Mr. Prime Minister

Your Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen, all of whom are dignitaries in your jobs, titles and official capacities

Ladies and gentlemen representatives of the Jewish and Gypsy communities,

Dear invitees,

The thing that distinguishes victims of the Holocaust from other victims of war is the intention of their murderers to ensure that the race to which they belonged disappeared from the face of the earth.

This was the objective from the moment when the fate of the Jewish mothers, infants and young children was decided. The systematic murder of the Jews with premeditated deliberation, denied the Jews in Europe a future.

In 1943, the French author Vladimir Jankelevitch wrote the following in a clandestine brochure called “Le Mensonge Raciste” (The Racist Lie):

Of all the fascist evils, antisemitism was not the one that affected the largest number of victims, but it was the most monstrous of them all. Perhaps for the first time, men and women were hounded not for what they did, but for what they were. They expiated their ‘being’ and not their ‘having’. Not acts, political opinions or their faiths, but the fatality of birth…”

People were murdered because they had a mother. This was the essence of the antisemitism that reigned at the time: excluded, persecuted against, arrested and murdered because they were born. This is one of the most terrifying and threatening things imaginable, because each of us has a mother.

“Even if the heavens were parchment, all the trees quills, the seas and all waters were ink

and all the inhabitants of the earth were scribes and skilled writers,

it would not suffice to describe this nameless suffering…”

These words, which are part of an Aramean prayer and have been recited by generations and generations of Jews, come up with each attempt to speak of or to try to understand the Shoah, the biggest Jewish catastrophe of all times.

The millions of dead, more than 25,000 of which were deported from Belgium - the biggest war crime ever carried out in our country - are not dead in the normal sense of the word.

Their voices ring out louder than ever. They are the voices of truth against lies, of freedom against oppression, people against animals, the eternal living against the dead. They, the dead, lack commemorations and museums. They do not miss the living. It is we, the living who miss the dead. We miss two generations of people and more who were torn away from us.

These men and women, the old and the young, rich and poor, intellectual and uneducated, liberal professions and civil servants, white collar workers and blue collar workers, tradespeople, farmers, soldiers and citizens, all had the most diverse ideological and political convictions.

More than 25,000 Jews, men and women, with their failings and their qualities, but living beings that wanted to live, that could live, that had to live; old mothers, young mothers and children with questioning eyes who disappeared into that darkest night.

People like you and me. They believed in a world conscience that lacked prejudice. They were deluded, believing in a peaceful heaven. Not one inch of railway line in all Europe was ever bombed. Nothing was done to stop the convoys, apart from a few kilometres from here in Boortmeerbeek when the 20th convoy was halted and hundreds were able to escape. ONE such act…

It is only good and right that their memory should be commemorated in this museum among others, one of the few in Europe that attests to the Shoah at the very site that was the last station on the way to hell.

Never again should it be possible for these people to be cursed as living beings or forgotten after their death. It is often the case that in remembrance we find an explanation about their past and we are enlightened about their fate.

Every one of the 5% who survived, came more ill and broken than the next. Some died on the way back, others straight after their release from the camps. All of them had been through hell.  They were survivors, but they were marked for the rest of their lives by the inhuman ordeals they had endured. It was years before they were able to broach the subject, even in their own family circles.

Your Majesties,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Belgium has always been a safe haven and a refuge for persecuted Jews. Whenever the Jews were being hounded and massacred, Belgians stood up, not only to denounce the crimes against mankind, but also, with all the compassion possible in a living and active democracy, to welcome and take in these men and women who did not yet have the good fortune of a homeland in Israel.

They were taken into the secret shelters of convents, the Beloeil castle that belonged to the Princes de Ligne (an ancestor of his, Charles Joseph had actually, just one century before, been an ardent forerunner of Zionism), and into humble hovels in Flanders or workers’ houses on the banks of the Meuse.

Queen Elisabeth, who was to become Honorary President of the Belgian Committee of the Alyath Hanoar, Monsignor Kerkhofs, Bishop of Liège, Judicial Officials, but also and above all the anonymous employees of the supply services and resistance movements, all came to the aid of the Jewish population with an admiral and solid momentum.

It is only right that a moving and fervent homage should be made here to all those who, in the time of need, proved their solidarity with the Jewish people. Several thousands of whom were saved and brought back from the brink of death.

