Holocaust Memorial Observance 2026 - International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust

Mr. Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United nations. Your Excellency, Ms. Annalena Baerbock, President of the 80th Session of the General Assembly. Excellencies, friends, Rabbi Artur Schneier and his wife Elizabeth, and all Holocaust survivors and their families who are here today. World War II veterans, friends and colleagues. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Melissa Fleming, and I lead the Department of Global Communications.

And it is my honor to welcome you to the annual observance of the International Day of Commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. We express our deep gratitude to the survivors who are joining us today on this solemn occasion. Dear survivors, may I ask you to please raise your hand so that we can acknowledge you.

Thank you. Dear guests, on the 27th of January, 1945, the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. One soldier, Officer Vasily Davidov, wrote, wherever one looked, one saw piles of human bodies. In some places, the former prisoners, looking like living skeletons, sat or lay around. Many of them could not be helped.

A few who could still walk, took us around the camp and told us what happened there. It is impossible to describe everything that we saw there. Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz 3, Buna Monowitz, remembered the moment of liberation. In the very hour in which every threat seemed to vanish. I was overcome by a new and greater pain.

The pain of exile, of my distant home, of my loneliness, of friends lost, of youth lost. Today we remember those for whom there was no liberation. Children like brothers Emmanuel and Afram Rosenthal, photographed in February 1944 in the Kofno ghetto in Lithuania.

Less than a month later, the Nazis murdered the little boys because they were Jewish. Emmanuel was 2, Avram was 5. They had a right to life. The Holocaust is devastating evidence of what happens when human rights are degraded, denied and destroyed. We honor the victims by remembering their humanity and defending the history.

And by taking action to confront antisemitism and challenge prejudice wherever we find it. May I ask you now. You all have candles in front of you. I think many of you have already turned them on. But those of you who haven't, please turn on your candles and join me in a moment of silence and reflection in remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust.

And to those who are able. Could I kindly ask you to stand up?

Thank you. It is my honor now to welcome the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, to deliver remarks.

Excellencies, dear friends, I am deeply honored to join you and humbled by the presence of Holocaust survivors. And their families. We gather in solemn remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust. There were mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren. Six million Jews murdered just because they were Jewish.

We also grieved the Roman sinti, the people with disabilities, LGBTQI people and so many more were enslaved, persecuted, tortured and killed. And we also remember the stories and struggles of those who confronted the worst of humanity to show us the best. Diplomats who defied orders and issued life saving visas. Journalists who fought to expose the truce. And farmers and villagers with families at great peril.

Remembrance is more than honouring the past. It is a duty and a promise to defend dignity, to protect the vulnerable and to keep face with those whose names and stories we refuse to forget. The Holocaust, after all, is not only history. It is a warning. A warning that hatred, once unleashed, can consume everything.

Excellencies, dear friends. Today that warning feels more urgent than ever. Anti Semitism around the world is raging. Jewish communities live in fear. Synagogues attacked.

Families shattered. Vile anti Semitic hatred racing across cyberspace. We are haunted by the horrific terror attack of October 7, which I once again categorically condemn, along with the taking of hostages and the acts of hatred targeting Jews around the world in recent years and indeed in recent weeks. But coming together as we have come today to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust fills me with hope. I see the power of humanity in all of you.

I see the courage of survivors who turned pain into purpose. I see the commitment of young people of every face and nation standing together against hate. I see the strength of solidarity when communities unite. You are here because you choose hope over hate. You choose remembrance as a living force, a shield against prejudice, a spark for justice, a pledge to protect every human being.

Excellencies, dear friends, this show of unity is more important than ever, because we know the Holocaust is a stark demonstration of the dangers of unchecked hatred. The Holocaust did not begin with killing. It began with words. Its architects telegraphed their evil intentions. They deliberately spread the hateful supremacist ideology that preyed on fear and economic despair.

This powerful engine of hate was given fuel through the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions, the stifling of the press, the persecution of civil society, the corruption of courts and the erosion of the rule of law. It included the mastery of the technology of the time, controlling information, deploying propaganda and manipulating public discourse, spreading anti Semitic and racist hatred with devastating efficiency. And we must never forget the painful truth that Jewish families who sought refuge were met with the cold shoulder of indifference, closed borders and bureaucratic barriers. This dark Chapter of our common history reveals sovereign truths. When those with power fail to act, evil goes unpunished.

When the past is distorted, denied and weaponized, hatred and prejudice fester. When words become weapons, lies, conspiracies, the casual joke and the coded slurk and grow until the unthinkable becomes policy and violence. So let us together pledge to stand against antisemitism and all forms of hatred and against bigotry, racism and discrimination anywhere, everywhere. Excellencies, dear friends, this is the 10th time I have the privilege as Secretary General to address you on this day of remembrance. For me, Holocaust remembrance and the fight against the ancient poison of antisemitism is not abstract, it is personal.

One of my personal achievements as Prime Minister of Portugal was working with Parliament to adopt a decree that revoked the 16th century expulsion of Jews from my country. I'm happy to see tens of thousands of descendants of those expelled families regaining Portuguese nationality. This was a symbolic step, but one that demonstrated the importance of acknowledging the depth of our remorse, even remorse for the crimes of our country, remorse for the past, and our commitment to build a better, more inclusive future. A commitment that goes to the core of what brings us here today. In memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

As Secretary General, I remember standing in Yad Vashem, confronted by the immense weight of memory and the countless lives extinguished in the darkness of hatred. I've prayed together with the Jewish community in the aftermath of atrocious acts of violence and anti Semitism. And I have heard testimonies from Holocaust survivors about their experiences that began with a knock on the door and ended with lives erased. And I've always understood the clear link between the horrors of the Holocaust and the spirit of multilateralism, justice and rights that founded our organization. Excellencies, dear friends, Just over eight years ago, the Nuremberg Trials began.

These trials represented the beginning of a new era of international criminal law, an era in which individuals, including the most powerful, are held accountable. And today, more than ever, we need to reclaim that spirit. At the opening of Nuremberg, Justice Robert H. Jackson warned us, and I quote, these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. End of quote. These influences, antisemitism, racism, hatred, are very much still with us.

And our duty is clear, to speak the truth, to educate new generations to confront antisemitism and all forms of hatred and discrimination, and to defend the dignity of every human being. But it is also our duty to keep alive the spirit of acting in common purpose through multilateralism, to Ensure that the forces of humanity always triumph over the forces of inhumanity. Let us honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust by recommitting to justice, dignity, compassion and violence to a world where humanity stands united against oppression and where the terrible legacy of the past strengthens our resolve to protect human rights today and in the future. Let us forever carry in our hearts the Holocaust victims whose calls for justice and peace can never be extinguished. May their memory be a blessing and I thank you.

I thank the Secretary General Guterres. And it is my honor to invite Her Excellency, Ms. Annalena Baerbock, President of the 80th Session of the General assembly, to deliver remarks.

