Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

POLITICS AND SOCIETY | SPEECHES   179 Politics and Society ©Flossenbürg Memorial / T. Dashuber A photograph taken a few days after the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp shows two GIs from the U.S. Army Signal Corps standing in the snow at the entrance to the camp’s command post. Hanging on the fence next to them is a makeshift banner – a bedsheet – with a hand-painted mes- sage:“Prisoners Happy End! Welcome!”. This was the prisoners’ way of thanking those who had liberated them. Dear Survivors, Dear LeonWeintraub, Dear Shelomo Selinger, Dear Josef Salomonovic, Dear Martin Hecht, Dear Erwin Farkas, Dear Duke Max in Bavaria, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here today to thank the liberated and their liberators – but above all, I am here to thank you, the ones who survived Flossenbürg! I am so grateful that you have made the jour- ney here – and that you continue to return to this place time and again – to join us in honouring the tens of thousands of prisoners who were so senselessly murdered here: men and women, Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witness- es, people branded “asocial” and “career criminals”, and political prisoners. 100,000 people from 47 nations were deported here to perform forced labour that sustained a wartime economy. According to current research, at least 30,000 of them were murdered here.When the camp was liberated on 23 April 1945, only 1,500 prisoners remained; the others had already been driven out on death marches across what is now the Czech Republic and Bavaria. As we mark the 77th anniversary of Flossenbürg’s liberation,   at a time when Europe once again finds itself hoping for the end of war – for the end of terror, fear and captivity in Ukraine – we are called to reflect on the true meaning of the word Claudia Roth, Member of the German Bundestag Federal Government Commissioner   for Culture and the Media 77th anniversary of the liberation of Flossenbürg  24 April 2022 “liberation”, and above all on the value of freedom and the conditions that make it possible. I found myself wondering whether 23 April 1945 was truly a happy day for the survivors of Flossenbürg. As I looked at the photograph with the banner reading “Prisoners Happy End”,   a thought crossed my mind:What a grey and cloudy day it was! Where were all the bright, spring days hiding in April 1945? Jakub Szabmacher – who later took the name Jack Terry, as he is known to many of you – wrote that this day in Flossenbürg was the saddest day of his life. For the first time in a long time, he could think of something other than finding something   to eat. His thoughts turned to his sisters, his brother, his entire family. None of them had survived; they had all been mur- dered. Jack Terry was all alone in the world – he belonged to no one, and no one belonged to him. His experience was shared by many survivors, and yet it was also something deeply solitary, something almost impossible to put into words. The solitary experience of a world coming to an end. For those of us spared such horrors, we can only understand this if we accept that part of his ordeal can never be commu- nicated. It is a shock that cannot be conveyed and cannot be healed. The gift of survival meant being left alone with this burden and having to live on. We, the generations that followed, speak of the responsibility that this legacy places upon us.We want to remember it – and to remember those who were forced to endure such suffering. But what do we mean when we speak of remembrance – or a culture of remembrance – and when we say “Never again!” in reference to our past?