Australian Prime Minister Visits Yad Vashem

01 November 2017

Prime Minster Turnbull and his wife Lucy studying a picture of prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in the Holocaust History Museum

The Prime Minster and his wife were guided through Yad Vashem by Ephraim Kaye of the International School for Holocaust Studies. Pictured: The Hall of Names, a "symbolic tombstone" to each Jewish man, woman and child murdered in the Holocaust

Australian Prime Minister The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP and his wife Lucy laid a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance in memory of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust

Prime Minister of Australia, The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP, offers remarks outside the Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem

Jorge Novominsky / Yad Vashem

The Honorable Malcolm Turnbull MP message in Yad Vashem's Guestbook

Jorge Novominsky / Yad Vashem

The Prime Minister of Australia, The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP, visited Yad Vashem on Wednesday, 1 November 2017. The Prime Minister toured the Holocaust History Museum, participated in a memorial ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance and visited the Children's Memorial.

At the conclusion of his visit, Prime Minister Turnball described visiting Yad Vashem as "one of the most moving experiences that anyone can have. The sheer banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt said, shocks us to the very core. The mind recoils from it… The 'Final Solution' was planned by bureaucrats, and it reminds us that the smartest, the most technological, the most educated can do the most terrible things."

In the Yad Vashem Guest Book, he wrote: "All of the world's oceans cannot contain our tears, but all of the world's steel cannot match the strength of our determination as we stand with Israel and the Jewish people and resolve – 'Never Again'."