Never forget Holocaust, Barak tells Germans

The Israeli prime minister, Mr Ehud Barak, warned Germans yesterday that they must never forget the Holocaust and urged them to stamp out signs of resurgent anti-Semitism and racism as soon as they appear. Speaking at the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, Mr Barak said that Israel would ensure that the memory of the Holocaust would remain alive for future generations.

"The Germans who carried out this crime and people from other nations who took part or knew about it and stood upon the blood but did not act - their guilt will never go away," he said.

Making his first visit to continental Europe since becoming prime minister, Mr Barak held talks on the Middle East peace process with the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, and President Johannes Rau. Mr Schroder promised that Germans would not forget the horrors of such camps as Sachsenhausen, where 200,000 people were imprisoned between 1936 and 1945 and tens of thousands died.

"There is only one way to deal with this unimaginable crime - we must remind ourselves and everyone else of it again and again. There must never be another Sachsenhausen, another Auschwitz, another Treblinka, in any place on earth," he said.

Mr Barak, who travelled to Paris yesterday evening, earlier urged German companies negotiating a compensation deal with former Nazi-era slave labourers to make a settlement sooner rather than later, in view of the advanced age of the victims. He said that Israel's economic and military strength was the best guarantee for Jews throughout the world that the crimes of the Holocaust would not be repeated.

"We will always defend ourselves and every Jew, wherever they may be. We swear that as long as we can still draw breath, there will be never be another Auschwitz, no Jews on death marches to the gas chambers, no mass graves," he said.

Mr Barak was accompanied on his emotional visit to Sachsenhausen by survivors of the concentration camp and their relatives. Among them was 76-year-old Mr Yirak Bahir, a Polish-born Jew who survived Sachsenhausen when all his family perished.

"When I come here 54 years later and stand next to my prime minister and my grandson, that is a guarantee that that cannot happen again. I was the only one who survived - I don't know why. It was either an accident or a miracle - but in any case it wasn't any thanks to God, because God wasn't here," he said.