But Belgium did not do just this: it did a lot more. It provided a safe haven for those who had been banished, for the hunted, an asylum for the persecuted. Each time Jewish masses, victims of pogroms, were made martyrs and murdered in the east, Belgians stood up to propose all the practical and immediate measures that could lighten the fate of these sorry souls who, as Léon Blum said several days before his death, did not have the good fortune of finding a home in the place where they were born.

And when we look back in time and recall their names, we notice that not only did they form what is the most eminent, the most representative, but also the permanent people of our country. Because this is one of the major constant elements of our government, to be a wise and generous democracy that is welcoming and tolerant that does not ask its citizens which gods they worship, nor what they do, nor which joys cause their hearts to beat; to offer to each and every one the same amount of liberty and equality made possible by a social order based exclusively on human fraternity.

We cannot talk too often about the admirable spirit of our people who came to the aid of their persecuted brothers, their serene spontaneity, the calm passion with which they offered succour to the hounded Jews.

It is only good and right to pay homage to the Belgian people, in particular those who had the magnificent courage and sense of sacrifice, who demonstrated solidarity with the Jewish people who were subjected to persecution at the hands of the Nazis.

A great majority of the Belgian people, Flemish, Walloons and people of Brussels, above all humble men and women with the most widely differing religious or political convictions, who all took an important part in this vast and truly heroic rescue operation.

It is extremely difficult moreover to define the exact number of survivors whose lives were saved by the action of one of these heroes, who in many cases prefer even today to remain anonymous. There was often no direct contact between the saviour and the saved. Sometimes the encounters lasted only a few hours, or a few minutes. The risks that these saviours took meant that they had to work at night in total anonymity.

They created false ID cards, but never knew who benefited from them. And in the majority of cases the beneficiaries never knew who was working for their survival.

It is only good and right to remind and to testify publically and acknowledge the thousands of non-Jews who participated in saving more than 18,000 Jews including 4000 children, by helping them to escape deportation and an almost certain death.

We are committed to keeping alive the memory of these honourable people in the same way that we are committed to keeping alive the memory of those we lost for no other reason than the fact that they were born, because they existed.

So that the collective memory, apart from the death atrociously dealt to the Jews of Europe, also contains hope in mankind, a hope that was kept alive by these thousands of people who got up in the darkest of nights and held out a hand, a piece of bread, false ID papers or a refuge for thousands of children, often separated from one minute to the next from their parents who loved them so deeply and tenderly.

Because in addition to all the negative memories, there are also memories that we want to keep alive, memories of these acts of courage, heroism, generosity and solidarity.

The honourable people and their actions. Those who, during the Shoah, contributed via a gesture or an attitude to the fact that you and I, all of us, can continue to believe in humanity.

One of the missions of the Museum is to tell the story of what happened in Belgium. The history of the deportation from Belgium of more than 25,000 Jews and 351 Gypsies via the Dossin Barracks, also called the final waiting room of death, or the gateway to hell.

A Belgian story, the stories of the Jews from Aarlen or Ostend, Brussels, Antwerp or Liège who were arrested and deported between 1942 and 1944 just because they existed, because of the simple fact that they had a Jewish mother or a Jewish grandmother or grandfather…they are all the same.

In 1945 Auschwitz became the biggest graveyard in the world; more than a million victims in a surface area of just several thousand square metres, where there was not a single grave, the symbol of the worst horror that mankind has ever committed. Since then it has become THE symbol of the horror of horrors…

The Endlösung, which marked the intention to eliminate a whole race of people along with their language. Anything that could serve as a reminder of the Jewish race had to disappear. The tiniest babies had to be murdered to make it clear that there was no future on earth for the Jewish race, even the corpses had to be burned.

Auschwitz and the extermination camps were described as the ultimate evil: racism that resulted in the murder of whole populations not for what they did, but because of what they were, “Jews and Gypsies”...

There is a threat however, that the Holocaust might disappear as a moral landmark. Terms such as Auschwitz, genocide and holocaust are easily used to describe all kinds of injustice in the world and in our country.

But by so doing people are increasingly contributing to turning Auschwitz into something banal, a bagatelle. It apparently no longer serves as a warning for what can happen when a policy of racial exclusion and persecution is adopted.

Your Majesties,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In 2006, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance, the descendants of the survivors made a decision and a few months ago, our Honorary Chairman Sir Natan Ramet, since deceased, made the following speech:

We have made the history of the persecution of the Jews in Belgium more readable, more visible and more digestible. For years it was said that the witnesses would disappear in the decades ahead. And that is indeed the case!

