27 January 2009

“The Survivors’ Bequest”

"The legacy that we are passing on today is also the legacy of European resistance."

Statement by Pierre Gouffault, President of the International Sachsenhausen Committee, given during the press conference on the 26th of January in Berlin:

"First in Germany and then in all of the European states where the National Socialists oppressed the population, there was not only collaboration – unfortunately to an appalling degree – there were also thousands of people who tried to overthrow National Socialist rule. For this they were arrested, tortured by the Gestapo and police and incarcerated by the concentration camp inspectorate in Sachsenhausen and in the over 1,000 other camps. Many of these men and women were murdered. I was arrested together with my twin brother and my mother in 1942 and was taken to Sachsenhausen at the end of January 1943 where I was imprisoned until liberation came during the death march at the beginning of May 1945.

The museums and the educational work of the Memorials must continue to honour the European resistance on into the future.

In recent years the Memorials in Brandenburg, particularly Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, have been extensively restored and redesigned. Although much still remains to be done, we are nevertheless grateful to the Federal Republic of Germany, and notably the Brandenburg Foundation, especially because we, the former prisoners, were able to join in the decision-making process. It is our will that in the future decisions about these international memorial sites shall continue to be made not only by German politicians but by people from all European countries as well.

Finally, I would like you to acknowledge my very deep concern: in the future as well there should never be any blurring of the historical phases at places that experienced two different pasts. Causes and effects must be clearly specified and the differences must be made distinct, even though we recognize that after 1945 new suffering and new injustices occurred. However, we will never accept any confusion in the depiction of history between these phases before and after the end of World War II."

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