Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese send a video message on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
We reproduce the text for the hearing-impaired.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we keep alive the memory of those who died, and the memories of those who survived.
We confront again the atrocity of the camps.
When the liberators entered Auschwitz, on 27 January 1945, none of them knew what lay beneath the snow and ash.
What they uncovered was hell – a hell that had been brought into being on earth.
Unimaginable cruelty. A savagery that was long in the planning and cold in its calculation.
We must never soften the truth of what the Holocaust was: the purposeful execution of more than 6 million Jews.
The Australian writer Lily Brett, born in a German refugee camp the year after the war ended, grew up in the shadow of Auschwitz.
She writes that when you’re born to Holocaust survivors, as she was, “you are born attached to the dead. You are born beside them, as surely […] as if you had been delivered into their arms.”
Many survivors of the Holocaust found refuge here after the war, and their stories are importantly preserved in Holocaust Museums.
As we are starting to lose the last generation of Holocaust survivors, the work of documenting their lives has never been more important.
Their stories carry the dark weight of sorrow, and they also carry the important message: Never again.
We must make sure that generations to come know the full history.
Antisemitism is on the rise, but it will not find a home here.
Australia will always denounce it and reject it utterly, just as we do all forms of racism and prejudice.
We owe it to our country, we owe it to our Jewish community, and we owe it to our survivors.
They deserve nothing less.
