The Holocaust was a premeditated crime that happened in the middle of society, a collapse of institutions, of all norms and humanity. It was generated by historical anti-Semitism, by the moral perversion of the political and intellectual elites and by all those who allowed democracy to be trampled underfoot and their peers excluded, persecuted or exterminated, Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca declared on Friday, in a message on the occasion of the ceremony organized on the occasion of the National Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust, according to Agerpres.
„National Holocaust Remembrance Day, October 9, commemorates the beginning of the mass deportations of Jews from Bucovina to Transnistria, the territory between Bug and Dniester under Romanian administration during the Holocaust. Starting from that day, over a hundred thousand Jews were embarked in freight trains, carried on foot for dozens of kilometers, frightened, humiliated, mistreated. Thousands more ended up dead during these deportations, from exhaustion, disease or cold. Individual executions were also part of this hellish transfer,” the prime minister said.
„We must never forget that 81 years ago the most terrible crime against innocent people, men, women and children, on ethnic and religious criteria began. Marshal Ion Antonescu’s regime – an absolute monstrosity – and his collaborators bear the full responsibility for the initiation and organization of the Holocaust, for the mass murder, but the failure of the entire society to save innocent people is a harsh reality that we admit and recognize,” Ciuca also said.
According to the head of the Executive, the fight against discrimination, anti-Semitism and xenophobia must be carried out on all levels, through political, administrative, educational measures and he emphasized that, „beyond the difficulty of the times”, „the fight against forgetting, indifference and the attachment to democratic values, freedom and humanity will win”.
The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania organized, on Friday, the annual ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, at the Memorial of the Victims of the Holocaust.
Agerpres