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 azozial, 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, Excellencies Rabi Schneider, ladies and gentlemen, and especially distinguished Holocaust survivors. Mrs. Conrad, Mrs. Weinstein, dear Ms. Tomenko and Ms. Blumenthal Lassan, who had just met at the Corridor and re realized that the deportation camp back in Belsen where she was deported as a child, I visited decades later as a student from my school.

Dear Excellencies, dear ladies and gentlemen. 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, of our United nations, its Charter and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it's also our duty to speak out even louder than before when signs of dehumanization emerge again. As a 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 choose silence when the Jewish door 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 with shockingly high levels of antisemitism, Holocaust denial just these days, a study came out from UNESCO that in 3, 4 of every classroom in Western Europe, you see antisemitism these days. I'm very thankful to the mission 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 8:30am in the trusteeship Council Chamber. In times where 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, 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 of the little Jewish girl she once wore. Every time you hear and see the warning signs of what made the Holocaust possible. Once inventory 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 the 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 staff David necklace. And also when your neighbors are faced with racial profiling, with Islamophobia, with sexism, was homophobia. Because questioning the rights of some simply for who they are, where they come from or what the color of their skin is, has all the same end.

Dehumanization, which eventually spreads to all. As back then German pastor Martin Niemoller warned and engraved at the Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts. In a longer version, I quote, 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's 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.

I thank the President of the General Assembly, Anneliese Baerbock. And I would now like to invite His Excellency, Mr. Danny Danone, permanent representative of Israel, to deliver his remarks.

Esteemed Holocaust survivors, UN Secretary General Guterres President of the General Assembly, Ms. Berbock, US Ambassador to the UN Ambassador Waltz, Rabbi Schneier, Distinguished guests, we are gathered here today to remember the Holocaust. The deliberate murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Alongside them, millions of others were murdered. It was the darkest chapter in human history. We remember because memory matters, because education matters, because honoring the victims matters.

We remember here in the UN General assembly because the UN itself was founded from the ashes of that destruction. But let me be honest with you. Today, remembrance alone is not enough. Because while we remember, Jews are attacked while we speak, hatred spreads. Words, slogans and statements have failed to stop the violence.

I stand before you as Israel's ambassador to sound the alarm. The time for talk is over. The time for action is now. In recent years, we have heard many warnings from this podium about the rise of anti Semitism. About dangerous lies, about how hatred begins with language.

Those warnings are right. But they ring hollow when the lies that fuel anti Semitism are allowed to spread. Including here in this building, in the un. When false narratives are repeated in this chamber, they do not stay here. They spread across the world with the rubber stamp of the un.

They harden into belief. They turn into hatred. To my fellow ambassadors here today, when you return to your missions later this afternoon, please ask for the numbers. How many anti Semitic incidents were reported in the past year in your country? How many threats?

How many attacks? Then ask the harder questions. How many indictments? How many prostitutions? How many convictions?

When you see that gap, do not explain it away. That gap is a measure of failure. It is a space where hatred grows. It is not enough to come here once a year to speak about remembrance and then go home and allow the same hatred to spread unchecked. Remembrance without action is empty.

Later today you will hear from a brave Holocaust survivor, Sarah Weinstein. Sarah, thank you for coming from Israel to being with us.

Sarah was just a little girl when the Nazis forced her and her family into a ghetto in July 1941. In 1941, she survived hunger, fear and miserable conditions. All because she was Jewish. In late 1942, her family was hidden by a local family who risked everything. Then a village mob fueled by anti Jew hatred arrived.

Shots were fired. Chaos followed as bullets tore through the room. Sarah's mother swear self on top of her, using her body as a shield. Her mother was killed protecting her daughter. We wish this were only a memory from the Holocaust.

It is not. On October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel. They went house to house. They hunted families. They murdered parents in front of their children.

16 year old rote Matias survived because his parents died protecting him. As terrorists stormed his home. Rotem lay Completely still. Beneath his mother's body, Dvorah Deborah Matias was shot and killed by Hamas terrorists. A lifeless body lay on top of Rotem for hours.

Those scenes were not imagined. They were recorded. They were celebrated. Hamas did not invent hatred of Jews. It has revived it with new weapons and new slogans.

Their goal is not borders or compromise. It is extermination. The threat is modern. The hatred is not again. Today, Jews are forced to use the their own bodies to protect those they love.

That is the reality we are confronting today. This violence does not stop at Israel's borders. Last month, on Bondi beach in Australia, Alexander Kleitman and his wife Larisa stood together at a Hanukkah celebration. Both were Holocaust survivors. When terrorists opened fire on the Jews gathered there.

Alexander did what Sarah's mother had done in 1942, what Rotom's mom had done. On October 7, he shielded his wife with his body. He was 87 years old. He was murdered protecting his wife. Around them, others did the same.

People scrambled to cover children. What we saw was horrific and tragically familiar. This was another massacre targeting Jews. This is not memory. This is now.

Bondi was not an isolated act. It followed October 7th, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It followed synagogue firebombings. It followed shootings and deadly attacks from Manchester to Washington, from Paris to Sydney. This is not a coincidence.

Hatred that begins with words does not remain words. It spreads and it kills. Anti Semitism did not end in 1945. It adapted. Today it often hides behind hostility to Israel.

We hear it in chants to globalize the Intifada. We see it in calls to boycott Israel. We see it on college campuses where Jewish students are harassed, excluded and intimidated. This is not protest. This is not free speech.

This has a name. The name is anti speaker. Targeted violence does not begin with graves. It begins with dehumanization. That is the lesson of the Holocaust.

Hatred does not spread on its own. It is enabled. It is legitimized. It is given authority. Especially over the last two years, this institution, the UN has failed that test.

We have all seen it claims of genocide. A claim made by a senior UN official that 14,000 babies would die within 48 hours. That claim did not come from the fringe. It came from the heart of the un. It was made without evidence.

It was repeated without correction. It traveled the world stamped with UN credibility. It has consequences. It inflamed hatred. It legitimized lies.

It put a target on Jewish communities around the world. Hamas came with the same Hatred and the same intent as the Nazis. To murder Jews, terrorize families and erase entire communities. They slaughtered 1,200 innocent people. They beheaded them.

They raped women. They burned children Alive. More than 250 people were taken hostage. But unlike 1941, today there is a different reality. We crashed and stopped.

Hamas terror machine. We brought home.

We brought home every hostage, every single one of them.

We waited 843 days. Today, the pin finally comes off.

We have shown that the Jewish people are no longer defenseless. Today we have our own army, the soldiers of the idf.

The days when Jews are massacred without response are over.

Yet from October 8th, while we were still counting our dead and pushing back terrorists, we faced relentless condemnation from within this institution. Hypocrisy, Bias. The campaign against Israel started while Israelis were still being hunted. But despite the double standards, despite the pressure, we stood tall. Our brave IDF soldiers, my son, my daughter, our children stood up and stepped forward to defend our people.

