message of
DR PIOTR M.A. CYWIŃSKI
DirEcTOR of AUSCHWITZ memorial
“In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies
but the silence of our friends.”
These words from Martin Luther King reflect, to a large extent,
the complexity of the post-war relationship between European Jews and their European homeland.
80 years ago, the mass extermination of European Jews began in Auschwitz,
a concentration camp that had been in existence for two years,
which at the time was mainly populated by Poles.
The Shoah knocked on the gates of Auschwitz to claim its greatest number of victims.
King’s words, unfortunately, epitomise our Western attitude today.
We are so proud of the values we have developed over centuries,
our philosophical and religious foundations,
and our humanism
and definitions of human rights.
These are enough for us.
Today, we cannot incorporate these lofty ideals into
social, political, international, and universal human life.
The Rohingya, the Uighurs, the hunger-stricken in Yemen, those fleeing terror,
starvation or hopelessness can only attest to this.
In today’s world, we are witnessing the slow end
of the old ideological divisions in politics.
The Left and Right are becoming increasingly less divergent.
Today, a new division is increasingly visible:
those who, in the spirit of universal values and humanism,
pursue a humane world,
and those who tread the path of dehumanisation.
And yet, we are hardly perturbed by this either,
enthralled by the beautiful sound of our fundamental values. Consequently, we slump into silence and indifference.
Meanwhile, here and now, we need to remind ourselves
that the watchword “Never Again” did not originate after the war.
It had already been heard in the camp.
And that it was not a cry for an eternal memory but for mindfulness,
a kind of motto for the future.
And the times are such as we wanted and managed to create.
There is still too little of this moral anxiety in our memories
to make us question our all-too-frequent indifference.
It is not the memory that the victims, former prisoners and survivors had in mind.
I would therefore like to thank the Auschwitz survivors present here,
and all those who are following these commemorative events
through the media and the Internet…
I implore everyone to observe a moment of silence,
to reflect on their responsibility, indifference and commitment.
This much we owe to the victims.
It is, above all, what remembrance is meant to do, today.
dr Piotr M.A. Cywiński