… but as I look around me, I see disappearing among us, the survivors, the fear of departing without leaving a message behind. And I see our children and grandchildren who carry the memory deep inside themselves. I now believe that there are committed people who will follow in our footsteps.

It is particularly sad that Sir Natan Ramet was unable to be with us here today to witness this. The realisation of one of his dreams. The inauguration of this new Museum with a capacity to receive a lot more visitors.

I would like to take advantage of this occasion to offer a word of heartfelt thanks on behalf of the Jewish component of Kazerne Dossin to the Government of Flanders and the successive Prime Ministers and their administrative officers who have supported and made the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance a viable entity since the day it was opened.

But also and above all I would like to thank them because they adopted the idea of Prime Minister Patrick Dewael of creating an important Holocaust Museum here and because the Museum has been built, under the direction of Prime Minister Peeters.

I can assure you, Mr. Prime Minister, that the Jewish community in general, and everyone who is committed to remembrance education within the Jewish community in Belgium, will not forget this.

Democracy is the most valuable asset we have. It is and remains worth putting all the strength we have to fight for it. In a democratic system like ours and those of neighbouring countries, extremist groups have tried to make their presence felt in recent years. You can see that the resistance to this is equally great in all parties.

Democratic achievements such as freedom and tolerance, notions that we must safeguard, must be defended at all times with all our force.

Nothing can justify anti-Semitic attacks that belittle us, that disturb us, that frighten us. There is absolutely no excuse for this. These types of deeds dishonour our country, there are unworthy of democracy.

The racist and anti-Semitic threat should never be given the chance to worm its way into our society like a malignant tumour.

We must ensure that any form of exclusion and notion of cleansing are met with zero tolerance. None of this must be able to permeate. We must deal with them with one and the same outrage, with the same passion and do all we can to ensure they disappear forever.

Because we will never have complete peace on this earth, and because the world can never achieve peace, as long as a Jew by virtue of being a Jew, or any human being by virtue of being who they are, has to harbour any anxiety, or know any fear.

Survivors demand that their testimonies be heard and that we remember. Their memories must become and remain our memories. Every detail of the Holocaust and the history of what happened in Belgium must be told and every fact must be revealed. We all owe that to the victims.

Freedom and tolerance are concepts that we must take to our hearts. If antisemitism grew so strong between 1930 and 1940 it is because there was no resistance to it, the resolve that was needed was not there. And because it was permitted, it became an expression of opinion like any other…

A French minister a few years ago uttered the following words when discussing a law in the French Assemblée:

“When we accept the inacceptable, and excuse the inexcusable, whatever the reason, the end is near…”

When we make compromises with extremism, we must look at the true consequences thereof. These types of compromise always form a breeding ground for the emergence of racism or antisemitism and sooner or later we pay a high price for this.

Only one attitude is possible if we are to combat this and that is to put up a solid wall of refusal to indifference to blind hate, racism, antisemitism, exclusion and extremism.

This is why we must all remain alert to any sign of exclusion, any verbal abuse, any form of intolerance irrespective of race, belief or origin.

We must do all we can in order to remove breeding grounds for extremism, racism and intolerance. There can be no room in a democratic society for hate, racism and antisemitism. Our society must be built on the foundations of tolerance and respect.

Only by so doing can we continue to honour the memory of the millions of victims, 25,000 of whom were forced just a few metres from this spot, to take their last train journey.

It has been an honour for me to address you today not just as the son of a deportee, but also on behalf of all those who were deported from our country, from their families and their descendents. Marcel Marinower was first captured in Libourne as he was fleeing to France.  It was 1942 and he was taken the Pithiviers camp in France. He escaped from there and returned to Belgium. He was arrested again in April 1944 and taken to the Dossin Barracks from where he was transported to Auschwitz, number 583 of the 24th convoy on 4 April 1944.  He was 24. He survived Auschwitz and other camps, survived a death march and was finally liberated by British troops in Bergen Belsen in April 1945 and repatriated to Belgium in May 1945.

He died in Antwerp in January 1962, aged 42 as a result of the physical hardships he endured in the concentration camps. I was seven at the time.