They are the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and of the founders of our nation, now standing proud to ensure Jewish survival. I stand here and thank our heroes who fought like lions with determination, with resilience, with bravery. To our brave soldiers, I say this. We honor your courage. We admire your sacrifice.

We salute you.

Thanks to you, every Jew feels safer today. To my fellow ambassadors, the responsibility now turns to you and to your governments. Standing with Israel does not mean agreeing with us on everything. It means standing against terror. It means confronting hatred before it turns violent.

It means refusing to tolerate incitement in your streets, on your campuses and online. It means showing real leadership because too many in this building have buckled. They buckled under the pressure of biased media, false propaganda and anti Semitic campaigns. Do not repeat that failure. Do not surrender moral clarity for political gain.

Do. Do not wait until words turn into blood. Never again demands action. Not tomorrow, not in a year. Never again is now.

Thank you, Ambassador Danone. I would now like to invite His Excellency Mr. Michael Waltz, permanent representative of the United States, to deliver his remarks.

Ambassador o', Donon, thank you for those incredibly powerful words. Excellencies, survivors, friends. Today the United States of America joins the international community in honoring the memory of those 6 million Jews murdered in cold blood in the Holocaust, including one and a half million innocent children and the millions more who were persecuted and killed by the Nazi regime. We remember them, we mourn them. And we recommit ourselves with fierce depression determination to pursue justice for the victims, for the survivors and their families.

We, the United States, we the international community, must remain unyielding unapologetically committed to combating antisemitism, not just in the United States, but around the world, including, Including right here at the United nations, the very institution that was born from the ashes of World War II, where the world then vowed never again. Well, colleagues and Excellencies, I have tragic and sad news for you that it is happening again. The UN must do far more now to confront this ancient poison, to fulfill its founding promise and to protect every people, including the Jewish people. As a soldier myself, I'm proud to say that 81 years ago, it was American and Allied forces who played an indelible role in tearing open the veil of Nazi evil. In April 1945, US army troops liberated Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp they encountered, a sub camp of Buchenwald, confronting literally piles of emaciated corpses and the stench of mass industrial scale murder.

Days later, the soldiers of Patton's US 3rd army liberated Buchenwald itself, where nearly 21,000 survivors awaited death from starvation, from typhus and from sheer brutality. And then those same soldiers liberated Dachau, which we should remind everyone, wasn't off in the woods or out in some remote place. It was literally across the street. Literally across the street from the city. Those gates in Dachau open to reveal crematoria ovens, mass graves and the skeletal survivors, prisoners who had endured an unimaginable torment.

Thank God that General Dwight David Eisenhower had the foresight to order immediate and extensive documentation of all of the atrocities. He sent that command out immediately because sadly, he foresaw. He foresaw that this would be questioned in the future. He personally went to visit the camps and personally witnessed the atrocities. And he later stated, I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things.

If ever in the future there develops a tendency to. To charge these allegations merely to propaganda. These American liberators, young men, boys really from every corner of our nation, did not seek this burden. And what, as an aside, I want to say that is so unique about the American soldier is they are willing to go all over the world and die for other people's freedom.

Those soldiers bore witness so the world could never ever again plead ignorance. Their courage ended one nightmare and issued that timeless command that we've said today. Never again, but never again. Must be words. It has to be more than words, and it has to be action.

And yet today that command also rings out a warning. Anti Semitism is not vanquished. It rages anew. It's Reaching the worst levels globally since the end of World War II. It ignited and accelerated the barbaric Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, when over 1200 innocents were slaughtered, families were burned, hostages were taken.

It was an orgy of hatred that targeted Jews explicitly and unapologetically. The Anti Defamation league's latest Global 100 index reveals that almost half of the world's adults now harbor deeply entrenched anti Semitic attitudes. More than double the figure from a decade ago and the highest they have on record. Younger generations, sadly under 35, show even higher levels of prejudice. And meanwhile, the Combat Anti Semitism movement documented a staggering 107% increase in global incidences in 2024, not 81 years ago.

In 2024 in the United States, the ADL's 2024 audit recorded 9,354 incidents, the highest ever in their 46 years of tracking. Assaults up 21%. Vandalism up 20%. Campus incidences amongst our young people exploding at 84%. In Europe, the surge has been especially acute.

The European Union Agency, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights documented that Jewish communities reported an increase of more than 400% in anti Semitic incidences. Harassment, threats, vandalism and violence. And this wave of hate has left synagogues under siege. Jewish students once again hiding their identity, whole communities living in fear. I mean, what are we back in 1933?

This is absurd and we have to call it out. And I commend the United nations for continuing to hold this event, but it is. Look, this is a people that cannot live unless they live within fear. It's families fleeing their neighborhoods. And we've seen synagogues here in the United States with armed guards armed up like fortresses, and the venomous chants that are echoing in the streets and on our campus and online.

It's Holocaust denial, It's distortion, it's rehabilitation in these historic narratives of Nazi collaborators. It's the manipulation of history right here at the UN and elsewhere. It's all a pretext for hatred. And it leads to things like we just saw at Bondi beach in December. Fifteen innocent people murdered during Hanukkah.

Elie Wiesel once hoped that antisemitism perished in Auschwitz. And sadly, he lived to see its horrific resurrection. We cannot wait for another liberation. So what do we do about it? Like what do we do?

Well, first and foremost, education, commemoration. I firmly believe, and I know so many of you do, remain our mightiest weapons. We have to amplify survivors voices.

By the way, I am so honored to meet you, to know you, to understand your history, but to celebrate your strength. To truly celebrate your strength.

You did not become a lifelong victim. You moved forward. Forward and educate the next generation so that this can never happen again. Look, we have to teach that next generation that this dark abyss that leads to and results from unbridled Semitism is someplace we can never go again. And we urge every nation to honor the victims and survivors by teaching this history unflinchingly.

No future generation can repeat these horrors. And the United States proudly stands as a founding member of the International Holocaust remembrance alliance, reiterating at every turn, never again. We reaffirm our commitment to justice through restitution. Through restitution and through compensation. The other horrible thing amongst many horribles is that the Holocaust was history's largest organized theft, an attempt to erase Jewish life, but at the same time enriching the Nazis.

And for decades, I'm proud to say, the US has led efforts now advanced by the State Department's Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, who works very closely with the Special Envoy for Anti Semitism, Rabbi Yehuda Kaploon, whom I am proud to call a friend and a wingman in this fight. In 2024, the US partnered globally to promote the best practices for the Washington principles on Nazi confiscated art and assets. And as Of December of 2025, 35 countries have endorsed them. That should be celebrated. That should be applauded.

But we should also ask, why only 35? Why isn't there more? And I'm calling on all nations to join. Colleagues. President Trump has advanced these causes resolutely right out the gate.

After his inauguration, he issued executive orders and ordered our entire government, the entire might and weight of the United States government, to combat anti Semitism aggressively on every front.

But, Excellencies, the Holocaust, as we've heard here today, and I just want to reinforce, the Holocaust is not distant history. It is a dire living warning against efforts to revive this existential threat to humanity. The barbarism of October 7th reminds us how quickly hatred can erupt into mass murder. The future hangs on our choices we make right here today. And on this solemn day.

