Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust in connection with

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

2.00pm, Thursday, 27 January 2022

REMARKS

of

THE HONORABLE TEODORO L. LOCSIN JR.

Secretary of Foreign Affairs

I am honored to join all of you  in this solemn commemoration  of humankind’s darkest hour. 

We are here to remember the victims –  the six million Jews murdered  during a time of unprecedented,  horrifying,  and abject cruelty;  such as no prior or subsequent act of barbarism  can ever come close to matching, although  both before and after  it is repeatedly tried.  

But never on this scale;  and with this deliberate purpose.  It was bad enough to want to erase a race;  but to do it as it was done:  meticulously planned,  in cold blood  and with sweeping, all-inclusive efficiency.  

And it spared no one, regardless of age.  It took particular relish in killing children;  infants. 

Today is also the anniversary  of the liberation  of Auschwitz-Birkenau.  That liberation  matched in the opposite sense of compassionate purpose  the horror it ended.  

The Allies knew  that nothing good  and plenty bad was happening in the death camps.  But it took  actual liberation to show —  in mass graves filled to the brim  and open doors of cold ovens surrounded by curious gray mounds of ash — the unspeakable acts of people who continue to have admirers throughout the world.  

So it is only right;  nay more, it is the decent thing for the global community to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on this day when it ended – for a while. 

We all have a deep responsibility  to remember the Holocaust  and hold firm to the commitment — never again.  Although it happens again and again.  But never on the same staggering scale,  dark design  and unspeakable, relished cruelty. 

My country is anchored on the conviction that we shall not stand by when something is done to others  that we would not have  done to ourselves. The manner of this one still boggles the horrified imagination.  

At the time of the Holocaust, it meant doing the decent thing  and implementing an Open Doors Policy, to take in the Jews fleeing systematic abuse heralding their imminent extinction.  

That decent thing we did was unmatched, indeed it was resisted by other countries in the world. There was no political incentive to do this, especially for a small country as ours in the Pacific. Indeed, there was scant authority for us to do it:  we were not yet an independent state but a dependency of a foreign power. It was just the sense of decency that moved Filipinos;  which is to say, the sense of humanity we expect as much from ourselves as from others.  

The rescue of the Jews speaks to a Philippine tradition of never turning away a stranger; of offering protection, especially to those most vulnerable to hurt  and in most desperate need of protection. And we give it without fail. I will not mention the occasions that spanned a century up to the present.   

The refuge we gave to Jews fleeing the Holocaust  is a defining moment in our friendship with the Jews. We shall always stand by Israel against any declared purpose or hint of another attempt  to repeat its extermination  by the barefaced lying denial that it ever happened.  

Because what happened exceeds any other despicable prejudice  based on race, religion or politics. Holocaust Denial is tantamount to a declared purpose of state to make it happen again to the Jews.  I will not dilute that message by invoking other horrors before and after it. Terrible as they were — in Kampuchea, in Rwanda —  they won’t bear iconic comparison.  

Jewish tradition has it that a person dies twice:  the first time  when his or her heart stops beating;  and then again the last time their name is said.  

For in a name’s utterance one thing of the dead and gone  at least survives into the present:  the names by which they were called in life by those who loved them. And as they were not to be called again  on the way to their deaths because their names had been substituted with serial numbers. 

No.  Let us seek out the mocking registries of death;  the last time their names were checked off against a list.  

Let us say their names again;  and keep saying their names.  For the sound of it at least  survives into the future they and their possible posterity were denied. Their murderers killed more than the Jews they starved to death, sickened, shot and gassed. 

So let us say their names; not in the collective as Jews;  but the names of each one of them. And keep saying them; one after the other.  We owe this  as much to our sense of humanity  as we owe it to them.  END