Mr. Prime Minister

Your Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen, all of whom are dignitaries in your jobs, titles and official capacities

Ladies and gentlemen representatives of the Jewish and Gypsy communities,

Dear invitees,

Today, at this historically emotional site of Kazerne Dossin, at this place of remembrance a new piece of history is being written. For it is indeed today that we bring an end to the intense preparatory work that has been going on over the past decade in order to turn into reality the ultimate dream of the our honorary chairman Sir Natan Ramet who passed away this year. He was the quiet but passionate and inspiring driving force behind the Kazerne Dossin project that resulted in the Flemish Governments commission to create in particular a historic place that is an anchor point for our collective memory based on three pillars:

1. a Memorial as a commemoration and a place of reflection for the many descendents of the survivors who were deported from Kazerne Dossin. A memorial full of grace that also serves as the absent grave around which family and friends can come together to mourn, to muse or just to be.

2. a historic and educational Museum with international allure where visitors are able to learn about a moment in history when one of the most traumatic and dark episodes of our country and of Europe took place. In particular the persecution, the deportation to the “Endlösung” of innumerable Jews and gypsies in the extermination camps during the Second World War as well as other systematic violations of human rights in Belgium during the Nazi dictatorship in Europe.

3. an accessible Documentation Centre that contains the collection of testimonies and the impressive archives of the former Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance about the handling of the Holocaust in Belgium. A centre that also draws attention to other forms of genocide, ethnic cleansing, exclusion, intolerance and racism that is sadly prevalent in our world today.

The inauguration of this new museum marks the beginning of a future full of expectation with a long-term mission to contribute to a more humane and democratic society.

To capture the moment and explore the future, we must first understand the past.

Ladies and Gentlemen

Your presence at this unique event bears testimony to the support for the Kazerne Dossin project with its historic mission. It is also serves as a particularly strong encouragement to keep the message of tolerance, compassion, non-discrimination and respect alive and to pass it on to following generations.

Dear invitees,

The Flemish Government offered its financial support for the creation of the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance, and initiated the creation of this new museum, made it one of the goals of its government programme and financed the biggest associated investment project.

Dear Prime Minister,

For all your support and initiatives, for your considerable moral and material contribution and for the successful partnership, we offer our sincere and heartfelt thanks. The Flemish Government, the Province of Antwerp and the City of Mechelen have, in response to your proposal, joined forces with the not-for-profit Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance and created the not-for-profit Kazerne Dossin, The Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre about the Holocaust and Human Rights.

The slogan goes to the heart of the mission of this museum. The goal was to create an extension, in the form of Kazerne Dossin, to the former Jewish museum both in terms of space as well as content. In terms of space, we have this brand new museum building that we have the pleasure of inaugurating today as a true memorial. The former museum building has also been converted into a magnificent memorial.

On behalf of Kazerne Dossin I would like to thank the architect bOb Van Reeth and his team and congratulate them for the architectural integration of old and new that they have achieved seamlessly and harmoniously at this site.

I would like to spend a moment to go a little deeper into the notion of the extension in terms of space and content, around which Kazerne Dossin was created.

The new, permanent exhibition does of course provide updated content gleaned from the historic research that has been systematically carried out since the creation of the Jewish Museum in 1995. In terms of the historic background, the curator Professor Herman Van Goethem was able to call on the expertise of an International Advisory Board made up of the most eminent international experts and on an Exhibition Committee that represented the Belgian scientific sector.

The museum is based on the fact that the Dossin barracks was organised as an internment and transit camp - in Nazi terms - an SS- Sammellager - from where no less than 25,484 Jews and 352 gypsies were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1942 and 1944.

Let us not forget that this horror was also made possible by the mass collaboration of the Belgian authorities in the occupied area from Aarlen to Ostend until 1942. Our factual knowledge of this unreal episode has been considerably expanded today and with the addition of more nuanced information.

In this museum therefore, we look closely into how all of this was possible, how Belgian society could break down so thoroughly in such a short space of time. We try to analyse the perpetrators, the victims and of the bystanders. What did they do? What could they do? How much margin was there for resistance? The demand for a resistance movement; saying ‘no’ to a society that had lost its way, also plays a key role in this museum.

This museum tells a Belgian story. It is also about Flanders therefore, and Wallonia, about Antwerp and Brussels. It is also a story about people and society, where people apparently had difficulty with basic democratic values such as the principle of equality, in other words, the principle of non-discrimination.