Please let us honor the victims through decisive action. What are those actions? Truthful, accurate remembrance in history, rigorous Holocaust education. Open the archives.

Full. Full restitution. And an unbreakable stand against anti Semitism everywhere and always. May the memory of the victims be a blessing, but a call to responsibility for us all. Never again.

Starting now. Let's get to work. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Ambassador Waltz it is my pleasure now to welcome Thomas Reddit. He is going to perform Sarabande from the Suite number one in G Major by Johann Sebastian Bach.

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Sara. Thank you very much, Mr. Reddit, for. For that moving rendition. It is my pleasure now to call on Ms. Natalia Tomenko. Ms. Tomenko will be sharing the testimony of her grandmother, Ms. Halnia Tomenko, who is too fragile to travel from Ukraine where she lives.

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During the Nazi occupation, Roma were hunted, deported and murdered without records or recognition. Survival depended on constant movement, silence and fear. My family endured hunger, genocide, uncertainty and loss. Many Roma families were were erased entirely. Later, I married a man whose family also survived Nazi persecution.

In Kremenchuk city, Poltava region. In our home, memories of the war were never written down. They lived in our bodies, in illness and in silence. The older generation carried this burden so that the younger generation could live. Unfortunately, today war has returned to Ukraine.

Once again, families flee. Once again, fear enters our homes. For Roma survivors, the present echoes the past. Trauma does not disappear with time. It is carried forward, but so is strength.

I speak today not only to remember, but to pass responsibility onward. My generation has carried memory through survival. Now we entrust this memory to our children and grandchildren not as fear, but as knowledge, dignity and protection. May they carry it further than we could and create a better world for next generations.

Thank you.

Dear Mr. Secretary General, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I stand in front of you today as a granddaughter, as a representative of the third generation after the Roma and Sinti genocide, as someone who accepts responsibility entrusted to me from survivors like my grandmother. We inherit not only memory, but wisdom. They teach us that survival is not only about endurance. It's about care, responsibility and action. The genocide of Roma and Sinti during the Second World War.

World War remains one of the world's least recognized crimes of Nazi regime in the world history. Tens and thousands of Roma and Sinti were murdered on the territory of today's Ukraine, often by mass shootings without documentation, graves or names. On the territory of Ukraine, the genocide was by bullets, meaning Roma were eliminated in the places of mass gatherings as Babyn Yar in Kiev and in many other places. For decades, this history remained outside official Holocaust remembrance. My generation works to change this.

We remember those who passed away during collective commemorative ceremonies, collect testimonies of still alive Roma survivors. In Ukraine, we build open archives, create permanent exhibitions for the state institutions and educational tools for school curriculums to ensure that their voices become part of national and global memory. This work is not symbolical. It is protective. Today's war in Ukraine and our generation's survival shows us that trauma is never only historical.

It is international, intergenerational and deeply human. Survivors teach us how to endure uncertainty, how to remain human in unhuman conditions, how to protect life even when the future is unclear. I accept the responsibility passed to my grandmother's generation. But memory alone is not enough. It must be transformed into protection, education and solidarity.

Our goal is not only to remember the past, but to care a future and create a future in which no child grows up fearing persecution because of who they are. Genocide. Remembrance is a commitment for future generations. What we do today will determine whether memory remains alive and whether dignity and human rights are truly protected tomorrow. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Tamenko, for sharing your grandmother's story. You're part of something vital. Descendants of survivors, the second and third generations. And keeping these memories alive and also facing that intergenerational trauma that you mentioned with your resolve. And I'd like to acknowledge the many of you who are here today.

Some leading public initiatives. Leslie Gel Rubin, the founder of the Last preserves survivor testimonies on film. Can you raise your hand.

Or stand up? Caroline Siegel, founder of if youf have Heard what I Heard. Along with Dave Reckless, Anna Scheuermann and Jane Pashman from the organizations three GNY and Living Links. They help families share their stories. Could you please stand up or raise your hand?

Others honor survivors more quietly within their own families. And this commitment carries weight, as we just heard, and complexity. But you're ensuring that these voices endure. And I want to thank you today. We are greatly honored to have have Ms. Evelyn Conrad join us.

Ms. Conrad is 97 years old. She was born in Vienna, Austria in 1928. Ms. Conrad, please come to the floor.

Your Excellency, Mr. Gutierrez. UN dignitaries and friends. They do not have any graves. They live in our memory. They were thrown into pits that they had to dig themselves.

But they are in our memory. Their bodies were shoved in into crematoria to be annihilated by fire, to be destroyed, to be erased. But they live in our memory. And we pass along to our children and our children's children the human duty to remember. The 6 million.

I remember my father's Hungarian family. None of them survived the Holocaust. From November 1938 on, after we had to leave Italy, my mother and I stayed in Budapest with my aunt Ilona. My father had been an officer in World War I. In 1938, he was still of age.

For military service, he had to get out of Hungary to avoid a recall. My aunt Ilona had a factory that made silk for flowers. She gave him documents that said that he represented her business in France. In France he expected to have an easier time or a better chance to get the hard to procure French visas for my mother and me. In December 1938, on my 10th birthday, we were still separated from him.

I wanted to go to school again, but my mother said it wasn't possible. So on most afternoons I went to the coffee shop, to the coffee house with my mother. I read headlines in German newspapers. I waited with her for a call from my father at the international telephone station. At night I listened to grownups whispering in the next room.

A young man had crossed the border on skis. I overheard isolated words, some phrases from the news that he brought from Vienna. My mother's cousin, a decorated World War I officer, had been clubbed to death on a trolley car by snot nosed thugs in uniform. Yes, that's what he would have said. Did anyone try to help him?

They turned away so they would not see. Always polite, the Viennese. I heard my mother's laugh, a strange laugh. I wondered what was funny. Then I fell asleep.

In May 1939 we got the French visas after my mother and I boarded the train in Budapest. And I never saw my Hungarian family again. On the train I was so excited because I'd soon see my beloved grandmother, my Omoti, again. I also looked forward to walking on the familiar streets in Vienna. But outside the train station, Vienna looked gray, glum.

As we crossed the bridge into Leopoldstadt, I heard the thunder of jackboots marching toward us from the I saw very few people on the those I saw were hurrying, staying close to the walls of the old buildings. We crossed from the trolley to Omoti's building. Two large women in dirndls approached us, where they should have had sprigs of Alpine roses or flowers pinned to their dirndls. Each had one large Hackenfurtz swastika. They marched toward us as if we were not there.

It happened so fast. They pushed my beautiful, slender mother off the sidewalk into the street. I ended up with one foot on the sidewalk, one foot on the street. My mother held my hand tight. I tried to break my mother's grip.

I wanted to run after those two big women. They didn't even look back. I wanted to bite them, to kick them, to scratch them. My mother dug her nails into my arm. Suddenly I was afraid.

