A strong, powerful state of Israel is the only guarantee that the Jewish people will never again be subjected to the horrors of the Holocaust, Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, declared yesterday as his nation staged its annual remembrance ceremonies for the six million Jews put to death by the Nazis.
Mr Netanyahu was speaking at Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland, where an estimated 1.5 million people were gassed during the second World War, addressing 7,000 participants, from 42 countries, who had gathered for the "March of the Living" - a reenactment of the two-mile "march of death" from the Auschwitz camp to the Birkenau gas chambers.
From yesterday's symbolic march, many of the participants are to travel on to Israel, which next week celebrates the 50th anniversary of its independence. In his address, Mr Netanyahu hailed the flourishing of Israel as proof of the ultimate Jewish victory over the evils of Nazism, and as the only reliable protection for the Jews.
The allies "could have destroyed this place with a single air attack," he asserted, gazing around the death factory. And yet that assault was never mounted, he said, "because the Jewish nation did not have any power at the time - neither military, nor political." But now, he went on, "the Jewish people have a home, a flag, an army . . . The lesson of the Holocaust is that the existence and rebirth of the Jewish people is dependent on Jewish sovereignty, a Jewish army, and the power of the Jewish faith."
Back in Israel, a siren brought the country to a halt at mid-morning - an eerily frozen tableau, with cars stopped on the main roads, pedestrians immobile. Restaurants were closed, flags flew at half-mast, and the Knesset and the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum hosted a series of memorial ceremonies.
The theme of this year's events was one of belated appreciation for the 250,000 Holocaust survivors who made their way to Palestine after the war and helped found the Jewish state.
In modern Israel's early years, survivors often found themselves despised by their new countrymen, reviled as "weak" Jews who allowed their families to be led meekly to the gas chambers, lambs to the slaughter. In countless interviews these past few days, ageing survivors have described the shabby treatment they were afforded here, their sense of shame, the way they repressed their Holocaust memories for fear of inviting contempt by discussing the period.
Only recently has the passage of the decades softened those arrogant judgments. And the new readiness to face up to the Holocaust, and all its implications for Israel, has been demonstrated this week, with the army's chief of staff, Gen Amnon Shahak, bringing his entire General Staff to Yad Vashem, and Mr Netanyahu becoming the first prime minister to attend the March of the Living.
Reuters adds Berlin, once the hub of Jewish life in Germany, yesterday marked Holocaust Remembrance Day by reading aloud the names of the city's 55,000 Jewish victims of the Nazis.
The reading took place on the grounds of a retirement home for Jews in east Berlin which was commandeered by the Gestapo in 1942 and converted into a holding depot for Jews destined for the death camps.