60th anniversary of liberating KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, 27th January 2005.
Address at the state ceremony

WLADIMIR PUTIN

Dear friends!

Colleagues!

It is said that time heals. It does, indeed. But as we stand here in one of the most horrible concentration camps 60 years after its liberation everything that happened here still causes horror, indignation and shiver.

It is impossible and unfathomable to comprehend that people are capable of such atrocities, that they may be prone to such a truly universal insanity. It is impossible to ever reconcile with the fact that it all really happened.

Yet we see the railroad, which brought whole trains crammed with victims, and gas chambers with their incinerators thought out in every detail. This visible and horrible evidence leaves no doubt that there used to be a smoothly and uninterruptedly operating death machine. We will never stop asking ourselves over and over again the same question: how could this ever have happened?

Oswiecim calls out not only to our memory but also to our mind. Here, on this land that once soaked with blood and ashes of the Nazi victims we truly see what kind of future the Reich had in store for the civilized Europe, which was based on humanitarian values and traditions of democracy, which came a long way from the Inquisition to reformation and enlightenment.

Standing on this tormented soil we must firmly and unequivocally say that any attempts to rewrite history and place killers and their victims, liberators and occupiers on the equal footing are immoral and unacceptable for those people who consider themselves Europeans.

Today we pay tribute to the memory of all those who were mercilessly and cold-bloodedly killed by the fascist barbarians not only here in Oswiecim but elsewhere.

We bow our heads before tens of millions of people from different countries of the world, who survived the hell of concentration camps, who were shot and tortured to death, who died of starvation and diseases. We bow our heads before all the victims of that inhumane war launched by the fascists. We mourn over them and remember the immortal heroic deed of the allied armies that broke the backbone of the fascist beast.

We pay tribute to the valor of the Soviet soldiers who lost 600 000 lives for the liberation of Poland. We will never forget that the Soviet Union paid an enormous price of 27 million lives for that great victory.

However today we shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world. Terrorism is among them and it is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism. And it is equally cruel: it has already claimed thousands of innocent lives.

As there were no "good" and "bad" fascists there cannot be "good" and "bad" terrorists. Any double standards here are absolutely unacceptable and deadly dangerous for the civilization.

Dear friends!

Our today's ceremony is in fact the opening of the 60-th anniversary of the great victory. The celebration in Moscow in May, where many of us will gather again, will become its culminating event. Let's make everything possible so that we, the modern-day politicians and statesmen, never feel remorse for our words and deeds, so that we could be honest and open to everyone who paid with their suffering, tears, blood or lives to bring that victory day closer.

We are standing before those who forever stayed here in Oswiecim and we must ensure that everything what happened here will never repeat again.

Never, nowhere and with no one!