(no subject)
Greville Janner (Lord Janner of Braunstone, QC), President of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism and Chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust:
Holocaust education transcends the political divide. This is becoming more important, year on year. As memories fade and new histories are written, we risk forgetting some of the horrors of the Second World War and of the Holocaust.
This process has been speeding up in countries such as Lithuania and Latvia. In some cases, the history of the horror is becoming twisted to suit a political and antisemetic agenda - and this deeply troubles me.
This is an agenda of distorting the truth, the truth of who was the victim and who were the perpetrators - and denying this through the blanket statement of ‘a complicated history’. Of course, Stalin and his Soviet Union committed horrendous crimes against citizens in the USSR and these must be remembered to help ensure that totalitarian regimes can never commit such crimes again - but these must also be remembered separately, as a separate crime to that of the Nazis and of their vile attempt to cleanse Europe of the Jewish people.
For Jews in Europe during the Holocaust there was little complication. The truth was and still remains that the Soviet and Allied forces were the heroes and the liberators and that Hitler’s Nazis were the perpetrators and the war criminals. Any attempt to pervert this history is an attack on the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Jews from that region which were murdered, including many of my own family, who were in Lithuania and Latvia.
Holocaust education transcends the political divide. This is becoming more important, year on year. As memories fade and new histories are written, we risk forgetting some of the horrors of the Second World War and of the Holocaust.
This process has been speeding up in countries such as Lithuania and Latvia. In some cases, the history of the horror is becoming twisted to suit a political and antisemetic agenda - and this deeply troubles me.
This is an agenda of distorting the truth, the truth of who was the victim and who were the perpetrators - and denying this through the blanket statement of ‘a complicated history’. Of course, Stalin and his Soviet Union committed horrendous crimes against citizens in the USSR and these must be remembered to help ensure that totalitarian regimes can never commit such crimes again - but these must also be remembered separately, as a separate crime to that of the Nazis and of their vile attempt to cleanse Europe of the Jewish people.
For Jews in Europe during the Holocaust there was little complication. The truth was and still remains that the Soviet and Allied forces were the heroes and the liberators and that Hitler’s Nazis were the perpetrators and the war criminals. Any attempt to pervert this history is an attack on the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Jews from that region which were murdered, including many of my own family, who were in Lithuania and Latvia.