From Nevember 1944 till the liberation of Budabest in February 1945, my aunt sheltered my father who was a fugitive because he refused to join the regular army. That is how he was able to escape. My father's best friend was called up for forced labor service- nobody has ever seen him since; it has not been possible to discover his whereabouts, or the circumstances of his death. Both paths of life can be said to be typical Central-European histories - with the sad addendum that the story and the tragic fate of my father's friend was more typical.
We know - and it is remembered in many places of reverence here at Yad Vashem - that every tenth victim of the Holocaust was of Hongarian extraction. We know that the largest Hungarian graveyard is in Auschiwitz. We know that the effects of the Shoa span generations: we feel it in our bones, in our nerves, in our dreams. It was given to us to live in an age, of which our Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz wrote: "This century, the twentieth, was like an execution squad on unceasing duty".
It is our responsibility - the responsibility of those here - to reinvigorate national remembrance everywhere; the disciplining and attentive national remembrance. That which, through personal histories, presents patterns of lives that warn and are worthy of following. With our national cultures and specific national messages, we all have to render the past experienceable, for the sake of a future worth living.
Yad Vashem, unifying the technical achievements of our age with the universal of aesthetics, is an example of this. We also drew inspiration from it when last year as a result of the efforts of our government, the Museum of the Hungarian Holocaust Documentation Centre and Memorial Collection Public Foundation was opened in Budapest.
It was here in Yad Vashem, in the Children's Memorial that I recalled the lines of your great poet, Mordechay Avi Shaul (who also stemmed from Hungary): "... They cannot ask: why/ they no longer see the tiny wooden horse/ the chatting doll, the chittering bird/ that is capering about in the book.// Of this generation, merely a photo remains..."
It it our commont responsibility that the children of the new Mellenium be conscious of the lesson of the horros of the Shoa. Israel's history includes that of Central Europe; while I wish us all strength. imagination and will for this shared work, allow me to greet you with the words of the Talmud: "Hai to you, People of Israel! You are all truly wise, from the great to the tiny".
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