Mr. President of the General Assembly, Secretary General, Ministers, Excellencies, Distinguished Representatives

I stand before you today, speaking on behalf of the Government of Romania and voicing feelings coming from my compatriots, to say our sorrow, and to pay our profound respect to the memory of so many people who, most of them simply because they were Jews, suffered and lost their lives at the Nazi concentration camps.

Today is a day of remembrance for the victims, and a day when we say our gratitude to soldiers who made the nightmare and the evil of the concentration camps come to an end. We recall the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a milestone in the tearing down of the entire network of death camps.

It is right to honor this day at the UN, it is right to hold this special session of our General Assembly. We need to remember the past, we need to hold on to its lessons, and to seek thereupon guidance for the times to come.

Romania upheld all the way this remembrance at the UN. Romanians remember too the years of Nazi terror, the times of an ideology that produced the infamous camps. Many Romanian Jews perished there. As the world was learning the full extent of the horror, Romanians too realized the full depth of the tragedy that befell on fellow citizens.

Coming out of the long shadow of totalitarianism and reintegrating the community of democratic nations, Romanians took upon a long, painful journey of recovering their memories and confronting the whole truth of those dramatic years. Today, we in Romania do believe that it is our duty to know and not to forget.

We believe there are responsibilities we need to acknowledge and assume, we believe we have to take a critical appraisal of history, so that the past as it happened is not forgotten, and we can reconstruct ourselves as part of constructing our future.

The Romanian experience with its own Jewish community during World War II, the fact that fellow citizens have been victims of the Holocaust, should not, and can not, be neither forgotten, nor belittled. The tragedy unfolded against the background of dramatic events for the country and the nation. Romania knew then times of profound turbulence. A radical change took place in the country's political regime, bringing to power, following a coup d'Etat, a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic party, the Legionnaire Movement.

In conjunction with several organizations of Holocaust survivors, and the Federation of Jewish Communities from Romania, our Government established the "Holocaust Day" in Romania, to pay a pious homage to all those that suffered from discriminatory anti-Semitic and racist policies promoted by the Romanian State in the middle of the twentieth century, in a turbulent moment of our own national history. By paying homage to the dead or deported, to those obliged to leave the country, to those dispossessed of their belongings, of their rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and treated as inferior human beings, we take, every year, on the 9th of October, a test of conscience. We thereby try to understand the causes and the consequences of ignoring the core values and traditions of tolerance of our own people.

The Jewish population in Romania was then subjected to crimes. The most important chapter of the Romanian participation to Holocaust relates to the deportations of Jews from parts of Romanian territory to the concentration camp located in Transnistria, a territory situated between the rivers Dnestre and Bug under Romanian administration during World War II. The history of crimes against Jews comprises other dark pages, among which the Iasi pogrom of June 1941.

Moreover, the Government decided to assign the task of disclosing all the relevant facts regarding the Romanian participation to Holocaust to an international committee of specialists in history, chaired by Professor Elie Wiesel. The report recently issued by this Committee will set the basis for any future investigation of this horrendous phenomenon, as well as for disseminating information to the public opinion, especially the young generations. The Ministry of Education and Research included in school curricula an optional course on the Holocaust, and the Holocaust in Romania.

These measures are part of a broader program promoting knowledge and understanding of our past and of events related to the Holocaust. It comprises adoption of legislation forbidding fascist, racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic symbols and organizations, and the cult of personalities bearing responsibility for crimes against humanity.

Romania has now a longstanding commitment to come to terms with its own past, and an established record of international cooperation in researching the Holocaust. Last December, Romania became a member of ITF - the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. Romania will continue to implement programs for scientific research on the Holocaust, education for tolerance, protection of the Jewish cultural patrimony, in a process that brings together governmental action initiatives from the civil society.

Coming to terms with one's own past, with all the good and the evil there is to it, is an exercise in honesty and democratic conscience. Condemning perpetrators of the crimes, we should not forget that even under the harsh political and military conditions of that time, many well known as well as many unknown Romanians have risked their freedom, even their lives, to save their Jewish fellow citizens from death. Some of these Romanians who stood up are nowadays recognized by the Israeli State as "Righteous among the Nations".

The Holocaust has a particular significance and observance today. It must not repeat itself. For that we must make sure the generations to come will still be able to learn and understand the whole truth. As Elie Wiesel recalled, "never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed... Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. "

That is why today's commemoration of the liberation of the Nazi death camps is so important. It is important that this day of remembrance is observed at the UN, allowing a renewed message for the global community to capitalize on what we had achieved as human kind during these last six decades and make sure that such atrocities and tragedies never ever happen again. We are today reminded in a very powerful way of the need to brace ourselves further and fight more resolutely racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. These scourges can never be addressed lightly.

This day must be for all of us a moment of recollection and reflection, a good time to meditate upon totalitarianism and its tragic outcomes, upon community ties and the values of human solidarity, upon the ways to ensure that democracy, legality and respect for fundamental liberties and rights of all human beings will always prevail. Thank you.

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