Klaus Iohannis said Tuesday during the decoration ceremony of three survivors of the Holocaust, that during his mandate he will seek to defend the memory of the Holocaust victims, showing that the Romanian state has learned the lessons of the past.
The President conferred at a ceremony held in the Union Hall at the Cotroceni Palace, the National Order "Faithful Service" Knight to Gabriela Bone, Viora Braun and Susan Diamantstein three survivors of the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp.
"Thank you, ladies, survivors of the Holocaust, that you are here today. Please accept this humble acknowledgment of the suffering you have endured along with your families," president Iohannis said in his speech.
"Thank you, ladies, survivors of the Holocaust, that you are here today. Please accept this humble acknowledgment of the suffering you have endured along with your families," the president said in his speech.
Klaus Iohannis has said that this award ceremony takes place at exactly 70 years after the liberation of the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and stated that, through them, we bring a pious homage to all the victims of the Holocaust in the War World.
"The day of being freed from this terrible extermination complex is dedicated to the memory of suffering, voices of resistance and concern for remembrance. The moment of today also means, however, one thing. It means that we, as a nation, we oppose the deliberate ignorance of the past. It means that we are not afraid to talk openly about guilt and responsibility.
Silence in the face of horrors, ignorance against discrimination, acceptance of the crimes the indifference to hate have also made possible the genocide. Deported to Transnistria by the Antonescu regime or to Auschwitz by the Horthy authorities, the Jews in these places have been victims of racial policy, anti-Semitism, discriminatory and criminal. Convoys of men and women, children and old people left the villages and towns to be deported. Thousands of innocent souls disappeared. And with them, citizenship or moral duty, "said the president, according to Mediafax.
Klaus Iohannis said that "by all that he did in the last decade on Holocaust commemoration and knowledge, the Romanian state has mastered the lessons of the past and fully understood to act against oblivion and any forms of intolerance, discrimination, racism , anti-Semitism and xenophobia ".
The president also said that in those troubled times of confusion and despair, there were Romanians, and many, known or not today, who showed human solidarity, who risked their freedom and lives to save from death Hebrew or Rroma people.
"May it be that the victims memory should always stay in our!", president Klaus Iohannis said in the end of his speech.