This brings me to another essential aspect of the mission behind Kazerne Dossin - human rights. This museum is the first museum in the world to have the words Human Rights in its name. The statutes in 2008 set the cornerstone for the mission. I quote: “This project must contribute to the study and reflection about mechanisms of exclusion, intolerance and racism in society”.

It was clear to everyone that we needed to base ourselves on the information relating to this particular site in order to create our concept. Our chosen approach to human rights had to be linked at all times to what happened here at this spot. Another requirement was that it had to bring the notion of human rights up to date; it had to be about human rights today therefore. How is it possible to choose between the innumerable violations of human rights that take place in the world and cover the pages of the press today, or that even more seriously, do not appear in the press? Why do these breakdowns in society occur? We watched how Natan Ramet, after months of dialogue about the concept, said: “Only now do I really understand what happened to me”.

Providing a better insight into the mechanisms that led to such a breakdown of society is also an important educational mission that we want to transmit to the current and future generations. The concept of human rights is approached in this museum from a behavioural analysis. On the one hand we have the beginnings of the principle of non-discrimination that forms the basis of the legal concept of human rights and that was formalised in the European Treaty for Human Rights.

And on the other hand, this museum looks at the mechanism of an extreme mass violence with the murder of not just men, but women, old people and children.

Genocide is never a haphazard event. There is usually a long chain of increasingly intense violence that takes place beforehand. And in many instances, this chain starts with discrimination and exclusion.

A number of educational models have also been integrated into the museum along with an educational team. The subjects that are covered include discrimination and exclusion, group pressure and mass violence, respect for diversity. Another aim of Kazerne Dossin is to go even more deeply into its mission via this educational aspect by expanding the Documentation Centre into an interactive “centre of expertise” about the Holocaust and Human Rights. This involves using a number of scientifically respected publications and organising events that have strong content and an international slant. This may include lectures, debates, symposiums and talks as well as temporary artistic and historic exhibitions.

Kazerne Dossin with its museum and its educational and scientific projects will become a beacon in the international museum landscape, specialising in the Holocaust and Human Rights.

This museum will undoubtedly be the subject of debate and even controversy and criticism. Nothing is more difficult than creating a museum about the Holocaust; nothing is more delicate than the introduction of the notion of Human Rights. “Only in freedom can truth exist”, said the Roman philosopher Seneca. We will listen carefully to the many reactions and when the dust has settled, we will also embark on dialogue. Kazerne Dossin is an ongoing project.

Sir, Madam,

Mr Prime Minister,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In his monumental book “In Europe. Travels through the 20th century (In Europa. Reizen door de twintigste eeuw)” Geert Mak describes his rambling journey through the ‘madness’ of the 20th century. Geert Mak followed the ineradicable traces of history throughout the European continent. His travel log talks about the past, and what the past does to us. It is about things being torn asunder, about ignorance, about history and fear, about poverty and hope, about everything that separates and binds our new Europe. It is about people in their eternal search for a dignified existence. The names of the towns that have drawn and redrawn Europe, from Amsterdam to Sarajevo, all feature in this majestic ‘oeuvre de revue’.

During his next European tour, we hope that Geert Mak will include Kazerne Dossin as one of his stopping places where the past inspires the future, as a place of reflection and a memorial about the fundamental values of our European model of civilisation.

The mission behind Kazerne Dossin with its Memorial, Museum and Documentation about the Holocaust and Human Rights is to expand from being a unique place of remembrance into to a European beacon of history that contributes to a more humane society in which tolerance, compassion, non-discrimination and respect all play a key role.

Honourable ministers from Belgium and abroad,

Your excellencies,

Madam Governor,

Mr Mayor,

Ladies and gentlemen,

The whitewashed wall of the former Dossin Barracks rises up opposite this new museum building. Between 1942 and 1944, a gruesome plan was carried out behind this wall, only a few metres from where we sit today. At the time, the Nazis used this eighteenth-century infantry barracks as an assembly camp to deport people to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Over 25,000 Jews and 352 gypsies from Belgium and northern France were transferred from here in 28 transports. For over 24,000 of these people, it would be their final journey. They did not return.

This white wall symbolises a dark period in our history. It symbolises the fact that ordinary people are capable of the most unthinkable acts. The fact that these types of acts can also occur on our streets and in our squares.

In 1995, fifty years after these acts, the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance opened in the front part of the former barracks. The aim of the Jewish Community was to keep the memory of this dark chapter in our history alive, with the support of the Government of Flanders.

