On International Holocaust Remembrance Day: »My message is simple. Never again.«

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. We remember not only the more than six million Jews who were killed, but also those who survived but will forever be scarred. Victims whose names we must keep in mind every day.

I experience the Remembrance Day as indescribably sad. What was done is irreparable. But although we cannot change history, we can listen to it.

So my message is a simple one:

never again.

On this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I ask and urge us to resist with all our strength any possibility that could lead to exclusion and hatred. Those unstoppable forces once spread across Europe against many groups of people, from the Jews to the Roma, the Sinti, the Slavs, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, the disabled... In the end, no one could escape them.

Exclusion and hatred open the door to headsmen who inflict fatal wounds on humanity.

But these fatal wounds can be avoided if we never again let history repeat itself. If we always, even when it seems impossible, turn to mutual respect, to cooperation, to friendship. This is what the living witnesses of the horrors of that time teach us, and this is how we will pay the greatest respect to them and to the dead.

One of the witnesses is a wonderful lady who bore number 30153 in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp. Her name is Marija Frlan and today she celebrates her 103rd birthday. History, she says, is both beautiful and ugly, but we humans need to know what is right and what is wrong.

As President of the Republic, but above all as a mother, I wish that, for the sake of ourselves and our children, the human cruelty we remember today will never have the chance to happen again. I believe with all my heart that each one of us knows what it means to be a good person. That we can inspire each other by example.

Let us nurture this awareness and be good people.