This conference has been special for it has had a unique character. Never before have so many Heads of States and governments, survivors and historians, philosophers and writers, Jews and non-Jews, gathered to search for urgently needed methods of educating the new XXIst century’s youth on how to maintain the memory of the Holocaust alive and untarnished.

They and the Government of Sweden are to be thanked.

The debates were often painful. Yet, we listened to one another with eagerness and respect. We all felt that in remembering the victims, we prevent their second murder.

Have we found answers? The question will remain History’s open wounds. The ghettos and the Final Solution, the Einsatz Kommandos and gaschambers, Birkenau and Treblinka, Ponar and Majdanek, Babi Yar and Sobibor: what were the causes of crimes of such magnitude? What did they mean? Did Creation go mad? Did God cover his face?

After Auschwitz, the human condition is nolonger the same. Even our dreams and hopes have changed. Man’s perception of his attitudes to wards power, faith, political commitment and neu-trality have been tested and possibly altered. After Belzec, we realize that the unthinkable may become real.

Many aspects of the tragedy still seem uncomprehensible. How can anyone explain Evil of such magnitude? How can anyone understand the calculated cruelty of the killers, the passivity of onlookers? Why was the free world silent? When six million Jews were exterminated? Why did the Allies refuse to bomb the railway tracks leading to the death factories? Has the world learned lessons from the Holocaust? If so, why is there still so much hatred in so many places? Why is antisemitism still an active threat?

We have heard survivors and witnesses speak.

Paradoxically, they advocate hope, not despair, solidarity instead of anger. They all insisted on the importance of memory: it may very well be our only answer, our human hope to save ur children.

Thus, as we bid farewell to one another, let us make a vow:

May days come and go , may events follow events, but we shall remember and move others to remember. We shall remember those who resisted the enemy and those who died with prayers on their lips. They fought alone, they suffered alone, they lived alone but they did not die alone; did something in all of us die with them?

The answer to this question lies in our hearts.

Elie Wiesel