Speech by Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius at a solemn ceremony paying tribute to the victims of the Holocaust in Paneriai

Honourable Litvaks of the world,

Your Excellences Ambassadors,

Members of the Lithuanian Jewish Community,

Ministers, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Together with you I bow my head in remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust today.

Lithuania will never forget this tragedy. We remember all the Jews who lived in Lithuania: friends, neighbours, culture and public figures. All of them worked in Lithuania and for Lithuania. All of them were very dear and close to us.     

The Holocaust is painful to all of us, because we have lost the Lithuanian Jews, with whom we had lived together for centuries; with whom we were building our better and a fairer state.       

Today we are also bowing to the Righteous, our fellow citizens, who risked their lives to save the Jewish people from executioners’ hands. Those courageous people felt an obligation to proclaim by their lives that even in the face of death a person has to remain human. Eternal respect to them.     

Ladies and gentlemen,

There are a number of memorials to remember the Holocaust in Lithuania. We would find them in the majority of Lithuania’s towns and cities; and they testify a shameful and tragic period of our history. My native Radviliškis district has some of them, too. When I go to visit my native place, I can see monuments and cemeteries that bear remembrance to thousands of Jews, who lived, studied, and worked here.     

I believe that history lessons are of great importance to the generation of the contemporary democratic Lithuania. Therefore all of us have an obligation to seek that the world hears the pain of those who suffered, so that the truth could no longer be hid, but that it could, even in the darkest hours, find the way into our hearts and stay there forever.     

Today we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto. I am delighted that Lithuania has recovered and, without forgetting the past, is looking to the future. Life stories of the Righteous among the Nations give us hope that all of us together can manage to build a better and a fairer world.       

I strongly believe that we, Lithuanians and Jews, shall do everything to foster the common values of humanity, to cherish the unique Litvak heritage, and to raise the young generation in the spirit of mutual understanding.      

And then those lying here would rest in peace.