President urges nation to speak out against bigotry and hatred

President of the Republic Marie Louise Coleiro Preca urged citizens to speak out against bigotry and hatred and to help protect the persecuted.

Organised by the President’s Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society in collaboration with the Italian embassy, the President attended an event to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today marks the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Approximately six million Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and its collaborators. Some historians use a definition of the Holocaust that includes the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to approximately 11 million.

“On this day we honour the loss of victims and the resilience of survivors, with renewed recognition of the value and the dignity of each person. Let us take this time to consider the responsibility placed on our shoulders,” Coleiro Preca said.

“We must, in the witness of our lives, ensure that the memory of these atrocities is remembered. We must make sure that its ethical lessons are learnt anew by each generation.

“We must respond with courage and resolve, to ensure that the seeds of that hatred, which grew into such evil, are never allowed to take root in our societies again. We must protect the persecuted. We must speak out against bigotry and hatred. We must remember, and in remembering, we must be transformed.”

The President warned that genocide is part of a process that allows discrimination, racism, xenophobia and hatred to grow.

“The Holocaust and subsequent genocides took place because of an insidious silence that allowed persecution to build momentum,” she said.

“While some were actively engaged in facilitating state policies of persecution, the vast majority stood idle - afraid to speak out, indifferent to the suffering of others. And discrimination has not ended, nor have we heard the last of the language of hatred and exclusion.”

Addressing the younger generations, the President said it was their task “to exercise vigilance, and remind us of the need to replace strategies of exclusion with processes of peace”.

“You are the active citizens of today and tomorrow, with the great responsibility to interrupt cycles of hatred and violence and to replace them with a message of peace and wellbeing.

“Do not stand by. Do not be silent. Be better than we have been.”