Dear Official Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen Ambassadors,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is with a sense of great honor and pleasure that I welcome you to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Today’s event marks the Foreign Ministry initiative to shed light, through the volume “Greek Righteous Among the Nations,” on an aspect of the history of the Occupation – an aspect that is unfortunately overlooked by many and that concerns the 327 Greek citizens who bear the honorific of “Righteous Among the Nations” because they saved, at risk to their own lives, our Jewish fellow citizens.
During the Second World War, Greece paid, for its size, a disproportionately heavy price for the freedom we enjoy today. Following the bitter fight to the finish against the invaders, our country suffered from hunger, the crimes against its population and the courageous Resistance against the occupation forces.
I believe that the persecution of the Jewish Greeks, in particular, is among the most heinous crimes perpetrated by the Axis powers in Greece.
The numbers are revealing: Before the Second World War, the thriving Jewish Greek community numbered over 75,000, of whom 67,151 lost their lives. Despite the fact that the Holocaust virtually wiped out the Jewish community of Thessaloniki – given that, of the 56,000 Greek Jews of the largest Sephardic community in Europe, only 1,950 were saved – the Jews living in Athens, Ioannina, Larissa, Corfu and Rhodes also faced the barbarity of the Nazis.
Those who managed to survive the persecutions and the Holocaust did so, in most cases, with the help of friends, neighbours, even officials of the time. The best way for us to comprehend the real moral magnitude of these actions of valor is to consider the unprecedented barbarity of those dark days.
However, despite the courage of many Christian Greeks – not just the ones we are honoring today, but others as well, the exact number of whom we shall perhaps never know – about 86% of the Jewish Greek population was exterminated in the Nazi camps. Thus, our county was left deprived of a vital part of its traditional polymorphism; poorer, an amputee.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Greece participates actively in all of the international initiatives and takes all the necessary measures on a national level to consolidate policies against xenophobia, racism and every other kind of discrimination, including anti-Semitism, naturally.
The Greek government directly condemns and takes the appropriate measures against acts of intolerance and anti-Semitism, in accordance with Greek principles and values as well as national, European and international law. It is no coincidence that our country is among the European countries with the fewest incidents of anti-Semitism. Moreover, none of these few, sporadic incidents involves physical violence – a fact that has been acknowledged by the Jewish Greek Community.
What’s more, the Greek state has in recent years adopted and implemented a number of measures and initiatives in favor of the Jewish community. In this context, three major legislative initiatives have been taken, based on which:
i. Israeli citizens who were born in Greece before 1945 can regain their Greece citizenship [Law 4018/2011 (article 13)].
ii. The Jewish Greek Community was paid compensation for the Old Jewish Cemetery of Thessaloniki (Law 3143/2011 (article 45)]
ii. The chair of Jewish studies at the University of Thessaloniki was recently restored.
By decision of the Hellenic Parliament, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed every year, on 27 January, in events throughout the country and with the official participation of the Greek state. It is worth mentioning at this point that, on this year’s Remembrance Day, for the first time in the Hellenic Parliament, the President of the Hellenic Republic inaugurated a monument with the names of the “327 Greek Righteous Among the Nations.” It must be noted that, apart from France, Greece is the only European state that honours its “Righteous” in this manner.
Holocaust monuments have been raised in Athens and Thessaloniki, including a monument to the Old Jewish Cemetery, within the grounds of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Moreover, we participate actively in international organizations and meetings concerning the Holocaust. The Greek state collaborates closely with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, while there is a permanent Greek exhibit at the Auschwitz Museum.
In this context, the Foreign Ministry’s Historical and Diplomatic Archive Service started its pioneering and praiseworthy publishing effort in 2000, with the aim of shedding light on aspects of the history of our country’s Jewish Community and, in particular, its rich contribution to the progress of our homeland.
This new book – the third in the series – from the Foreign Ministry demonstrates the indissoluble brotherly ties that connected and continue to connect Greeks of the Christian and Jewish faiths, proving that Greece has a national memory and moral standards.
At the same time, we are fulfilling an historical, national and moral duty. We are safeguarding our society – and I am referring first and foremost to our young people – from the constant danger of ignorance, of the falsification of history and of forgetting the brutality that indelibly marked our homeland and all humanity.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
People are capable of the best and the worst. The Holocaust is a salient example of this truth.
Beyond the honor due to the victims, unrelenting vigilance, raising awareness and educating are the only path to our gaining – and, most importantly, maintaining – consciousness of the worst that humankind are capable of perpetrating, so as to rally the best that we have in us.
Defending – vigorously and consistently – the values of our culture, our right to live in a society of democracy and equal rights, we will succeed in definitively marginalizing the voices of hatred, of racism, anti-Semitism and of intolerance; voices which, unfortunately, continue to menace modern societies.
Thank you for your attention.
May 30, 2016