well forgive everybody."

During the anniversary visit to Auschwitz, Munch signed his paper documenting the gas chambers and Mozes Kor read and signed her declaration of forgiveness. "I felt immediately a burden of pain was lifted from my shoulders. That I was no longer a prisoner of my tragic past. That I was no longer a victim. That I was finally free," she said.

She now tells everybody, "Forgive your worst enemy. It will heal your soul. It will set you free."

One year ago we stood here. I red out Dr Munch’s statement and Fran read out Eva Mozes Kor’s statement of forgiveness. Many who were here were near to tears.

Subsequently, I discovered that she had built up a little museum in her home town in America to honour the memory of all those twins and to keep their memory alive.

At the end of 2003 – just over a year ago – that little museum was burnt down in a hate attack.

She has spent the intervening 12 months raising the $400,000 needed to start rebuilding. The Museum should reopen in March.

On January 27th she was, of course at Auschwitz, leading a team of American teachers and school children.

She says that she wants to be at the 100th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz when she will be 110 years old.

She wants to pass on the torch of remembrance to a new generation. "How do you keep history alive?" she asks. "You don't keep it alive by putting it in a book only. You keep it alive by people who experience it."

Today we remember the horrors which she experienced. Today we admire her resilience, her strength, her faith in the future. Today we defy those who burnt down her museum, those who would deny the truth of history. Today we share in her determination to pass on the torch of remembrance. Her and all those like her.

Speaking at Auschwitz on Thursday Russian President Putin said:-

It is said that time heals. It does, indeed. But as we stand here in one of the most horrible concentration camps 60 years after its liberation everything that happened here still causes horror, indignation and shiver.

It is impossible and unfathomable to comprehend that people are capable of such atrocities, that they may be prone to such a truly universal insanity. It is impossible to ever reconcile with the fact that it all really happened.

Yet we see the railroad, which brought whole trains crammed with victims, and gas chambers with their incinerators thought out in every detail. This visible and horrible evidence leaves no doubt that there used to be a smoothly and uninterruptedly operating death machine. We will never stop asking ourselves over and over again the same question: how could this ever have happened?

Oswiecim calls out not only to our memory but also to our mind. Here, on this land that once soaked with blood and ashes of the Nazi victims we truly see what kind of future the Reich had in store for the civilized Europe, which was based on humanitarian values and traditions of democracy, which came a long way from the Inquisition to reformation and enlightenment.

Standing on this tormented soil we must firmly and unequivocally say that any attempts to rewrite history and place killers and their victims, liberators and occupiers on the equal footing are immoral and unacceptable for those people who consider themselves Europeans.

Today we pay tribute to the memory of all those who were mercilessly and cold-bloodedly killed by the fascist barbarians not only here in Oswiecim but elsewhere.

We bow our heads before tens of millions of people from different countries of the world, who survived the hell of concentration camps, who were shot and tortured to death, who died of starvation and diseases. We bow our heads before all the victims of that inhumane war launched by the fascists. We mourn over them and remember the immortal heroic deed of the allied armies that broke the backbone of the fascist beast.

However today we shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world. Terrorism is among them and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism. And it is equally cruel: it has already claimed thousands of innocent lives.

As there were no "good" and "bad" fascists there cannot be "good" and "bad" terrorists. Any double standards here are absolutely unacceptable and deadly dangerous for the civilization.We are standing before those who forever stayed here in Oswiecim and we must ensure that everything what happened here will never repeat again.