Augsti godātie konferences rīkotāji, dalībnieki, referenti un viesi, dāmas un kungi!
Šodienas konferences par holokaustu Latvijā iekļaujas plašākā pasākumu sērijā, kuru iniciatori ir mūsu tikai nesen dibinātā Vēstures komisija, kas darbojas Latvijas Valsts prezidenta Kancelejas paspārnē. Šī komisija, nodibināta jau prezidenta Gunta Ulmaņa laikā, savu darbību sāka tieši pirms manas stāšanās amatā un, es esmu pārliecināta, ka tas ir tikai pats sākums tās ļoti svarīgam un nozīmīgam darbam.
Šis pasākums ir organizēts kopā ar nozīmīgiem partneriem, un tādu mums ir bijusi jau vesela virkne. Pagājušajā gadā mēs piedzīvojām konferenci par vispārēju pārskatu par okupācijas gadiem Latvijā. Nākamgad mums būs īpaša konference, veltīta 1941.gada deportācijas 60.gadadienai, bet šogad šī divu dienu starptautiskā konference ir veltīta tieši holokausta tēmai Latvijā.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The topic of your conference touches upon possibly the most painful episode in Latvian history, which, God knows, has not spared horrors and bloodshed throughout the centuries. The Holocaust is one of the outstanding events of the past century. It has been branded with the mark of Cain, with a mark of shame, with a mark of inhumanity. And it is our eternal sorrow and our eternal shame that some of the events linked to this antihuman undertaking took place on Latvian soil and took place with the collaboration of some of our fellow citizens.
It is our sacred duty to commemorate the lives of those who were lost in most tragic events, by gathering information about them as fully as we can. It is a way of trying to restitute some of the human dignity from which these people were deprived. It is a way of building a memorial to those whose ashes are scattered in the winds or disappeared into mass graves.
We in Latvia take seriously our duty to look at everything that has happened in our past, with a view of understanding the significance and the lessons that must be learned from it. We have had ten years of the new independence in which to start re-evaluating a history that had been submitted to ideological distortion for so many years.
When Russian tanks rolled into Latvia on June 17, 1940, they destroyed the Republic of Latvia. The occupying forces destroyed Latvia’s sovereignty, they took as prisoners its parliamentarians and its government and other leaders. They deported the intelligentsia, the army, the teachers and nearly everybody who had some wealth in their possession. The lists were long, but only a small part of these unfortunate people was deported before the Nazi Germans rolled in with their tanks and came in with their programme and their schedule of mass destruction.
Each regime, as it arrived, denigrated everything for which Latvians in their independent state had stood for. The Soviet invaders trampled our values, they ridiculed our aims and aspirations, they humiliated, tortured and deported.
The Nazis then came and in turn shot, arrested, terrorised and deported to labour camps those who had collaborated with the previous regime. The Nazis put into effect a propaganda machine and recruited collaborators. They went on with the forced conscription of Latvian men into the German armed forces against the Geneva Convention, against every principle of international law. And, of course, when the Communists came back, there was another round of accusations, condemnations and trials.
For the whole period of communist occupation, a system of propaganda was set into force to justify the communist occupation of our land on the principle that the Communists had arrived as liberators against fascism, that they were occupying Latvia because of the will of the people.
That meant vilifying those who had gone to exile and who continued to proclaim the just rights of Latvian independence. The Communists attempted to portray these exiles as Nazi collaborators, and documents were either distorted or entirely fabricated to discredit the Latvian exiles and what they stood for.
And here again, all were painted with the same brush, so that innocent people who fled from communist oppression were thrown together in the same pot with those who had actually been Nazi collaborators and who had participated in crimes against humanity or participated in genocide.
The time has finally come. We are now a sovereign nation and we intend to follow the principles of law, the principles of democracy and the principles of justice. We can now set about understanding the past, sorting out various events, evaluating their significance and, yes, pursuing those who are still alive and have not yet received punishment for crimes that they have committed so many years ago.
Latvia has set up a legal system where crimes against humanity do not lose their importance with the passage of time. This means that we evaluate to the same measure crimes committed in the name of fascism and those committed supposedly in the fight against fascism.
In evaluating collective responsibility and collective reaction to the tragic events of our past, our main guide must be an understanding of why it is important to understand our past.
I believe that the “why” is extremely simple. We must understand the past so that this understanding can set us free. When I as a girl began my studies at Victoria College in Toronto, there was a beautiful inscription on the Victorian arch of that college that said: “The truth shall make you free”.
I think that this quotation of the Gospel according to St. John is the guiding principle with which we must look at both at our past and our future. We have to look at the past; we have to sort out the truth from untruth, fact from fiction, interpretation from documentation and emotion from reason.
This is not an easy task. It is frequently an extremely painful task. It is a task that can elicit in us strong feelings of anger, despair, or shame. We have to accept these feelings and then go beyond them, so that we can gain a true understanding of what is right and what is wrong. For that is the whole point of this exercise – an exercise in evaluating our past.
In evaluating our past, we are trying to learn lessons about right and wrong. We are trying to learn lessons about what is and what is not acceptable human behaviour, about what does and what does not befit human beings, about what can and what cannot be tolerated under any circumstances or pretense. And I think the lesson we want to show, the one we want to pass on to our children, is the one about what it means to be truly human.
I think that the greatest cause of suffering in all conflicts is the division of human beings into ‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us,’’ between the ‘‘good guys’’ and the ‘‘bad guys.’’ It does not really help to line up the ‘‘good guys’’ as toy soldiers and the ‘‘bad guys’’ on the other. Eventually, the regime will change to switch their places, to paint the black ones white and the white ones black.
It is possible to keep on that way for eternity. You throw a stone at me, and I throw a stone back at you. You throw a rocket at me, and I throw one back at you. It can go on forever.
We have to find the root causes of conflicts, the root causes of prejudice, the root causes of human evil, no less than that. And it is only as we progress in understanding that we have a ghost of a chance of insuring in the future, that things like the Holocaust will not be repeated, that things like the Holocaust will stop taking place everywhere around us in the world, in spite of what we have to see here every day.
We want to teach our children what it means to be truly human. And to be truly human means accepting our fellow human beings as equal to ourselves. This requires a sense of compassion and an understanding that harm is done to humanity as a whole. And the harm done to humanity as a whole cannot leave us indifferent, it cannot leave us standing aside. This is a lesson of the brotherhood of men that we must learn, that we must retain, and that we must teach our children.
The task before you, ladies and gentlemen, scholars and historians, is a difficult one, it is a painful one. The truth is not easy to find, but then, of course, freedom also is not easy to master. Both are values that we are fighting for, because only in truth and in freedom can we lead our lives as truly human beings.