Speech by Václav Havel President of the Czech Republic on the Occasion of the Opening of the Holocaust Phenomenon Conference

 Ladies and Gentlemen,
On 8 March 1944, while thousands of Czech Jews entered, in that single day, the gas chambers at Birkenau - besides the Jewish song of Hatikva - they also sang the Czechoslovak National Anthem. The deported Romanies used to sing a sad song about "the big prison at Oświęcim, where people are burnt in fire." But, it made no difference whether the victims of the mass murders thought of the hope of Zion and Jerusalem, or of their homes in the Czech lands, or of the killed and burnt mothers and children. Both Jews and Romanies were destined to die according to a predetermined plan, simply because someone ruled that they were not human beings, but merely worthless, inferior creatures. This tragedy, which we will probably never completely understand, passed into history under the name of Shoa, or Holocaust. But once the Jews could be excluded from the circle of human beings, there was nothing to prevent the killing of homosexuals, of the disabled, of the mentally handicapped; nothing to stop the Nazis from arrogating, to themselves, the right to decide about the future existence, or non-existence, of entire nations, which were divided into various categories according to an absurd criteria.

Only a handful of those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust are still with us today. Unfortunately, the various international activities in Western Europe and the United States reach out to Central and Eastern European victims only reluctantly, and rather marginally. Nor are we, for our part, doing enough to learn a lesson from the fate of our Jewish and Roma fellow citizens. And time is pressing - our schools, indeed, our entire education system should capture the memories of Holocaust survivors while those who remain are still here to share those memories with us. Who, but they, can impart to us an historical experience which teaches us that every manifestation of racism, or of hatred of minorities, is the beginning of an attack against the very foundations of human civilization? The threat of transports and gas chambers is encoded in every act of intolerance toward Romanies, in every anti-Semitic remark. Whoever denies the past, or casts doubt upon it, is equally dangerous to democracy, be it an American neo-Nazi, a member of the German Witiko-Bund or a Czech skinhead.

When blockheads with shaved skulls now sing the Czech Anthem, in between chanting racist slogans, it is a gross insult to those who sang the same Anthem in the moment of their death in the Birkenau gas chambers. When shouting "The Czech Lands to the Czechs," they probably - in their ignorance - fail to realize that if the ideology which they profess had prevailed, half a century ago, there would be no Czechs today, as a nation: according to the Nazi genocidal plans, the Czech nation was meant to be extinguished, by means of mass killings, deportations and forced assimilation, during the course of thirty years, "during the lifetime of the Führer," who was to personally witness that glorious moment. And, it is entirely possible that the skulls of the grandfathers - of today's skinheads - would have failed to pass that absurd investigation into the possibility of "germanizing" the Czech population which was ordered by Reinhard Heydrich and Karl Hermann Frank.

The world community today is making an effort to come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust, at least in a material respect, by the time we enter the new millennium - an objective which, most probably, we shall never completely attain. But, it would be much more tragic if we failed to learn a lesson from the bloody history of this century, and if similar atrocities were to be committed again in the future. Education and a knowledge of history, combined with humanity and with an ordinary capability of compassion, hopefully will enable us too recognize the germs of the old-new dangers and to fetter the demons of hatred and evil before they take hold of us again.

It is my hope that the Holocaust Phenomenon Conference will help us in these endeavors and, therefore, I wish your deliberations every success.