Former president Mary McAleese on Monday asked a group of schoolchildren from Roscommon and Leitrim to think of the 1½ million children who were murdered in the Holocaust “because people had in their hearts hatred instead of love”.
The former president had invited the local children to plant crocus bulbs in the garden of her home near Cootehall, Co Roscommon to commemorate the children who died in the concentration camps.
Mrs McAleese told the children that she was just back from a trip to Rome where, 79 years ago “in the living memories of your grannies and grandas”, buses came on a glorious sunny day and took away more than 300 children and 700 adults “to a place called Auschwitz”.
She told the pupils of Cootehall National School, Woodbrook National School and Carrick-on-Shannon Community School that these children were “murdered, for no reason except that they were Jewish — beautiful, beautiful little children just like you who never came home”.
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The former president was launching Holocaust Education Ireland’s (HEI) Crocus Project, and she joined the local schoolchildren as they planted crocus bulbs in her garden. HEI says that the yellow crocus recalls the yellow Stars of David, and will bloom around the time of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th.
HEI chairman Prof Tom O’Dowd said that the fact that there were now 1.2 million children under the age of 18 in Ireland starkly illustrated the “scale of the slaughter” when 1.5 million children were murdered.
Among the guests who were welcomed by the McAleese family to their home on Monday were Holocaust survivors Tomi Reichental, (87) who was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944 as a nine-year-old, and Suzi Diamond, who was just two when she was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and her five-year-old brother.
Mr Reichental said it meant a lot to him to be there. “We must never forget the children who were murdered in Auschwitz and other places, to remind the people that this did happen so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.”
Ms Diamond urged the children “to speak out about hate speech, about bullying and about Holocaust denial”.
Speaking before the event, Mrs McAleese said that while Ireland had reason to be proud of having integrated so many people from outside Ireland, complacency was “a dangerous phenomenon”.
Stressing the importance of “eternal vigilance”, she said complacency creates the space in which toxic seeds grow.
“I grew up with it in Northern Ireland. You look at it and you think what a waste of life, what a waste of all those lovely lives that were killed in the Troubles”.
More than 500 Irish schools have so far signed up for the Crocus Project, which is co-funded by the European Union and supported by the Department of Education.
