My name is Dina Frydman Balbien:

I was born in Radom, . The Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939 – I was 10 years old. From the very beginning I witnessed beatings, forced labor, confiscation of all our possessions, merciless killings, enslavement and dehumanization of a helpless and innocent people who only wanted to live in peace and practice their faith. Among the millions of that were gassed in the gas chambers and then burned in the ovens were my parents, my eighteen-year-old sister, and my 10-year-old brother. Also gassed and burned were all my aunts and uncles, all of my cousins, except for two, my two grandmothers and all of my friends.

For a long time after my liberation from Bergen Belsen concentration camp it was too painful for me to discuss . However, it is imperative that Holocaust survivors speak up so long as there is one left on this earth. I never thought that I would hear academics and others assert that the Holocaust was a myth and that the Nazis were baking bread and not humans in the ovens in Auschwitz, Treblinka, or any other concentration camps. I am here to remind you that the Holocaust did take place and to have lived through it is far worse than to hear about it. Just like the Exodus from Egypt you must teach your children and they must teach theirs about the tragedy that befell European Jewry during World War II. We will never forget those that perished and never forgive the Nazis and their cohorts that perpetrated these crimes.

I would like to quote Elie Wiesel, who said “To forget the Holocaust – is to kill twice.”

Let me conclude with the following chosen lines of the poem entitled “The Oath” by the Israeli poet Avraham Shlunsky: In the presence of eyes Which witnessed the slaughter Which saw the oppression The heart could not bear, We have taken an oath: To remember it all, To remember, not once to forget! Forget not one thing to the last generation!