Of course I wanted to see my Omuti. But this was no longer My Vienna. I would like you to know my Omuti. The way I remember her. What she was like in the Vienna that I remember.

I have no pictures of her, but I can tell you what she looked like. Omoti's face was exactly like the face of the American actress Tova Feldshu. But Tove Feldshu is slender. Omoty was a bit beyond Viennese. Plump felt was my Omoti's maiden name.

Ometi came to Vienna at age 17 with her husband, Samuel Dukeler. They became parents of my mother and her younger brother. My grandfather became owner of a haberdashery on Maria Hilfelstrasse during World War I. Even though he was father of two, my grandfather was nonetheless called into military service. He closed the store.

Then he disappeared into the military, into depression, into possible suicide. As a young widow, my Omoti stayed in the big family apartment. She had a all around cook housekeeper to help her. But Omoti did the household shopping herself. On her way home from the store.

She loved stopping at the nickelodeon. That's what gave her the idea. Leopoldstadt needed a full time movie theater. To own a movie theater in Vienna she needed a license from the government. So she did what she had to do to get the license.

She rented space on the Nestor plus, turned it into a theater with a film projection room. She was among the first movie owners in Vienna to have an American sound system. She got first run films from American and German film companies. The Nestor Tonkino was a success. My Omoti was a natural born businesswoman.

She was not as lucky in her private life. After my grandfather was declared dead, she married a man whose factory made combs for long hair. Women's long hair. The age of the flappers put an end to her new husband's business. He died of a heart attack several years after Omoti was widowed again.

Armin Breikner became her third husband. I adored him. His winter coats with fur collars, his silver tip walking cane, his gray mustache, his lederhosen for hikes in the Vienna woods. He died shortly before the Anschluss. What kind of grandma was Omuti?

On her birthday she came to see me in the day and she brought a stroller for my dolls. The store would have gladly delivered it, but she didn't want to wait to see me jump with joy at her present. Whenever we lived in Vienna, we stayed stayed with my Omoti. I remember her sitting at her mirrored vanity in her bedroom every morning, dressed in a dark suit or dress a flowered cotton wrap over her shoulders. Promptly at 10 in the morning, the maid would show my Omoti's hairdresser to comb out in to comb out my Omoti's hair before she left for the day.

During our May 1939 visit, Omoti's apartment was different. Omoti was different. She herself came to open the front door. She put a finger on her lips for us to keep quiet. She led us to her bedroom, down the long hall to the front of the building.

They'd moved two families into her apartment with her. I couldn't wait to get back on the train to get away from this new Vienna. Before we left, Omoti took one one of her flowered cotton wraps from the drawer in the vanity and gave it to me. I threw my arms around her. She held me close.

Then she turned her head away. I started to cry. I bit my lip to stop the tears. I wanted to get out of Vienna, and I was ashamed. I was so ashamed to be leaving my omity behind.

I didn't feel sick, safe again, until our train passed the limaginot into France a few weeks later, on the 1st of September 1939, Hitler's army marched into Poland and World War II broke out. All hope of getting my Omoti out of Austria was crushed. If the Germans win, I asked my father, will that mean that they were right about the Jews?

That question and that fear had plagued me. No, he said. He put me on his lap. The civilized world won't let them win. The whole world will always remember.

Might does not make right.

Decades later, during our 2024 visit to Vienna, a guide took my daughter Elizabeth and me to see the Wall of Names finally built in 2001 to commemorate the more than 64,000 Viennese victims of the Holocaust. The guide pointed to the other side of the empty city space that was a deportation center. She said, after the war, the they tore up the railroad tracks that started right here in the heart of the city. And the last sounds from Vienna that the Jews heard as they were being shoved into cattle cars were the insults shouted by the crowds of their former neighbors. Scum, vermin.

Get out of our country. My mother learned about her mother's death from a cousin who said that my Omoti had died on a transport to Treblinka in 1942.

I kept hoping against hope that she still lived. Eventually I learned to accept the truth, but it did not sink in as powerfully as that day in January 2024, when my daughter Elizabeth and I saw my Omoti's name, Eleonore Breitner, on the wall of names. Omoti did not survive the Holocaust. She lives in my memory and in My.

Dear Ms. Conrad, you have deeply moved us all. Thank you for sharing the vivid memories and the pictures from your beautiful life and your devastating tragic life after. It is now a pleasure to introduce a promising young cellist attending Colburn School, Mr. Serge Kalinowski, who will perform Ernest Bloch's Supplication. It.

Sa.

Sa.

Sam.

Thank you very much, Mr. Kalinowski. That was beautiful. It is my honor now to introduce Ms. Blumenthal Lausanne. Ms. Blumenthal Lazanne was born in Bremen, Germany in 1934. Ms. Lauzanne's great granddaughter, Ms. Lea Tova Svern, will accompany Ms. Lauzanne.

Thank you, Ms. Fleming, for giving me the opportunity to share my testimony today. In the early 1930s, my grandparents, parents, brother and I lived comfortably in Hoia, a small town in northwest Germany. In 1934, 35, when I was just one year old, the Nuremberg Laws were formulated drastically restricting the rights of Jews. Our lives changed dramatically and my parents decided to leave the country. On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht took place.

Our apartment was ransacked. But worst of all was that my father was forcibly transported to concentration camp Buchenwald in Germany. My father was released after three weeks only because our papers were in order for our immigration to America. In January of 1939 we left for Holland from where we were to sail to the United States. In December we were deported to the Dutch detention camp of Westerbork to await our departure to America.

Under Dutch control came Westerbork van Tyleb. However, In May of 1940, the Germans invaded Holland and we were trapped. When the Nazi SS took over the command of Westerbork, we were surrounded by the ever present terrifying 12 foot high barbed wire. Then in 1942, the dreadful transports to the concentration and extermination camps in Eastern Europe began. Every Monday night, lists of those to be deported were posted, causing incredible anxiety, anguish and fear.

And then on Tuesday mornings. Every Tuesday morning, men, women and little ones were marched to a nearby railroad platform from where they were transported. This area became known as as Boulevard de miser. Of the 120,000 men, women and children that departed Westerbork, 102,000 were doomed never to return. In January of 1944, it was our turn to be shipped out.

I remember that it was a bitter cold, pitch black, rainy night when we arrived at our destination, concentration camp, Bergen Belsen in Germany, we were dragged out of the cattle cars and greeted by the German guards who were shouting at us and threatening us with their weapons and with the most vicious attack dogs by their sides. I was a very frightened nine year old and to this day I still feel a certain whenever I see a German Shepherd. 600 of our people were crammed into each of the crude wooden heatless barracks meant for 100 when originally built. There were triple decker bunk beds with two people sharing each bunk. German winters were bitter cold and very long.

We were given only one thin blanket per bunk and a straw filled mattress. And this bunk was our only living quarters. And that for two people. I remember seeing a wagon filled with what I thought was firewood. I soon realized that what was in the wagon were dead naked bodies thrown one on top of the other.

