Survivors mark Holocaust Day

DEATH camp survivors, President Mary McAleese, government ministers, nearly two dozen ambassadors and various religious leaders gathered last night to remember the Holocaust.

It was the first official memorial ceremony by the State to mark the deaths of six million Jews and thousands of other people targeted and systematically murdered by the Nazis.

The ceremony, in Dublin’s City Hall, heard Holocaust survivors’ recollections, readings, poems and choral music, and a candle-lighting ceremony in memory of all groups persecuted and murdered.

Among those who attended was Bergen Belsen death camp survivor Tommy Reichental. Aged just nine when the camp was liberated, Mr Reichental remembered how it was the type of camp where people were starved to death by their captors.

There were thousands of bodies piled up, rotting away, so many the guards were unable to clear them away, said Mr Reichental. The stench was terrible but they got used to it and, after a while, hardly noticed.

A Holocaust Memorial Day, held on or close to the anniversary of the liberation of the Polish concentration camp Auschwitz, was held last year. But 2004 marks the first official day of remembrance.

It follows a declaration signed in 2000 by 44 countries vowing that the Nazi genocide should never be forgotten. The Stockholm declaration declared: “With humanity still scarred by genocide, anti-Semitism, ethnic cleansing, racism, xenophobia and other expressions of hatred and discrimination, we share a solemn responsibility to fight against these evils.”

Only five countries of the 44 have so far organised a Holocaust Memorial Day.

Last night, President McAleese said it was intolerable that the lessons of the Holocaust, in a short space of time, could so easily be overlooked as conflicts continued all over the world. She said: “In all the places in Ireland and around the world where a person’s culture, colour or religion provoke others to irrational and outrageous hatred, men and women and children face each day trembling in fear. That hatred is the seed-bed of the Holocaust.”

Other survivors of the Holocaust, Suzi Diamond, Geoffrey Phillips, Terry Samuels and Zoltan Zinn Collis, also participated in the commemoration.

Israel’s Ambassador to Ireland, Mr Daniel Megiddo, lit candles for the Jewish victims while a prayer of remembrance was recited by the Chief Rabbi of Ireland Dr Yaakov Pearlman.

Oliver Donohoe, chairperson of the Holocaust Memorial Day Committee said: “This is a time ... to oppose anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, xenophobia and intolerance”.