Romanian PM Tariceanu attended inauguration of Israel's Holocaust museum

(Initially published in http://www.romania-report.ro/ - Mar 16, 2005)

Romania's Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu, along with leaders and dignitaries from 40 countries yesterday attended the opening of a $56 million Holocaust museum that focuses on the personal tragedies of the six million Jews who perished in the Nazi genocide.

The new Holocaust History Museum at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem memorial took 10 years to complete. The building, designed by Israeli-American architect Moshe Safdie, spans more than 4,000 square meters (four times larger than the museum it replaces.

Heads of State and government from at least 15 countries, as well as United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and dozens of other nations’ leaders and dignitaries, joined Israeli President Moshe Katzav, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Education Minister Limor Livnat in inaugurating the new museum. Along with Annan, the guest included the presidents of Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia & Montenegro, and Switzerland; the Prime Ministers of France, Sweden, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Romania; the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; the Vice President of the Dominican Republic; foreign ministers of Germany, Norway, and Spain; the National Security Advisor of the Russian Federation; the Defense Minister of the Czech Republic; the education ministers of Estonia, Greece, Latvia and Slovenia; the Minister of Transport of Canada; the State Secretary of Austria; the Minister of Information and Communications of Hungary; a representative of the Vatican; Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, and others.

The museum displays a three-tiered wooden barrack where concentration camp inmates slept, a cattle wagon that transported Jews to their deaths and a small fishing boat that ferried Danish Jews to safety in Sweden. Underground galleries on either side of a 200 meter central walkway topped by a skylight guide visitors through the history of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution: prewar life, anti-Semitic laws, roundups, deportations, mass executions, death camps.

Voices from the Yad Vashem museum inauguration ceremony:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: "The state of Israel is the only place in the world where the Jews have the right and the power to protect themselves by themselves. This is the only guarantee that the Jewish people will never know another Holocaust."

Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel: "It was man's inhumanity to man - no. It was man's inhumanity to Jews. Jews were not killed because they were human beings. In the eyes of the killers, they were not human beings, they were Jews."

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan: "A United Nations that fails to be at the forefront of the fight against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism denies its history and undermines its future."

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer: "This is a moment of commemoration for the 6 million murdered by Nazi Germany. Of course Germany is my country, so it's also a historical and moral responsibility to never forget what happened and the responsibility of my country for the Shoah."

Romania Report – according to various sources