Here’s What Biden Said in His Speech at the Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony

Here is the president’s complete speech, which lasted about 16 minutes.

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President Biden speaking at the Capitol on Tuesday.

President Biden delivered these remarks on Tuesday at the Capitol for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance.

Thank you, Stu, for that introduction, for your leadership of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. You’re a true scholar and statesman and a dear friend. Speaker Johnson, Leader Jeffries, members of Congress and especially the survivors of the Holocaust. If my mother were here, she’d look at you and say, “God love you all. God love you all.”

Abe Foxman and all of the survivors who embody absolute courage and dignity and grace are here as well. During these sacred days of remembrance, we grieve. We give voice to the six million Jews who were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. We honor the memory of victims, the pain of survivors, the bravery of heroes who stood up to Hitler’s unspeakable evil. And we recommit to heading and heeding the lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history, to revitalize and realize the responsibility of never again.

Never again, simply translated for me, means never forget. Never forget. Never forgetting means we must keep telling the story, must keep teaching the truth, must keep teaching our children and our grandchildren. The truth is, we are at risk of people not knowing the truth. That’s why growing up, my dad taught me and my siblings about the horrors of the Shoah at our family dinner table. That’s why I visited Yad Vashem with my family as a senator, as vice president, as president. And that’s why I took my grandchildren to Dachau, so they could see and bear witness to the perils of indifference, the complicity of silence, in the face of evil they knew was happening.

Germany 1933, Hitler and his Nazi Party’s rise to power by rekindling one of the oldest forms of prejudice and hate: antisemitism. His role didn’t begin with mass murder; it started slowly across economic, political, social and cultural life. Propaganda demonizing Jews. Boycotts of Jewish businesses. Synagogues defaced with swastikas. Harassment of Jews in the street and the schools, antisemitic demonstrations, pogroms, organized riots. With the indifference of the world, Hitler knew he could expand his reign of terror by eliminating Jews from Germany, to annihilate Jews across Europe through genocide, the Nazis called the final solution. Concentration camps, gas chambers, mass shootings. By the time the war ended, six million Jews — one of every three Jews in the entire world — were murdered.

This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust. It didn’t end with the Holocaust either. Or after — even after our victory in World War II. This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world and requires our continued vigilance and outspokenness. That hatred was brought to life on October 7th of 2023. On the sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the Earth, over 1,200 innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents, slaughtered in a kibbutz, massacred at a music festival, brutally raped, mutilated and sexually assaulted.

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