Toilets consisted of long wooden benches with holes cut into them, one next to the other. There was no privacy, there was no toilet paper, there was no soap and hardly ever any water with which to wash. And in the almost year and a half there that we were in Bergen Belsen, never once were we able to brush our teeth. Every morning we were ordered to line up on a huge field. It was called an Appelplatz. Five in a row.

As we were counted, we would have to stand there until each and every one of us was accounted for. Often from early morning to late at night, without food, without water, no matter what the weather, without protective clothing, force bite was common. We would treat our affected toes and fingers with the warmth of our own urine. Our diet consisted of a slice of bread a day, some hot watery soup. The bread was later cut back and given to us just once a week, and only if our so called quarters were neat and in order.

Once a month we were marched to an area to shower. And there, under the watchful eyes of the guards, we were ordered to undress. I was frightened, not knowing what would come out of the faucets, water or gas. Yes, we were always hungry, we were thirsty, we were in pain. But for me, fear was the worst emotion to deal with.

The dark, crowded quarters often caused us to trip and fall over. The dead bodies could not be taken away fast enough. We as children saw things that no one, no matter what the age, should ever have to see. You have all read books, you've seen movies, through documentaries. But the constant foul odor, the filth, continuous horror and fear surrounded by death is indescribable.

There is no way that this can be put accurately into words or pictures. Our bodies, hair and clothes were infested with lice. We learned that there's a distinct difference between. Between head lice and clotheslines. Squashing them between my thumbnails became my primary pastime.

Much of my time was taken up with make believe games. And one game, a game based on superstition, became very important to me. I decided that if I were to find four pebbles of about the same size, size and shape, that that would mean that the four members of my family would all survive. It was a very difficult game to play, but I was sure that I would always fight my four pebbles. I made it my business to find those four pebbles.

My mother was a remarkable, extraordinary lady with tremendous inner strength and fortitude. Mom passed away six weeks short of 105. And when she was still with us, we were five generations of women. And I refer to that as survival and continuity. I have no doubt that it was because of my mother that I survived.

I am fortunate, very fortunate, that I was never separated from my mother during those difficult years. One day, my mother was able to smuggle some salt and potatoes from the kitchen where she worked and somehow managed to cook some soup in secret. This was done on our bunk. I was on the bunk with her, trying to hide and shield what she was doing. Soup was simmering, just about finished, when the German guards entered our barrack for surprise inspection.

In our rush to hide that setup, the boiling soup spilled on my leg. We had been taught self discipline and self control the hard way, for I knew for sure had I cried out, it would have cost us our lives. This happened in the spring of 1945. I was just 10 years old.

Soon thereafter we were transported to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe. And after 14 days on the train, without food, without water, without medical supplies, without sanitary facilities, the Russian army liberated our train. Near Trobetz, a small village in eastern Germany, 500 of the 2,500 people on board the train died en route or shortly thereafter. Many inhabitants in Trobitz fled and we took over their homes. Kitchens were stocked with ample food.

It was rich and good, actually much too good for our stock bodies. We could not tolerate that unfamiliar nourishment. And at that time, at the age of 10 and a half, I weighed 16 kilos, equivalent to 35 pounds. We were all ill with typhus, but my father had to die from it. Six weeks after our liberation, and this after six and a half years of mental torment and physical abuse.

In 1948, when I was 13 years old, our family of three emigrated to the United States. We arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey April 23, 1948. By coincidence, exactly three years to the day of our liberation, the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society find a home for us in Peoria, Illinois, where we once again started our lives anew. And because of my inability to speak English, I, at the age of 13, was placed in the fourth grade with nine year olds. Both my brother and I worked long hours after school to help our mom pay bills.

And by taking extra courses during the year, attending school, summer school, and by working very hard in my studies, I was able to be graduated from Peoria Central High School five years later at age 18, ranking eighth in a class of 267 students.

It was two months after high school graduation that I was married to Nathaniel Lazanne.

I am grateful that I survived healthy in body, mind and spirit, and that we're able to perpetuate our heritage with a wonderful family. We have three grown children. All three are happily married, have given us nine beautiful grandchildren and 15 extraordinary great grandchildren.

Survival and continuity for sure. This is the very yellow star that I was forced to wear. It was just another way to denigrate us, to isolate us and to set us apart from the rest of society. Each and every one of us must do everything in our power to prevent such hatred, such destruction and such terror from reoccurring. And we can begin by having love, respect and compassion towards one another.

Regardless of the religious belief, color of skin or national origin.

Let us all, each and every one of us, have this compassion and respect. It is such a simple message and yet so difficult to achieve. There is very little that we can do against the negativity in our world. But how we treat, behave and reach out towards one another, that is entirely up to us. And with that, I wish each and every one of you, your children, your grandchildren and all succeeding generations, a healthy, happy, productive future in a world of love and peace.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Ms. Blumenthal Lazanne and Ms. Spurn. You described the indescribable and you inspired us all. It is now my pleasure to welcome Ms. Sarah Weinstein. Ms. Weinstein was born in Stepan, Poland, Today, Ukraine.

Her daughters, Ms. Avital Weinstein and Ms. Orith Weinstein, and her granddaughters, Claire and Michelle Alpern, will accompany her. Ms. Weinstein will be speaking in Hebrew. And Please press Channel 1 on your headphones so that you'll be able to hear the interpretation in English.

Ladies and gentlemen, Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations. Danny Danone UN Secretary Secretary General Antonio Guters Distinguished guest. I stand before you with my greatest grace, victory. Beside me, my daughter and my grand grandchildren.

I have come here today with hand extended in a plea for peace in our world. So that the heart may have an open space to spread love. Let us be united. Let us love one another. May we have a good and meaningful life in this world.

And may we live a life of joy and goodness for the younger generation. The generation what will one day take our place. My name is Sarah Weinstein. A 91 year old Holocaust survivor. Born in Poland, A citizen of the State of Israel.

A country small in size, but yet great in heart and complexity. And I have come here to speak about the simplest, yet deepest of all things. Humanity.

When I was four years old, World War II began.

A little girl who just wanted to live, play and love.

And saw how the world was losing its way. Until then, my life had been quiet and peaceful. I was born into a large, traditional family. We lived in a small house, wrapped in love. My mother was a housewife and my father was a tailor.

I had three brothers, two sisters and I was the youngest. Grandma lived with us. I don't remember her name. The war had robbed me of many things. I don't remember my mother, how my mother looked like.

I don't have any pictures of my parents. We lived by the river, in the river. In the winter we would go onto the frozen river with sleds. My mother was doing laundry in the river and I sat next to her with my feet in the water. I didn't know that these days would be the last days with my mother.

In 1941 we were taken out of our homes and marched over the ghetto. For a year and three months. I was in the Berezenda ghetto and the Stefan ghetto. I will not bore you with the horror stories about life in the ghetto. The terrible conditions and difficulties.

