Page 106 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Zofia Lubińska-Rosset - "Okruchy Pamięci".

Annex

Zofia Lubinska-Rosset’s speech
at the commemoration of the 77th anniversary
of the Lodz ghetto liquidation

On August 29th, 1944, the last transport from the ghetto to
Auschwitz Birkenau departed from the Radegast station. By sym-
bolically accepting this date as the moment of the liquidation of
the Lodz ghetto, today we are paying tribute to all those who died
here or in the places of extermination to which they were deported.
In the Litzmannstadt Ghetto over two hundred thousand
people were locked behind barbed wire. About ten thousand sur-
vived the Holocaust. I am one of them, a child of the Holocaust.
At the outbreak of the war, I was not yet 6 years old. The cruel
terror changed my happy childhood into starvation and cold of the
ghetto, the nightmare of the Ravensbrück, Königs Wusterhausen,
Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg camps and the forty-kilometer death
march. I had no chance or the right to survive.
Despite everything, I managed to survive, not because I was
so clever, wise or brave, but thanks to chance, happy coincidences,
and most of all thanks to the people who were not indifferent.
After the war, I really wanted to forget about those cruel years,
but I soon realized that they could not be forgotten, and even that
they must not be forgotten. Because although we would like to
erase traumatic experiences from our consciousness, it is the
memory that stays, teaches, and serves as a warning to future gen-
erations.
But memory itself is not enough. This memory must be spe-
cial, devoid of hatred, desire for revenge or retaliation, free from

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