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| 26 January 2005 |
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| Address of the president of the Republic of Croatia H.E. Mr. Stjepan Mesiζ at the award ceremony "Righteous among the nations" titles |
Distinguished members of the families of the latest "Righteous among the Nations",
Madame Ambassador of the State of Israel,
Dear guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,
The crime of the Holocaust, unreal in its atrocity, inconceivable to the normal human mind, will be remembered as one says till the end of time.
A veil of oblivion must never cover the monstrous, and in terms of the methods employed, the industrial annihilation of an entire people. The ideology that lay behind that crime must never again be given a place within civilised society. Criminals both those who conceived and ordered mass killings only and exclusively on the basis of race, ethnicity and religious affiliation; and, of course, those who perpetrated them - must forever be remembered for what they were, for the only thing they were brutal mass murderers.
However, if one remembers crime, if one recalls victims and executioners, one cannot and must not forget those people who, at the time when human life almost had no value at all, and when the feeling of honour and humaneness was often paid for with one's life, saved others risking their own lives. The State of Israel has called those people who, at the difficult times of the Second World War, were saving Jews from a certain death jeopardizing their own safety Righteous among the Nations.
Although decades have passed, although many of them are no longer with us, the information on the heroic deeds of such people is still being discovered. For this reason, the list of the Righteous among the Nations has not yet been concluded.
I am proud to be able to attend today this act of paying homage to a few of those people. This is the third time that I attend the proclamation of the Croatian Righteous among the Nations. By this, I do not only wish to pay personal tribute to those to whom the State of Israel has awarded this title, but also to stress the need for not letting the crimes from the time of the Second World War be lost in oblivion and for offering resolute resistance to attempts at revising history.
We are paying tribute today to non-Jews who were saving Jews at one very concrete moment of the recent past. However, the message of their selfless deed is in fact universal and timeless. It is a matter of a man who is not threatened and offers a helping hand to another human being whose life is in jeopardy, neglecting the fact that this very deed may put his own life in jeopardy too. The greatness of the act lies in all its simplicity.
Wars in which people were also prosecuted only because they were different, because they were of another nationality or faith, have recently been waged here too, in our region. In those wars too, there were callous murderers, but there were also people ready to help, rescue and snatch away from death. There were such people on all sides. And it is good that there were such people because they proved, just as the Righteous among the Nations did more than half a century ago, that even in the most difficult moments, or in those very moments, there are those who are to put it in the simplest possible terms human beings.
Both those Righteous among the Nations from the past times and these from the recent times, albeit we have not identified the latter in our midst, let alone pay them tribute, deserve to be remembered. They have written history, they have dedicated a part of themselves to history, they have saved their peoples from being perceived as collective culprits. It is true, a nation can feel ashamed because mass murders sprang up from their ranks, but those who, saving innocent victims, resisted crime they prove that there is no nation that can or may be stigmatized for the misdeeds of individuals or groups.
The Holocaust has, in the history of crime, and crime is unfortunately inseparable from the history of mankind, an irreplaceable and unrepeatable place. There is no crime that could or may be compared to the Holocaust. What befell the Jewish people at the time of the Second World War is unique in its atrocity. It is worth reminding of it today when we are witnessing throughout the world frequent anti-Semitic excesses and incidents.
Anti-Semitism must not be tolerated. Equally so, no form of discrimination whatever the basis or wherever must be tolerated. Here too, it is worth-while to remember the Righteous among the Nations and the example they set. Crime did not affect them; it was happening next to them. But, they did not turn their heads away or close their eyes. They acted, they were doing what they could and as much as they could. They were saving and did save human lives, not asking for race or religion. They were human beings and they were saving other human beings.
It is good to know that there were such people in our midst. Let us never forget them. If one has to have bright role models in the past, then they are those role models. If one has to have examples how to behave at hard times no matter when or where then again they are those examples.
Together with all of you, I am paying tribute to their memory and their deed. They truly were the Righteous among the Nations and they truly deserve to be called by that name. Not only those whom they rescued and their loved ones, but rather the nations they sprang up from are indebted to them. The Croatian nation is indebted to those Righteous among the Nations whom we remember today.
It is my honour, as President of the Republic of Croatia, to be able to bow before the magnitude of their humaneness.
Thank you! |
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