At the end of that period, my parents realized that the Germans intended to destroy the ghetto and all of its habitants. We managed to escape with the help of the Ukrainian family who were friends of my parents, who arrived at night with a wagon full of straw and smuggled us to their house. Popel, the father of the family, was not Jewish. Every Ukrainian knew that whoever helps the Jews, those who fed the Jews, those who take care of the Jews, end up with death. Popel risked his life hiding us in a side room.

We were not allowed to talk or look out the window. It was forbidden for the outside world to know that we are at Popol's house.

Popel and his wife went out every few days to buy food. Bread, potatoes, cabbage. The villagers noticed that they were buying larger quantities of food than usual. They followed them and realized that they were hiding Jews. They came to the house, broke down the door and told us to all lay down on the floor.

My mother lay on top of me to protect her little girl. Popelin and his wife were asked to stand and they were the first to be shot. And they were then shot, all of us. My brother was injured, my mother was killed. The bullet that killed her penetrated me and I was very badly injured.

The bullet entered through my shoulder and pierced my back.

My sister in law and the two babies were murdered. The villages stood outside the house. They rejoiced and cheered that they had succeeded in killing more Jews. They set the house on fire and after a while they left. Father understood that if we did not get out, the fire would burn us too.

He shouted, children, those who are alive, get up and run away. No one got up from the shock. He went from one to the other and pulled us, me, my brothers and my two sisters. We took my mother's body from the burning house, dragged it for a burial in the forest and fled into it.

I was wounded, suffering from agony and pain, lying on the ground, hungry, thirsty, dirty, weak and feverish, in a minus 20 degrees Celsius, covered with leaves and branches to protect myself from the cold. The forest is huge and scary. There is no water, no food, no shoes and no shelter.

We were in the forest for three years. We lived like animals. I was wearing the same dress as we went when we ran away from the burning house, without shoes on my feet. I came out of the forest when I was nine and a half years old and weigh 15 kilo. On the day the war ended, my father was also murdered by the residents of the nearby village.

My two sisters and I were left alone in the world, waiting on the sidewalk for my dad return.

I wandered among dozens of orphanages until I arrived in Israel to a kibbutz that took me and became my home. I started family when I married Avraham. May his memory be blessed. He is also a Holocaust survivor. We had three daughters, six grandchildren, three grand grandchildren and a fourth great child on the way.

Thank you. Thank you. My family members who are in heaven are looking at me from above. My mother Mira, who gave me life twice when I was born. When she protected me and was murdered.

My father Binyamin. My sisters Shoshana and Rachel. My brothers Moshe, Avrasha, and Israel are with me here today in my heart. And we see the dirty, hungry girl who has not changed her dress for three years, standing here upright, speaking to the UN General Assembly.

Thank you, dear Sarah, madams. I've seen what happens when a person forgets that he's a person, when hatred becomes language and when people close their eyes. I survived, but my parents, all of my family members, and 6 million others didn't survive. Six million silent voices are asking us for one thing.

Don't forget. Not for us, but for you. Because the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with words, incitements, propaganda, jokes, accusations and indifference. And today I see again the buds of that hatred.

Anti Semitism is rising its head. Jews are being attacked and the world is silent. We must not accept a reality in which a Jew is forced to hide his identity, where synagogues are being burned and where words of hatred became an act of violence. Anyone who thinks that hatred of Jews stops a Jew is mistaken. Hatred never knows bounds.

Today is the anti Semitism, tomorrow it will be against different people, a different religion, a different race. Hatred and incitement spread like fire, burning everything we hold dear. Compassion, justice, trust and peace. I call on every person from here stand up for the hatred. Don't be silent.

When you see antisemitism on the street, online, at the university, raise your voice. Because silence in the face of hatred is complicity in transgression. Antisemitism is not just a matter of the Jewish people. It is a test of the entire world, whether we choose humanity or indifference.

I dedicated my life to telling what happened to me, to us, in the Holocaust.

I returned to Poland dozens of times as a witness to the younger generation on the last Holocaust Day, on marched in March of the Leven between the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the accursed war. We stood there, 80 Holocaust survivors, upright, proud, wrapped in Israeli flags, with our descendants by our side.

Thousands of youth, Jews and non Jews from around the world march with us, who saw with their own eyes the price of hatred and saw alongside it also hope.

They saw how we rose from the dust as people and as a nation. They saw us, the generation that went through the Holocaust and established the State of Israel, as representing revival, resilience and strength. They looked up to us, the disappearing generation of survivors. And I look up to you today in simplication, in demand. Never again.

Fulfill this commitment that was brutally violated in the terrible program of October 7th. I didn't believe I would ever see children fleeing a burning house like me when their parents were murdered in front of their eyes. I couldn't believe that I would hear of Jews chained in shackles, locked in cages, underground, without air, without light, in the terrible darkness, starved and physically and mentally abused.

Our worst nightmares came back to us.

Only yesterday when the last of the abducted hostages returned to us, was able to breathe again. And for the first time in a decade, there is no Israeli hostages in Gaza. The big wound, The big wound that opened in my beloved country will heal. I came to talk about humanity, human rights, analogous concept of international convention or legal documents.

They are born from a basic understanding that every person everywhere deserves to live in security, dignity and freedom. So are the Jews of the world. In Israel, we live in complex, sometimes painful reality. We are surrounded by security, political and emotional challenges.

But it is precisely in Israel, where life and death are so close to each other, our commitment to humility is being tested. We believe that humility is not a sign of weakness. It is a proof of strength, the power of a nation that has not given up hope, that has not lost the ability to see the other, even after being hurt so many times. I am 91 soon. I've seen human evil up close, but I also saw delight in man, the one who gave out a piece of bread, who hugged, who risked his life to save.

Delight exists in each of us. We must choose it every day. My testament to the younger generation and to everyone who hears me today. Don't forget what happened and don't allow to happen again to any people, to any person.

Remember, there is one thing that can save humility, and that is love.

One thing can save humanity, and that is love. Thank you for listening.

I thank Ms. Weinstein and her family. And we will all remember here at the UN your words. Let us choose. Choose light. The light exists in all of us.

It is now my pleasure to invite back Mr. Serge Kalinowski to perform Ernest Bloch's Prayer from the Sweet from Jewish Life.

It.

Sa.

Thank you very much, Mr. Under Kalinowski, liberated today 81 years ago by Soviet forces, Auschwitz has come to symbolize the Holocaust. Of course, no single camp could represent the genocide that stretched across Europe from 1933 to 1945. Between January and May 1945, Soviet, American and British forces liberated camp after camp, revealing the horrific scale of Nazi atrocities, many of which we have heard today from our eyewitness survivors. Today, in line with General Assembly Resolution 67, the basis for the United Nations Holocaust Remembrance Mandate, we honor the Courage and the dedication of those who liberated the camp camps and responded to the survivors with humanity.

I would now like to call on His Excellency Mr. Vasily A. Nabensia, Permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.

I will speak in Russian.

Distinguished guests, those of you who have survived the Holocaust. Mr. Secretary General. Madam President of the General Assembly.

Your Excellencies, colleagues, Ambassadors, Reverend Schnar. Elizabeth. Friends.

