ZAGREB, January 26, 2018 – The Croatian Parliament started its session on Friday by observing a minute of silence on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, with Speaker Gordan Jandroković saying that the victims should remain forever in the collective conscience of human kind so that such crimes could never happen again.
“On 27 January 1945 the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz was liberated. That biggest site of crimes and cruelty symbolises all the other places where during the Nazi and Fascist regimes six million children, women and men were systematically tortured and killed just because they were Jews and because they belonged, according to the monstrous Nazi ideology, to an unwanted group. Six million human stories and dreams, including those by members of various minority groups, disappeared without a trace. It is therefore our responsibility as individuals and as a society to fight intolerance and hate, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and prejudices of any kind,” said Jandroković.
“By marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we honour the strength of the Jewish and all other peoples who knew how to and were capable of surviving one of the darkest chapters in the history of human kind. The experience of the Holocaust has shown us that during that difficult period in Europe’s history there were people who had the strength and courage not to stay indifferent to the injustice done to the Jewish people. Listening to their own conscience and putting their own lives in danger, they saved people known and unknown to them,” said Jandroković, noting that there were 115 Croatians among the Righteous Among Nations.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he said, is a reminder that tolerance must be promoted and that crimes, discrimination, racism and anti-Semitism must be fought.
“It reminds us that globally we have to continue building societies based on mutual understanding and trust, tolerance and solidarity, in which we will permanently promote universal principles of democracy and human rights in the spirit of dialogue and openness. Those are the fundamental values of the community of democratic countries,” Jandroković said.
He added that those values were the best guarantee that cruelty, genocides and crimes would be prevented for good and that the Holocaust as well as crimes committed in the 1990s in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina – Vukovar, Škabrnja, Srebrenica and other places of suffering – would never happen again.