Thousands of people visited the museum in the following years. As a result, it soon became too small to cope with the number of visitors.

Moreover, new historical insights were developed about social evolutions before and during the Second World War. And contemporary phenomena such as racism, discrimination and the exclusion of people based on their ethnicity, faith, creed, colour, sex or orientation prompted a reflection starting from the Dossin site’s historic context. As a result, the content needed to be expanded and updated.

As a Holocaust survivor and the founder of the original museum, Sir Natan Ramet firmly believed in this expanded objective. It is extremely sad therefore that he is no longer with us to witness the opening of his new museum. His testimony about the horrors of the Holocaust and his deep sense of responsibility and belief in tolerance, respect and citizenship have added inestimable value to this project.

Sir Natan Ramet was the founding father of this museum and should also be remembered as such.

That is why I would like to propose that his name be permanently associated with the auditorium on the fourth floor of this museum. This auditorium will become a place where the dialogue, which he encouraged with such enthusiasm, will be pursued more than ever.

Ladies and gentlemen,

This memorial, museum and documentation centre is the outcome of sustained and intense consultations.

That is why I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to it. The services of the Government of Flanders who oversaw the project; Mayor Somers; the engineering firms; the board, the management and the employees of Kazerne Dossin. I would also like to thank all the contractors who were coordinated by NV CEI-De Meyer and all the other companies that were responsible for the museum’s design, the technology and the works in the area around the museum.

I would also like to thank my predecessors. The museum which I am honoured to inaugurate today would have never been completed without the continuity that the previous Governments of Flanders accorded to this matter.

The current Government of Flanders has continued this effort and even consolidated it. By investing 25 million euros in the museum’s construction on the one hand and by our intention to continue to support the museum’s operations in the future on the other.

But the permanent support of the Government of Flanders should not be taken to mean that this is an exclusively Flemish project.

The presence of the King, of representatives of the various Belgian policy levels and of the philosophical and ideological organisations, and several ministers, ambassadors and attachés from abroad prove that this story is a universal story, of and for all people. Of and for everyone who shares our desire to ensure that what happened here will never happen again. The museum serves as a beacon for remembrance education, in its broadest sense, in Belgium and abroad.

The design of this beacon is simply spectacular. bOb Van Reeth and ‘awg architecten’ have done a splendid job. The conversion of the barracks into a Memorial and documentation centre; the construction of the square and the architecture, and especially the design of this new museum, bear testimony to a strong vision.

And this vision is also reflected in the content. Professor Herman Van Goethem accepted the challenge to link the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War with the broader issue of the violation of human rights. Eric Stroobants, the chairman of the non-profit association Kazerne Dossin, will discuss this in more detail later.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The opening of this museum takes place in the year in which our country holds the chairmanship of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. With this new museum, Flanders has put the objectives of this task force into practice. I would like to emphatically thank the International Advisory Board, and the representatives of the other Holocaust Museums for their support of this project.

I am convinced that Kazerne Dossin will have its own place in the list of international Holocaust museums and in the wider circle of remembrance museums. I am currently looking into whether we can organise regular international meetings here in Mechelen. The level of international interest, which today is an important source of support for Kazerne Dossin, is very

encouraging and provides the foundation for an even more enhanced collaboration.

Ladies and gentlemen, this new museum establishes connections which may prompt a proper debate. For example, in the introductory film, which will be shown at the start of the guided tour, the link is established with bullying and exclusion among young people.

The step from bullying and exclusion to violence is a small one. The same goes for the step from individual violence to group violence. These dangers are just as real as they were 70 or 80 years ago. Naturally, they cannot be compared to the machinery of destruction of the Holocaust, but the ultimate form of mass violence is genocide.

And that is what this museum is all about. About keeping the memory alive, about vigilance. So that we never have to experience what happened behind that white wall again. But this is also about growing towards more tolerance, respect and citizenship.

This museum is also about the stories of people like Simon Gronowski and Koenraad Tinel, who are with us here today. Simon Gronowski survived the twentieth Dossin convoy; he managed to escape from the train that was stopped by a group of heroic members of the Belgian resistance.

Koenraad Tinel is the son of a Belgian Nazi, who fled to Germany with his family after the Normandy landings, who was subsequently arrested and extradited to Belgium via Nuremberg. Today, these two men are the best of friends.

