 |
"A democratic society knows and recognizes its history. At the same time, it also assumes errors of the past to not repeat them in the future ", Prime Minister Tariceanu declared in a message released on the occasion of Holocaust Day in Romania, on October 9.
|
|
|
BUCHAREST (AFP-EJP)---Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu has announced the construction in Bucharest of a monument dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust, placing this gesture in line with measures which allowed Romania to assume this page of its history.
Tariceanu said work would soon start at the site located in the centre of Bucharest, to commemorate some 400,000 Romanian Jews and ethnic Romanian minorities who were murdered under a Nazi-allied regime during World War II.
"A democratic society knows and recognizes its history. At the same time, it also assumes errors of the past to not repeat them in the future ", Tariceanu declared in a message released on the occasion of Holocaust Day in Romania, on October 9.
On October 7, the Romanian Chamber of Deputies organized in Bucharest a commemorative session with the cooperation of the representatives of the country’s Jewish community. Among them, Liviu Beris, president of the Association of the Jews of Romania victims of the Holocaust, and Mihail Ionescu, director general of the Elie Wiesel Institute for the study of the Holocaust.
After hesitating for a long time to recognize its participation in the Holocaust under the pro-Nazi regime of general Ion Antonescu, Romania decided in 2003 to set up an international commission of historians steered by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, which was asked to clear up this period of the country’s history.
According to the commission report, 400,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews died in territories administered by Bucharest between 1940 and 1944.
"The Holocaust must not be denied nor forgotten, and it must never be repeated," Prime Minister Tariceanu said in a written statement ahead of Romania's Holocaust Memotrial Day.
In 2004, the Romanian government decided to commemorate the day of the Holocaust on October 9, which marked the start of mass deportations of Romanian Jews to a then Romanian-occupied part of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Tens of thousands perished in so-called death marches into areas east of the Dniestr river.
Some 280,000 to 380,000 Romanian Jews died in Romania and Romanian-occupied areas, and 25,000 ethnic Roma’s were deported, about half of whom died, the report denounced.
The new memorial will be designed by Romanian-born modern sculptor Peter Jacobi, who lives in Germany.
Born in 1935, Peter Jacobi, graduated from the Fine Arts Institute of Bucharest, lived in Romania until 1970 before he established in Germany where he could develop his artistic vocation in various forms.
