Yehuda Bauer
1 Shoah, Antisemitism, War, and Genocide: Text and the Context Yehuda Bauer Ladies and Gentlemen, Colleagues and Friends, The International Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, was founded by the then Swedish Prime Minister, Göran Persson, as an answer to a problem that was expected to be solved within a few years’ time, namely the lack of education. There had been worrying signs of a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust among Swedish youths, but there was also disillusionment with democracy generally. Mr. Persson’s government began the process of establishing, with government help, an independent, special, large organization called Levande Historia, to address the educational aspects of steps to be taken to remedy the situation. I was asked to advise in all this. In order to establish the ITF, the Prime Minister turned to President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair to join, and they agreed. I was then asked to become the Academic Adviser of the new body and, as they say, the rest is history. Soon afterwards, Mr. Persson then suggested that a large inter-governmental conference should be organized that would address these concerns internationally, and I became the person responsible for the academic side, and a member of the organizing committee, consisting of important Swedish government officials, driven forward largely by Veronika Bard- Bringeus. We opened the Stockholm Forum on Holocaust Education on January 27, 2000, with a large number of governments in attendance. Out of that came the famous Stockholm Declaration, which until today forms the basis for the ITF. A great deal has changed since then.
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