2010 Observance Holocaust Remembrance Day
Screening of the film "Defiance"
cosponsored by the United States Mission to the United Nations
28 January 2010
Introduction Remarks by H.E. Alejandro Wolff,
Deputy Permanent Representative of the United States
to the United Nations
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I’d like to welcome all of you here to the last event of this year’s International Day of Commemoration in Memory of Victims of the Holocaust. As you heard, this year’s theme is “Holocaust Remembrance: The Legacy of Survival.”
"Defiance" is indeed a film about survival. It tells the astonishing true story of three Jewish brothers and their comrades in arms as they battle the Nazis in Belarus. After the slaughter of their parents, these brothers took to the forest as armed partisans, and their heroic actions rescued more than 1,200 fellow Jews from deaths in the extermination camps. It’s not always an easy film to watch, but it’s a very stirring one.
I would also like to welcome Professor Nechama Tec and her son Roland Tec to this evening’s program, and to thank them sincerely for being here and for bringing this important story to life.
It is fitting that we end this International Day of Commemoration in Memory of Victims of the Holocaust on a note of courage and survival. We have just drawn down the curtain on the bloodiest century in human history, and the United States is determined to