Ladies and gentlemen, they prove that one is not a victim or an offender from birth, but rather that one becomes one or the other because of the time, the place and the surroundings. And this should give us hope. Because it means that we can also prevent this from happening. That we can learn from the past and thus protect our children and grandchildren from the tragedies to which our parents and grandparents were subjected.

Or to quote Simon Gronowski: “Regardless of how tragic yesterday’s events were and how many people are suffering today, you must always maintain your faith in the future. You must have faith in the fundamental goodness of people.”

Let this be the message that we send out to the world today. A message of peace and tolerance. Of vigilance and resilience. But above all, ladies and gentlemen, a message of faith in the

goodness of people and unflagging hope of a better and more beautiful tomorrow.

Thank you.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The word razzia is sad and repellent. The razzia like a police-orchestrated manhunt of the innocent is the repulsive act that we are remembering this evening. Those who remember stand still and look back. To remember is to interrupt, briefly, the flow of the everyday to recall together events or people from the past. It was on the 15th of August 1942, a Sabbath, here in this city on the river Schelde, that the first national open hunt, the premeditated razzia on the Jewish people, was organised. This is what we wish to remember, it is why we take a moment to pause and contemplate this evening, in part thanks to the initiative and the effort of the Antwerp city council. Better late than pedagogically never.

While I was reflecting on my spoken contribution, the 28-year-old Etty Hillesum came to mind. She was gassed at Auschwitz around the 30th of November 1943 and had written in her diary: “Dante’s hell is a frivolous operetta compared to this.” I also thought of Abel Herzberg and his novel Three Red Roses, in which he wrote, approximately: “He, Salomon Zeitschek, was part of a community that was written off the balance sheet of existence. You felt no sorrow for what you were going through, you felt sorry for a humanity to which, in spite of everything, you still belonged.”

Sorrow for a humanity to which you still belonged in spite of everything. We would be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful, or indeed more heartbreaking, way to express it.

The people we are, despite everything; the humanity to which, I believe, we all belong. We are indeed the people who find ourselves too often having to live in an oppressive world in which we, in spite of everything, must act meaningfully. We are people who, in the words of Elie Wiesel, “must invest hope in a world that offers none.”

How do we do that? My first answer would be: “I don’t know any more.” My second answer is: “We must never resign ourselves to that first answer.” As early as the 19th century, the German rabbi Samson ben Rafaël Hirsch wrote, roughly translated: “There is something inside us that calls out in full despair: you can never despair. Nobody can. Our tradition doesn’t allow it. Even less so does it allow a person to squelch the hope of human betterment in our fellow humans.”

Never falter and never give up is therefore the logical message because it is also possible to contemplate that despairing of the world is effectively the same as assuming the attitude of the deeply abhorrent national-socialism. Nazism also started from the sentiment that the world is inherently worthless, that nothing good can come from human kind and that unmitigated power, merciless discipline and bloodthirsty guile are the only values that apply. This kind of belief and herd mentality appeals, as history demonstrated to our deepest disgrace, to human kind’s most basic animal instincts. Paradoxically, people who are driven to such a desperately nihilistic attitude subscribe deep down to an implicit assertion of Nazism, even in a global village where eagerly anticipated springs turn to ice at a bewildering speed.

To still believe in and have hope for humanity after the Shoa was and is not easy but those who wish to be consistent in their anti-horror attitude will accept the challenge and must communicate it both mentally and effectively. The late lamented Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, a Hegel specialist, when struggling with the pathological heathen nature of the Shoa terror summarised his contribution to the ideas of the post-war Jewish generations by adding a 614th commandment to the 613 commandments and interdictions of Judaism: “Thou shalt survive” because the authentic Jew of today and tomorrow may not give a posthumous victory to absolute evil.

Of course, there are these questions: How do we live and act to prevent genocidal crimes? Was the holocaust a spontaneous eruption of a gang of criminals or did the Nazis mostly act from a deep-rooted, time-spanning European tradition? A repressed disease that becomes and is visible, audible, tangible and readable again with the smallest socio-economic recession.

It may be recalled how the destructive doctrine of Nazism was not only the work of perverse sadists or incurable Jew-haters, the massacre was also carried out by impeccably tidy public servants and armchair intellectuals, goaded and poisoned as they may or may not have been by contemporary media, because hate seems to be more contagious than brotherly love.

