Ladies and Gentlemen,

I represent a special country and a special land.

People, war, witnesses, archives. All that is important. But there is not a better lesson about the Holocaust than looking through the gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau at the perspective of the camp and the chimneys of an enormous crematory.

Scale of the crime, precision of planning, defencelessness of the victims. The world cannot forget that.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Tomorrow, precisely tomorrow, 27th of January is the 55th anniversary of the liberation of Oswiêcim and hence of the few prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau who waited long enough for their freedom to come.

I presume therefore that the timing of the International Forum on the Holocaust has not been chosen incidentally by the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sweden. There were, unfortunately, more tragic place where the Holocaust came about: Chezmno as well as Treblinka as well as Sobibór, Belzec, Majdanek and Sztuthof. However, the first and the largest of the camps, Auschwitz, became a symbol. It became a synonym of the evil born out of hatred and contempt for other people, for racism, xenophobia and anti-semitism.

All those places designed for the annihilation of millions of people - were constructed by human beings. They pursued their goals in the name of an insane ideology. It was a result of its sentence that in October 1939 the Polish city of Oswiêcim, together with a large part of our country became the German Reich. This was to be the case for at least a thousand years and the time was to be used by the conquerors of the Polish land to subjugation of the local inhabitants and erasing the notion of "Poland" out of historical memory.

The goal of making those criminal plans a reality was to be served, among others, by the concentration camp whose construction was imminently launched. It was then that the world - which had previously known little of Oswiêcim - heard for the first time the ominous name of Auschwitz. Two years later the world irrevocably linked it with the tragic Birkenau. For a long time, it was not able to believe in what had happened there over the period of five years. Regrettably, it still does not understand it.

Thinking of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we repeat after Primo Levi - the Italian prisoner of the camp, one of the very few who survived and left to the future generations a testimony of the cruel times - an important question: who is a human being? Whom he or she should be to other people and the surrounding world?

Auschwitz and the entire experience of the Second World War remain a warning to all of us that in certain historical circumstances people become founders of institutions and systems of social and public life which can lead to genocide, to bureaucratisation of mass murder, to trivialising the evil. There is therefore never enough reminding and making ourselves aware that in adequately prepared conditions people can become executors (frequently also keen executors) of immoral commands and antihuman goals. I will once more repeat a well-known thesis that if people are treated as objects, the way is open to gas chambers.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I take the view that the Holocaust must not be treated as an incidental episode in the history of Europe and the world. The Holocaust is - let us say it openly and with full conviction! - an experience of our civilisation, the European civilisation as a whole. I believe that this thought had also led the Prime Minister of Sweden - in spite of the distance of your country from the sites of the Holocaust - to take upon himself the initiative of animating education about the Holocaust on our continent.

Just like the Partenon, like Forum Romanum, like Hagia Sofia, like the cathedrals in Cologne and Reims, like the Eiffel tower - Auschwitz-Birkenau is also part of the heritage of the European civilisation. It is a unique memento of human activity - unfortunately a sorrow and a shameful one. However, it should last in the memory. This is also what distinguishes Auschwitz from other monuments and relics of the past because it is also a scream, also a warning!

It is the intention of Poland and my own as the President of Poland for Auschwitz-Birkenau to last as a cemetery and a place of remembrance. I believe it to be very important for young people from around the world to visit it most frequently. We want to preserve Auschitz we want it to persist in its tragic expression and, giving testimony to the facts, speak to the imagination of the future generations. We want it to make everybody aware that it was human beings who imposed such a fate on other human beings.

It is therefore my intention to assure all who have gathered here that the Polish people will do everything possible to protect that place - for the future generations. It is our conviction that it should host a centre of studies and education about the Holocaust since in Auschwitz, as Elie Wiesel rightly noted: "not all the victims were Jews but all the Jews were victims".

We, the Poles, consider reminding about the Holocaust of the Jews to be our obligation. It is a painful paradox of history to us that our Polish land, for centuries perceived as its own by the Jewish nation, had to become under foreign rule the largest area of the "final solution of the Jewish question". The Jewish people, most numerous in our country out of the whole of Europe, had been among us for centuries. We had lived side by side for very long. In our history, culture, science, their memory is preserved as well as their achievements. Many distinguished Polish artists, scientists, doctors were Jews. In Auschwitz and other camps of annihilation, we lost co-inhabitants of this same land. We lost Polish citizens. It is our own, personal loss. We think of the war-time tragedy of the Jews with utmost pain.

We desire to preserve the memory of them. Not only the memory of their Holocaust but also the memory of their grandiose past. The memory of their long shared existence with us. The memory of Jewish culture, customs, knowledge and their unforgettable input into the Polish culture, knowledge and custom. This is the reason why I strongly support the establishment in Warsaw, on the site of the old ghetto, where before the war there used to be the largest Jewish settlement, of the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews. I believe that you, Ladies and Gentlemen, will support this initiative as well.

That museum will be a commemoration of the history of the Jews in our land as well as an another educational establishment. It will certainly amount to going half-way towards the needs of many of my compatriots, particularly the young. There are among them many people genuinely interested in the centuries-old history of the Polish-Jewish diaspora. It is them who will carry forward the memory of the fate of the Jews in our land.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I will celebrate tomorrow's anniversary of the liberation of Oswiêcim there, on the site, together with former prisoners. I will pass on to them the message from Stockholm that the memory of Auschwitz, the memory of the Holocaust is a memory of the whole of Europe. I will greet the few surviving past prisoners who lived through the Holocaust and who will take part in the anniversary commemoration. And I will promise them, the descendants of the common fate, sentenced to death by Nazism. I will promise to all victims of the largest tragedy of history: we will not forget! I will recall their sacrifice and I will stress: the World will not forget! The World cannot forget!