Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I warmly welcome You all to the opening of the exhibition Holocaust by bullets!
I especially turn to our friends from France: Mr Eric de Rotschild, president of Memorial de la Shoah, and Karel Fracapane, responsible for international relations at the same institution. Memorial de la Shoah has produced the exhibition and so generously made it available to the Living history forum.
Father Patrick Desbois and Your team. Father Desbois is the driving force – to use an understatement – behind the whole project and without You and Your team there would be no exhibition.
We are honoured that You all have taken the trouble to travel to Stockholm to attend this opening, thereby emphasizing the importance of the exhibition and its contents.
This opening takes place the day before the day of commemoration of the Holocaust, its victims and survivors. It has been planned deliberately to give it a strong, not to say brutal concretization of the commemoration. Voices have been raised to question this kind of commemoration taking the political situation in the Middle East into consideration. Such considerations “spill over” on the opening of an exhibition like Holocaust by bullets.
I am, therefore, very anxious to state that no matter how one judges what happens in Gaza and Israel, it never ever justifies any kind of anti-semitic attitudes, declarations or actions anywhere in the world which we can see happens increasingly now. We very clearly have to separate the two and treat each of them based on their circumstances. The Holocaust - the most deliberate, systematized and cruel genocide the world has experienced in modern time – is necessary to remember, explore and learn from both intellectually and emotionally. We do so in deep respect for all those who suffered, died and survived. We also do it with the intention to vaccinate ourselves and the coming generation from developing discriminatory, exclusionary and degrading behavior.
During the coming 6 months the exhibition Holocaust by bullets will serve as a public gear for this intention. The exhibition hall will be open almost every day for anyone to drop in free of charge. School classes will come for educational tours led by our own exhibition educators. Already bookings are flowing in.
I want to express my deep gratitude to Memorial de la Shoah for letting us borrow the exhibition and to father Debois and his team for the peerless efforts behind it.
I also want to thank our own staff - under the direction of Erika Aronowitsch and Anna-Karin Johansson - for all the preparatory work without which we wouldn’t be here today.
You have all contributed to discovering and making an important piece of this dark part of contemporary history visible, a gloomy but unfortunately necessary task for societies striving for tolerance, human rights and democracy.
It is now my privilege to give the floor to Mr Eric de Rotschild.
