At Auschwitz, son of Iran’s ousted shah calls for wider Holocaust education

Visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp for the first time, former Iranian crown prince and activist Reza Pahlavi calls for global solidarity against Holocaust denial.

Pahlavi, whose work focuses on overthrowing the Iranian regime, which categorically denies that the Holocaust happened, says that Holocaust education is necessary “not just to honor those who have been lost, but to make sure that it will never, ever happen again.”

He notes that Iranians faced their own massacre earlier this year, when some 40,000 people were killed during protests against the regime, according to unverified figures.

“This, of course, pales in comparison to six million Jews who lost their lives during the Holocaust,” he adds.

Pahlavi is visiting the site as part of a delegation organized by the European Jewish Association for the 88th anniversary yesterday of Kristallnacht, the German pogrom widely seen as a prelude to the Holocaust.

He said he was there representing Iranians who “understand the meaning of denial and also understand the meaning of murder.”

His father, the former shah of Iran who was deposed in 1979, had visited Auschwitz in 1966.

Speaking at a ceremony in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where a million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, Pahlavi concludes with a message that he says is a cultural and symbolic motif in Iranian society: Light will triumph over darkness.

The EJA conference, attended by dozens of Jewish leaders and political figures, called on European leaders to increase their current commitments to protecting Jewish life on the continent into more concrete actions.

EJA chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin called on attendees to remember the victims, teach their stories and “protect the Jewish life you were not allowed to live.”