Today we have gathered to honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The genocide of the Jewish people committed by the Nazis as part of a horrifying ideology of racial supremacy. Which divided the entire world into superior Aryans and so called Untermenschen subhumans. According to this misanthropic ideology, the Untermenschen were expected to surrender their place in society, their property, their right to speak their native language and practice their religion, their right to receive an education, to run a business, their their land and ultimately their lives. To the superhuman representatives of the Aryan race to which German Nazis and a number of their collaborators purported to belong.

We must remember that this horrifying ideology did not immediately take on its final shape, its final form of the so called Final Solution. When gas chambers and crematorium ovens that shocked humanity's conscience were built, built to burn women, the elderly and infants. It all began instead with racial laws that divided people on ethnic and religious grounds. And that were rooted in the racial theories and practices of the colonialism that flourished at the time. That is precisely why we must prevent the resurgence of doctrines of supremacy or legislation that discriminates on ethnic, linguistic or racial grounds.

The peoples of Russia know what the Holocaust was firsthand. At least one third of its victims were citizens of the Soviet Union. It was on the territory of the USSR and Poland that the horrific death factories were located. It was here that actions were carried out at scale to physically exterminate Jews. Along with Slavs, Roma and people of other nationalities.

Today we also mark the 82nd anniversary of the end of the 900 day blockade of Leningrad. Where Nazis essentially carried out a genocidal policy of starvation against the residents of the city. Ladies and gentlemen, the easternmost Jewish ghetto was established by the Nazis on the territory of the USSR in July 1941, in the village of Ulyno, part of the Smolensk region of Russia. When they entered the village, the occupiers resettled the Jewish population, about 200 people in total, onto a separate street and surrounded the houses with barbed wire. The prisoners were given almost no food, but they were mercilessly forced into perform hard physical labor for the villagers, other villagers who had never categorized their neighbors by nationality and who had never even heard the word ghetto, this new measure was both terrifying and incomprehensible.

Tricking the guards and risking their own lives, they brought food and clothing to their imprisoned fellow villagers. And their solidarity was the only thing that helped the residents of the ghetto hold on. The harsh Russian winter of 1942 was in full swing. Severe frosts had set in that January, and one day guards came for the residents of the ghetto. Without giving them time to get dressed properly, they drove them all out into the street and led them to be executed.

The terrified, barely clothed crowd, mostly consisting of women, children and the elderly speaker, spent many hours out in the cold before being told that due to some delay or other, the execution was being postponed until the next morning. After spending the night awaiting certain death and hearing gunfire at dawn, the condemned residents of the ghetto were convinced that their time had come. But the sounds reaching their ears were in fact the sounds of a battle that brought salvation. On the morning of January 25, soldiers of the 252nd Rifle Division drove the Germans out of the village, thus putting an end to the existence of the Ilyuna ghetto. Victory was still far off at the time, but that act of liberation gave people the gift of life.

The Red army played a decisive role in destroying the Nazi regime, crushing it in its very lair in Berlin, and thus ending the Holocaust, which mercilessly annihilated people from the small village of Ilieno to the factory of death in Auschwitz.

We have gathered today on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, a date that is forever etched into the memory of the Russian people who are keeping the memory of the Great Peace patriotic war alive. On January 27, 1945, Red army troops entered Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps, and brought long awaited freedom to more than 7,000 of its remaining prisoners. About 200 Red army soldiers died that day. Such was the cost of the fierce battle that Soviet commanders decisively chose to engage in without the use of artillery. The Red army knew that it was not just the enemy behind the camp walls, but also prisoners.

It is vital that history preserve the truth about each and every one of the horrific crimes of Nazism, and that no considerations ever be used to justify these crimes or their perpetrators. Today, it is also vital to prevent the glorification of Nazism, which is something that we are unfortunately seeing today. That is why our country annually submits the resolution entitled Combating the Glorification of Nazism to the un General Assembly.

Thank you, Ambassador Mencia. I would now like to call on His Excellency, Mr. James Kariuki, charge d' Affaires of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the United Nations.

Excellencies. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to start by thanking the survivors and their families for their moving testimonies today and the strength you have shown in sharing your stories.

We must match their strengths. Our commitment to honoring the memory of the 6 million Jewish men, women and children who were murdered along with countless others by the Nazi regime in the darkest chapter in Europe's modern history. As His Majesty King Charles III said last year at an event in Poland to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The responsibility of remembrance rests on our shoulders and on those of generations yet unborn. And with that act of remembrance, we must every day reaffirm our collective responsibility to confront anti Semitism, hatred and all forms of prejudice wherever they arise.

Colleagues, friends. Sir Brian Urquhart is known in these halls as the Briton who helped create the UN 80 years ago, founded UN peacekeeping and served the organization for over 40 years. He was also amongst the first Allied troops to reach the Bergen Belsen death camp in April 1945 as a young British army officer. When they arrived, they found 13,000 unburied bodies.

In 2005, at this very event, Sir Bryan spoke of how the experience still haunted him. Who, he said, could imagine such horrors.

The experience also installed in young Bryan a commitment to to international cooperation and humanitarianism. Principles which drove the women and men of that generation to create a new international order from the horrors of the Second World War. Their generation knew too well that the Holocaust didn't start in Bergen Belsen or in Auschwitz, but in words of prejudice and hate, in political discourse, in a coffee shop, in a classroom. That it didn't take place in a dark corner, out of sight, but in plain view.

We here today are the guardians of their post war commitment to a different future. Not just by saying never again, but by each of us playing our part, working together to build open, inclusive societies.

Many of you will have seen the recent film One Life about the courageous Sir Nicholas Nicky Winton, a British stockbroker. On a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1938. We, Nikki, launched a rescue operation that ultimately saved 669 children, most of them Jewish, from the Holocaust. We can't all be Nicky, but we all have a role to play, to educate, to challenge Holocaust denial and distortion and to prevent the circumstances that led to in plain sight, to the murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children.

We must use this day, as former Secretary General Kofi Annan said, to remember not only the victims of past horrors whom the world abandoned, but also the potential victims of present and future ones.

It is our collective responsibility to ensure these crimes are not repeated and to actively defend our common humanity. Thank you.

Thank you, Ambassador. And I now invite Kantor Rafael Frieder to recite the memorial prayers for Cantor Frieder. Participating today is particularly meaningful to him, as his parents, Hannah and Emanuel Frieder, were Holocaust survivors targeted by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia. His parents found a family who hid them in an isolated village in a hilly area. And thanks to this family's kindness, both his parents and older sister, Margalit survived.

Please rise for the reciting of the memorial prayers. Cantor Frieder.

Sa.

K. Venom.

Please join me now in singing Animamin.

Animami.

Thank you, Cantor Frieder and Excellencies, survivors. Dear guests, our observance now draws to a close. Today and every day. May the memory of the victims of the Holocaust strengthen our resolve to build a world where dignity, justice and humanity prevail. Thank you.

Be safe and go well.