Proclamation 4747—Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust

Thirty-five years ago, in the closing days of World War II, U.S. Armed Forces liberated the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany. Words can hardly convey the shock and horror the world felt on seeing the victims?both the living and the dead?of the Nazi program of deliberate genocide.

Dachau and the other death camps, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Treblinka and the others, were the machinery used by the Nazi regime to perpetrate the Holocaust-the systematic, state-sponsored extermination of six million Jews and the murders of millions of other people. The Holocaust was a crime virtually without equal in history. It has left deep moral scars on all humankind. No one who participated in the liberation of those camps or who knows their history can ever forget them?least of all the 250,000 survivors who found a home and built a new life in this country after the war.

During my trip to Israel, I visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. I vowed then, and I repeat now, that the world must never permit such evil to occur again.

We must study the record of the Holocaust and learn its lessons. We must never forget the terrible fruits of bigotry and hatred, and continually rededicate ourselves to the principles of equality and justice for all peoples.

In recognition of the magnitude of those crimes against humanity, the Congress of the United States, by joint resolution (S.J. Res. 97), has authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation designating a week of remembrance.

Now, Therefore, I, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate April 13 through April 19, 1980 as "Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust." I ask the American people to observe this solemn anniversary of the liberation of Dachau with appropriate study, prayers and ceremonies, as a tribute to our determination to eliminate the hatred that produced such horror from the face of the earth.

On the recommendation of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, I also ask the people of the United States to observe International Holocaust Commemoration Day on April 13, 1980.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this tenth day of April in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fourth.

JIMMY CARTER