Ministra de Educación y Ciencia, Mercedes Cabrera. Versión inglés.

On December 10th 2004 the Spanish Government established the Official Holocaust Memorial and Prevention of Crimes against Humanity Day to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. That is the reason why we are all here together today.

Please allow me, as Minister of Education and Science, to spend just a few moments thinking about those two words that lend meaning to the title of this commemoration: Memorial and Prevention.

As educators we have to make an effort to be able to place the Holocaust within its historical context and to pass on its Memorial to successive generations. Our youngsters need to understand that the Holocaust was an act of genocide, designed to systematically exterminate European Jews and other ethnic, religious and cultural minorities, as well as to stamp out any political dissidence. The genocide was led and orchestrated by the Third Reich with complicity from all around Europe and is an essential part of European history. We might even call it, as the French sociologist Annette Wieviorka -an Auschwitz victim herself- remarked, the most characteristically European phenomenon of the 20th century.

This is where we have to make an additional effort in Spain because so often we tend to think of the Holocaust as something remote and rather far removed from our own history. It was not. There were many, many Spaniards amongst the victims of Nazism: more than 15,000 Republicans on the losing side in our civil war spent time in Nazi concentration camps. The bulk of them ended up in Mauthausen which is why it is still known today as "the Spaniards´ Camp". Most of them died there.

And of course we have to make an effort to incorporate into our history the almost half a million Jews of Spanish origin who were exterminated. With us today are several survivors who we salute publicly at this event.

Let me stress, once again, how necessary it is for us to ensure that the Holocaust Memorial is passed on down the generations to come. So, for the very first time in our education system, the Holocaust is to be given a specific mention under History of the Contemporary World, a subject taught in the last two years of upper secondary education in schools. And in the earlier, compulsory years of secondary schooling, Education for Citizenship and Social Sciences, Geography and History are all subjects that already include critical thoughts on anti-Semitism and acts of genocide.

But, I wonder: is including the Holocaust as a subject on the school curriculum enough? I think the answer is no. Memorial is not enough. Or, at least, Memorial is not enough if we see it merely as information or news about what happened. A timely reminder for us here are the words of Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel who said that "a memorial unresponsive to the future would also violate the memory of the past".

This is where the second key word underpinning the title of this commemoration comes into play: Prevention. Knowing is not only about accumulating information. There must be some purpose to it. And in this case we have to know in order to prevent. We have to prevent the horror from ever happening again.

Those of us who grew up under the dictatorship -under any dictatorship - are well aware that democracy is not something to be taken for granted; we know that it is a victory won by the people. And we have to be able to convey that idea to young people born in a democracy.

It is essential for our schoolchildren to know that democratic institutions cannot stand up on their own, that they need to be respected, nurtured and protected. Respect for others has to be one of the pillars of their education; we have to foster a culture of living together, of coexistence, that can reach the very core of who our young people are. We have to ensure that they know their rights as citizens and are ready and willing to fight to defend those rights and prevent them from being overturned. All in all, we have to try to make our students learn the values underpinning what living together in a democracy is all about and to believe in those values as their own. We have to imbue the education of the citizens of the future with an ethical and moral spirit. These are our challenges and that is one of the goals of the Spanish Government´s education policy.

I expect you have seen in the entrance hall to this building that there is an excellent exhibition organised by Yad Vashem about the children in the Holocaust. As Minister of Education and Culture I am convinced that for these scenes never to be repeated the solution lies in our schools.

Thank you very much.