Following are excerpts of remarks delivered on May 7 by U.S. Ambassador James S. Gilmore III to the Vienna-based Permanent Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
…Today, we recognize the shared sacrifice, enduring commitment, and unflinching bravery of the Allied forces and the underground movements in defeating the Axis powers in Europe. The people of many countries made great sacrifices and endured enormous suffering and loss of life. …
As we teach our children about the horrors of the concentration camps, the massacres, and the deportations, let us also tell the stories of the righteous citizens who protected their neighbors, the soldiers who sacrificed everything to fight fascism, the ordinary citizens who rose up to resist occupation, and all those who fought for freedom and stood up in defense of the rights and lives of others. We should never forget the unique suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, nor the merciless slaughter of so many other innocent civilians by the brutal Nazi regime.…
In remembering the full history of the second world war we cannot forget that for many peoples in Central and Eastern Europe, the end of Nazi oppression was replaced by the imposition or re-imposition, against their wills, of Communist repression. For them, the full blessings of liberty that Western Europe celebrated in 1945 did not arrive until 1989, 1990, or later. Indeed, it was the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act, establishing the OSCE, which helped enable those peoples to recover their freedom and human rights.
While the Soviet Union’s military and civilian population made tremendous sacrifices to defeat the Nazis, as our Russian colleague has reminded us today – and we honor those sacrifices entirely and completely – we should also not forget that the second world war began in 1939, when Stalin and Hitler aligned through a pact that divided Eastern Europe into Soviet- and Nazi-controlled zones. I’m confident our Polish friends today have not forgotten that fact for one second.
For many nations of Europe, 1945 marked not a return to freedom, but rather the beginning of almost 50 years of oppression by the Soviet Union. The road to true liberation has been long, and in some cases, societies are still traveling along that road. We call on Russia to stop making self-aggrandizing claims based on purposeful misrepresentations of history. We stand in solidarity with our European partners against Russia’s falsification of history. …