Holocaust Memorial Observance 2026

Six million Jews--almost two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population--murdered. 

Targeted and killed simply for, who they were--Jews. 

Millions more--including Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+--killed, in cold blood, being described by Nazi Germany as “asozial”, not worthy of life.

Human beings inflicted these horrors upon other human beings--made possible by dehumanization that allowed unimaginable cruelty to become routine; what Hannah Arendt called the ‘banality of evil.’ 

Mr. Secretary-General, 

Rabbi Schneider, 

And especially Distinguished Holocaust survivors, 

Mrs. Konrad, 

Mrs. Weistein 

Dear Ms. Tomenko, 

And Ms. Blumenthal Lazan, who I just met at the corridor, and realized that the deportation camp Bergen-Belsen, where she was deported as a child, I visited decades later as a student from my school 

On today’s International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, it is our duty not only to recommit to the promise of “Never Again”  – a promise that is etched into the very DNA of our United Nations, its Charter, and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights--

But it is also our duty to speak out, even louder than before, when signs of dehumanization emerge again. 

As the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. 

• It began with words and with laws.
• With singling out Jews, just because they were Jews
• With synagogues burned.
• And with neighbors who chose silence when the Jewish store next door was boycotted, and when the owner was dragged out from his home with his little girl.

As Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal said, “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

A quote you can also find at the memorial site of the former concentration camp Auschwitz.

And given that we are living in times of shockingly high levels of antisemitism and holocaust denials, just recently a study came out from UNESCO that in three fourths of every classroom in Western Europe, we see antisemitism.

And I am very thankful to the Missions of Poland and Germany who will enable us to have a live virtual guided tour of the different sites of Auschwitz-Birkenau tomorrow here at the United Nations at 8:30 a.m. in the Trusteeship Council Chamber.

In times that people deny that Auschwitz even happened, a guide at Auschwitz will take us to the piles of millions of shoes being exposed there. Shoes like yours.  Big and small.  Brown little shoes of girls. 

Sandals like our own daughters would wear, torn off from the little Jewish girl, taken from her home.

Torn off from her, alongside her clothes, her hair. 

Stripping away every shred of humanity before sending her, with millions, to the gas chamber. 

Think of these shoes, the shoes the Jewish little girl she once wore, every time you see and hear the warning signs of what made the Holocaust possible once.

The rhetoric of “us versus them”. 

The dehumanization of people, putting Jews against others. 

This means not turning a blind eye to antisemitism, in all its different forms. 

When more than 1,400 Jews were murdered, slaughtered and kidnapped at the Nova Music Festival, in their Kibbutzim, at their homes on the 7th of October.

Or when you read an online post denying that the Holocaust happened. 

But also when your colleague is afraid to show her Star of David necklace. 

And also when your neighbors are faced with racial profiling. With Islamophobia. Sexism. With homophobia. 

Because questioning the rights of some, simply for who they are, where they come from, or what colour their skin is all has the same end: dehumanization, which eventually spreads to all. 

As back then German pastor Martin Niemöller warned, and engraved at the Holocaust Memorial in Boston Massachusetts in a longer version: 

“When they came for the Jews… I did not speak up, I wasn’t a Jew. 

When they came for the Catholics… I did not speak up. I was a Protestant.

When they came for me, no one was left to speak up.”

“Never Again” is not a slogan. It is a duty. 

A duty to speak up and to stand up. 

To defend the dignity and human rights--not of some--but of every member of our human family, everywhere, every day.

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