Embassy Events 2010
“Duty to Remember”: President Obama Delivers Video Message for Auschwitz Liberation Anniversary
27 January 2010
President Barack Obama
“Duty to Remember”: January 27, 2010 -- President Obama gave remarks by video commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp’s liberation at the conference “Auschwitz – Memory, Responsibility, Education” held at the Center of Dialogue and Prayer, in the Polish town of Oswiecim, and also at the International Holocaust Forum “Let My People Live” hosted by the European Jewish Congress in Krakow.
President Obama expressed his gratitude to Poland’s leadership and the people of Poland for “preserving a place of such great pain for the Polish people […] a place of remembrance and learning for the world.”
In his remarks, the President emphasized our “sacred duty to remember,” as well as “the burden of seeing our common humanity; of resisting anti-Semitism and ignorance in all its forms; of refusing to become bystanders to evil, whenever and wherever it rears its ugly face.”
In addition to recalling the evil committed at Auschwitz, President Obama spoke about “man’s capacity for good,” and recalled acts of “compassion” and “resistance” including the “Polish Rescuers and those who earned their place forever in the Righteous Among the Nations.”
He also praised those who survived the Holocaust as “living memorials to the loved ones you left here. And to the spirit we must strive to uphold in our time.”