...Several months earlier, I visited the Wannsee Villa in Berlin. There, I saw the original invitation for the meeting of high-level Nazi officials, in which they decided to wipe out the Jewish people. On the invitation that was sent by the Deputy Head of the SS was written: “The chief of the Reich main security office, Reinhard Heydrich, cordially invites you to a discussion about the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Breakfast will be served at 09:00.”This is how, in an elegant villa on the shore of a pastoral lake, over breakfast and glasses of cognac, 15 men sat and decided how to destroy our people. No one batted an eyelid; no one expressed any doubt regarding the mission, either its necessity or its justness. Immediately after the meal, they began their work to erase the seed of Abraham from the Earth.
As I was walking through the villa, moving from document to document, I was filled with a helpless rage, and the feeling continued to grow until it became a flood. At the end of the tour, my German host asked me to write something in the guest book. I sat in the chair and the sadness and the anger rose up and started to overflow. And because of the storm of emotions, I wrote only three words: Am Israel Chai [the People of Israel live].
Tonight at Mount Herzl, I say those words again: Am Israel Chai...
Nevertheless, today we must ask the question: have the lessons of the Holocaust been learned? I believe that there are three lessons: fortify your strength, teach good deeds and fight evil...
The historic failure of the free world when faced with the Nazi menace was that they did not stand up against it in time, while there was still a chance to stop it.
And here we are today again witnesses to the fire of the new-old hatred, the hatred of the Jews, that is expressed by organizations and regimes associated with radical Islam, headed by Iran and its proxies.
Iran’s leaders race to develop nuclear weapons and they openly state their desire to destroy Israel. But in the face of these repeated statements to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the Earth, at best we hear a weak protest, and even this is fading away.
The required firm protest is not heard – not a sharp condemnation, not a cry of warning.
The world continues on as usual and there are even those who direct their criticism at us, against Israel.
Today, 65 years after the Holocaust, we must say in all honesty that what is most outrageous is the absence of outrage. The world gradually accepts Iran’s statements of destruction against Israel and we still do not see the necessary international determination to stop Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons.
But if we have learned anything from the lessons of the Holocaust, it is that we must not remain silent and be deterred in the face of evil.
I call on all enlightened countries to rise up to forcefully and firmly condemn Iran’s destructive intentions and to act with genuine determination to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons...
(From the text of Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony last Sunday night.)
