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Conversation: Foreign Secretary’s speech from Holocaust Memorial Day wedding reception – 24 January 2023

They understood full well that they had been risking their own lives. Your Excellency the Ambassador of Israel, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. “At night the glow of the flames from the chimneys…showed with the crevices in the walls. The particular shrieks of the sick or maybe the wounded, crowded together in trucks bound for some unknown destination, grated on our spirit. The members of the Elsinore Sewing Club – and others such as them across occupied Europe – consciously decided to location themselves in the mortal peril in order to save others. Last year, on the winter evening, I stood on a concrete platform of the disused Radegast station within Lodz in Poland. Out of this nondescript and functional creating, 200, 000 Jewish guys, women and children were transferred to Nazi death camps. In the town associated with Elsinore, the escape collection was run by Erling Kiaer, the local bookbinder, Thormod Larsen, a policeman, Ove Bruhn, a clerk, plus Børge Rønne, the publisher of the local newspaper. These people called themselves the “Elsinore Sewing Club” and they carried regarding 700 Jews across the Audio to Sweden. Today, we must all silently request ourselves the difficult plus searching question, what might I have done? And indeed in May 1944, the Nazis arrested Erling Kiaer right after intercepting his motorboat, and was incarcerated in Neuengamme concentration camp in Philippines. Now our only possible reaction is to mean it, basis, when we say the words “never again”. I stood where they would have got stood, and I saw the actual saw; the crude wood cattle trucks, drawn up by the platform. They were concealed in churches, in private hospitals and in family homes, plus spirited to coastal towns, from where they were taken to safety in Sweden, aboard fishing boats or kayaks or motorboats. I reflected that there had been countless unused buildings such as this, scattered across occupied Europe, all being used, to send human beings to be murdered. And then Olga Lengyel requests: “Could such conditions actually exist in Europe within the twentieth century? ” Would There are taken that risk, not merely for myself but for my family? Inside the station developing, I turned over page after page of nicely typewritten names of the people who were forced at gunpoint onto those trucks. I’m deeply honoured to participate you on this occasion. Today, every one of us shares the solemn duty to remember that those conditions did indeed can be found in Europe in the 20th century, that six mil men, women and children were consumed by the Holocaust, But the hard truth is that when the moment arrived, there were never enough people like them. But he survived until the camp liberation, and he resided until his 77th calendar year, dying in 1980. “Sometimes we heard revolver shots, for the SS pads used their guns freely. Above these noises arrived orders barked in overbearing voices. Nothing would let us forget our slavery. ” This remains an extraordinary and outstanding fact that ordinary people in Denmark managed to save almost all of their particular country’s Jews. She wrote, and I quotation: “Whenever I recall the very first days at the camp, We still grow hot plus cold with nameless fear. It was a terror that will rose for no specific reason, but one that has been constantly nourished by strange occurrences whose meaning I actually sought in vain. And as we answer that profoundly difficult and required question in our hearts, all of us owe it to the six million who were not preserved to reflect, to learn, to grieve, and above all, to remember. But there were, at the time, some ordinary people who meant it when they said to on their own that they would not stand by, and so they would not watch others becoming transported to their deaths. One of those who was deported to Auschwitz, in her case from Romania, was Olga Lengyel, who lost her parents, lost her husband, plus lost her two kids. Radegast had been where the Jews of Lodz ghetto were transported in order to Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau. If virtually every Jew could be saved in Denmark, why not elsewhere?

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