‘Every one of us has a number on our arm’

President Reuven Rivlin addresses those gathered at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official museum commemorating the Holocaust.

“We stand here tonight, in painful silence, in Jerusalem,” Rivlin says.

The president notes that it has been exactly 70 years since Allied soldiers entered the Bergen-Belsen camp and liberated its Jewish prisoners.

“Their families were killed…every one of the survivors was sure they were the last Jew on earth.”

The survivors had an impossible task ahead of them, to rebuild their lives after the horror they had encountered.

“I remember lone soldiers who were survivors, I remember Freddie who came from Hungary, who three days after arriving at his foster family, went to fight in the Independence War and never returned.”

“We saw the numbers on the survivors’ arms, we thought they had gone mad. But we later discovered it was the world that had gone mad.”