00:00Finally, we arrived at Auschwitz, a gloomy Sunday with a sky
00:29obscured by smoke and a terrible stink hung in the air and there were rows and rows of
00:39naked women all around me.
00:44What are they looking for?
00:47I asked my mother, as I too was naked, and I tried to avoid the gleam of the German shepherds'
01:01teeth and their eyes.
01:04I was their height, so I can see them completely.
01:11I can still see their eyes to this day.
01:14My mother answered me, diseases, but if we are ill, she didn't have to finish.
01:26She pointed to the smoke right by the entrance.
01:33I knew at five and a half what that meant.
01:41We all knew.
01:43I recall thinking, I will never, I will never let them know how much they are hurting me.
01:54At five and a half, I had the rebellion in me.
01:59I will not show them, I will not let them know the pain they're inflicting on me.
02:06On an icy, windy day, I stood and watched helplessly as little girls from the nearby
02:16barrack were marched away crying and shivering to the gas chamber.
02:25They were covered with rags and some of them didn't even have any shoes and were walking
02:34barefoot in the snow.
02:37They were very young, as I was, six or seven, but starvation shrugged their bodies and they
02:49appeared even younger.
02:54They too became ashes.
02:58I knew nothing about partisans saving Jews from ghettos and camps.
03:06I knew nothing about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, nor of the Allies and the D-Day, nor of the
03:16invasion of Normandy.
03:21At that time, we were victims in a moral vacuum.
03:29But today, however, we all, we have an obligation, not only to remember, which is very, very
03:41important, but also to warn and to teach that hatred only begets more hatred, killing
03:52more killing.
03:54Instead, our revenge has been to build a strong Jewish country and raise our families in peace.
04:06Eighty years after liberation.
04:09The world is again in crisis.
04:14Our Jewish Christian values have been overshadowed worldwide by prejudice, fear, suspicion, and
04:25extremism.
04:27And the rampant anti-Semitism that is spreading among the nations is shocking.
04:36It's shocking to all of us, to our children and our grandchildren.
04:43Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is fighting for its very existence and its
04:54way of life.
04:58We mourn not only the fallen soldiers and the hostages, but also the turbulence and
05:10mistrust in our society.
05:15We pray for strength, resilience, and of course, hope.
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