Zelenskyi: We must do more than possible to preserve truth about Holocaust
photo: Office of the President
On International Holocaust Day, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi stated we must do more than possible to preserve and spread the truth about the Holocaust so that the crimes of the 20th century never happen again.
He wrote about it on social media.
"We live in a responsible time when we can have direct contact with the last survivors of the Holocaust and those who liberated the world from Nazism. They are gradually passing on to another world. This means losing the opportunity to hear firsthand about the horror that was staged by Nazis, and about the salvation that took place then.
When there are living witnesses, the story cannot be ignored or distorted. Because the most important reminder will always state how it really was. Because there'll be someone who'll draw a simple line between ethics and loss of conscience, between knowledge and atrocity, between those who tell the truth and those who try to lie.
Documents, books, movies, lectures, official references, monuments, and museums won't replace living testimony. That's why we need to say things repeatedly that may seem automatically apprehensible, but… To whom? In fact, to those who still may find witnesses to the Holocaust and saved ones from the death planned by the Nazis. Those who've heard stories from their loved ones in their families, living witnesses of World War II and the Holocaust.
Humankind is gradually moving into new circumstances when there's a lot of so-called hybrid information around. So we must do even more than possible to preserve the truth about the Holocaust. To spread the truth. To join the new generations to the system of ethical coordinates, which arose from sincerely realizing that the crimes of the XX century should never happen again.
Every year this task will be more and more important and difficult for each society. For the history not to be just empty words. So that people really understand why today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, for instance. So that everyone can realize for themselves and be able to tell their children that the falling of Nazism was really the salvation of humanity, the victory of those values that, in fact, made us human," the President explained.
Zelenskyi recalled that on January 27, 1945, soldiers of our 1st Ukrainian Front in the Soviet Army released prisoners from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. "Over one and a half million people had been killed in this death camp over the years of its existence. Every release, every discovery of the truth about the crimes of the Nazis has filled with an irresistible force of words: never again.
It is our duty to continue to ensure the eternal invincibility of the power of these words. Never again!"
