International Forum “Let My People Live!”, January 27, 2005

MOSHE VIATCHESLAV KANTOR'S ADDRESS

President Kwasniewski, President Katsav, President Putin,

Distinguished guests, dear colleagues and friends!

For almost a year we - Jews and non-Jews from Europe, Israelis and Americans, citizens of the world – have been living with this day in mind in order to be united today at our Forum, sharing our common understanding of the unique historic importance of this event.

Sixty years ago the Red Army, at a huge cost, through the sacrifice of many lives – first and foremost of the peoples of the Soviet Union – stopped the machine of destruction that threatened modern civilisation, the machine that was about to crush the world of human diversity, replacing it with the one-dimensional standard of the thousand year Reich.

Meanwhile, this machine had already destroyed its first victim, European Jewry, a thousand-year civilisation of people who spoke Yiddish, and other civilisations were lined up for extermination.

But humanity was saved.

The final act in the Holocaust-Shoah tragedy was performed by the Russian Jew from Zaporozhye, Major Anatoly Shapiro, who used to live in the same town and on the same street with my father, Vladimir KANTOR, a Red Army soldier-liberator and his family members, who were murdered by Nazis within their own city. The tragedy was stopped by Russian officers and soldiers, men named Martynushkin, Vinnichenko, Koptev, Chertkov and their comrades-in-arms, those few who have passed away and those few in good health today. Just as the earth will never cover the blood, as is written at the entrance to the nearby Krakow Synagogue, so our gratitude to them will never be exhausted. We, the Jews of Europe, have always been a precise instrument for measuring the health of society. As one of the continent's great nations without our own state in Europe, we were attacked at every turn wherever the level of absolutism was not limited by effective democratic institutions. Holocaust-Shoah is the strongest historical example, which surpasses in its scope even the Biblical reference to the destruction of the four million Jews who stayed in Egypt after refusing the Exodus to freedom.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Only three years passed after die Kristallnacht and the Wannsee meeting took place. And the broken windows and burned Synagogues were converted to death camps for humanity. Today, only 60 years after the tragedy, we again see tolerance for intolerance standing on the shards of broken glass. It is time to act! Probably the last possibility of an open dialogue between survivors and liberators and the young people and leaders of the world has predestined an outstanding historic initiative launched by the Presidents of the Jewish, Russian and Polish States together with the heads of other governmental delegations and the Forum participants concerning the foundation of a regular Holocaust Forum; in order to support by their own prestige the Pan-European Programme to train everybody teaching the lessons of the tragedy in every country of Europe. As it is said: Hashem causes the seed of salvation planted by men in the kindly soil to flourish. That applies to us, who are united by the Forum. Thank you for this. Our Forum is over. Welcome to the New Forum.