There are indeed good and bad conspiracies, even in the cursed time when I, as a Jewish child and with no masochistic parading about, was doomed. Those were years of darkness in which time and time again alliances were built by people who were willing to take the greatest risks to save lives. It is undeniably true that this was a minority and that in the meantime a more populous group of official and private accomplices were ideologically and opportunistically conspiring in degrading vicious acts while the majority remained at the sidelines watching the persecuted being chased into the gutter.

A Jewish legend speaks of 36 honest people, unaware of the remarkable nature of their acts, who save the world every generation. These are stories of men and women who, each from their own place, had the fully democratic decency to let care for others prevail over their own safety and cool self-interest. These stories do indeed maintain a highly educational content. They illustrate that human kind is never condemned to impotence or the tyranny of political correctness, not even when faced with advanced killing machines or manifest ethical neglect.

It is of course true that it may be one of the depressing lessons to draw from history, that history, in effect, teaches us nothing. That States, ideologies, and so people, cannot or will not fully curb their predilection for brutality. And then there are the doom and gloom merchants with their gaudy pomposity and the pedantic bar philosophers with their ideas that remembrance education gives rise to nothing!

But doing nothing in this case may and can never, even against better judgement, be a moral option.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is untrue that time is a flowing stream. Time stands still in our head and we travel from memory to memory along the intricate roads of emotional logic. Past and present, partly because of this, lie along the same line of thought.

Yesterday and today are pieces of the same mental image. A meta-political commemorative plaque like this and, perhaps in the future thanks to the municipal commission Beeld in de Stad and the unrelenting effort of the Forum for Jewish Organisations, a monument memorialising the Jewish people deported from Antwerp will, to avoid disastrous recidivism, elucidate yesterday’s doom in the service of a never-again-tomorrow. Warning beacons and reminders in case there are ever again times in which the ruthless darkness tries to grab hold of us. Because, as said before, hate is more contagious than love.

Welcome to the Jewish Central Consistory of Belgium’s new site.  You may consult the following pages on this site:

• The Consistory’s history
• How the Consistory works
• Belgium’s recognized Jewish communities, in words and pictures
• The archives of our newsletter, Les Nouvelles Consistoriales/Consistoriaal Nieuwsblad
• The coming edition of our newsletter
• Links to other sites related to the Jewish community and Judaism
• Contact page

Happy browsing!

Joëlle Milquet
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior and Equal Opportunity
Rue de la Loi, 2
1000 Brussels

Mrs. Milquet,

We were extremely pleased to learn that this past May 9^th the mayor of Brussels prohibited the highly controversial French “comedian” Dieudonné, who is well known for his negationism and anti-Jewish positions, from performing in Brussels, as other boroughs and towns such as Anderlecht, Laakdal, and Ninove have already done.  On behalf of the Jewish Central Consistory of Belgium we wish to congratulate you on the way the problem has been resolved and hope that this is the result of our joint commitment.

Racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular are taking on major proportions both in our country and in Europe, and extirpating it calls for firm and courageous treatment.  We thus thank you, as well as the mayors of the towns concerned, for this strong signal.  We remain at your disposal for fruitful subsequent collaboration.

Sincerely,

Professor Julien Klener,

President of the Jewish Central Consistory of Belgium

The Jewish Central Consistory of Belgium learned of this odious action, which also targeted the Jewish community as a whole, with horror and disgust.  Constant, stepped-up surveillance against possible attacks must be provided for the Jewish institutions, and Jewish schools in particular, in our country and all the other States of the European Union.  Even after the Holocaust, Jews still may not enjoy carefree freedom in all circumstances.

The Jewish Central Consistory of Belgium shares the pain of all the victims’ families, with whom it deeply and truly empathizes.

It is with great sorrow that the Jewish Central Consistory of Belgium informs you of its loss with the passing of its Honorary President, Baron Georges Schnek.

Baron Georges Schnek was an extremely committed member of the Resistance during the years of Nazi domination, professor of chemistry at Brussels Free University (ULB), cofounder of the Jewish Students Union of Belgium, president of the Jewish Central Consistory of Belgium, and, until very recently, president of the Jewish Museum of Belgium.  He was also instrumental in creating the Martin Buber Jewish Studies Institute, of which he was vice president.

The burial will take place at the Jewish Cemetery in Kraainem, Wednesday, March 21, 2012, at 2:30 p.m.