Dear Ms. Baika, dear colleague, ambassador of Israel, esteemed Rabbi Salzmann,

ladies and gentlemen,

It is an honor to open this seminar together with you.

I am impressed to see that so many teachers have come to devote one week develop a deeper understanding of Holocaust history and to think about the best ways of helping students to find access to this history.

This is an important, but also very demanding task. Many things compete for our attention and for the attention of young people.

Why should we focus on issues that are difficult and painful?

And Holocaust history is painful – when we think about it, we feel the pain, the despair of the victims. We think of their vast number, of old and young, men, women, children.

We as Germans, in addition, feel the pang of responsibility, of our undeniable relation with the perpetrators.

This is true for us Germans, but not for us alone.

How do you explain to students in Moldova that it is worth their time and effort to explore the part that Romania, at the time, played in the local events that belong to the vast history of the annihilation of the Jews in Europe?

It is so much easier and more satisfying to listen to another narratives. One of them is that the genocide against the Bessarabian Jews was committed by Romanian fascists, with which the people of Moldova have nothing in common.

The other may be that the guilt rests exclusively with Germany, with Hitler.

Ladies and Gentlemen, our country recognizes its historical guilt and its present responsibility in full. We do not attempt to make it smaller by unloading some of it on others.

We have come to see that responsibility may be heavy, but it is not a burden.

It guides us, it helps us find our way.

If our nation is important to us, we should know – and we should want to know - about its history comprehensively, without reservation.

It is not the past that makes the nation, but the way we deal with it, the way how we react to it. And this we cannot do without knowing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot make your work easier – I would only encourage you to tell your students that knowledge is always an asset and that by denial, by voluntary ignorance, you weaken yourself.

I wish you a fruitful seminar – and I wish you fulfillment and satisfaction in your work as educators.