Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres on Wednesday highlighted a nuclear Iran as the closest existential threat to the world nowadays during this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyr's and Heroes Remembrance Authority.

Israeli soldiers stand in formation during the opening ceremony of the annual Holocaust Memorial Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem April 18, 2012.[Photo/Agencies]

Netanyahu stressed the need to remember the past so as to avoid present and future threats to Israel.

"Today, the regime in Iran openly calls and determinedly works for our destruction. And it is feverishly working to develop atomic weapons to achieve that goal," Netanyahu said, referring to Iran's controversial nuclear program.

"Iran represents a threat to world peace and it is the world's responsibility to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry," he pointed out.

Israel's President Shimon Peres speaks during the opening ceremony of the annual Holocaust Memorial Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem April 18, 2012.[Photo/Agencies]

Peres also referred to Iran as a world threat in his speech to the audience.

"Today humanity has no choice, we must learn from the lessons of the Holocaust and stand strong against existential threats before it is too late. Iran is at the heart of this threat. She is the center of terror, she represents a threat to world peace," Peres said.

"There is no reason to undermine Israel's capacities to face this threat, whether visible or hidden," he added.

Israel, along with many other Western countries, has accused Iran of secretly seeking the capability of making nuclear bombs, while Iran insists its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, such as power generation and medical research.

The main theme of the ceremony was "my brother's keeper-Jewish solidarity during the Holocaust," to commemorate the stories of mutual help between Jews during the Holocaust.

Six Holocaust survivors were commemorated during the ceremony, with short films about their lives during the Nazi occupation and how they survived. Each one lighted a torch representing the six million Jews that perished during the Holocaust.

Visitors look at an installation at Yad Vashem's Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem April 18, 2012.[Photo/Agencies]

Batsheva Dagan, born in Poland and only survivor in her family, told Xinhua about her struggle to remain alive and how the experience inspired her to become a writer and teach children about the Holocaust.

"I was in six prisons in Germany and then they took me to Auschwitz, where I was for about 20 months, always living in fear to be killed. There I worked in different commands, such as picking crops, and my hands were bleeding because I had no gloves. After they took me to the infirmary, where I had to take buckets with excrements and touch the bodies to see if they were cold or warm, and separate the living from the dead," Dagan recalled.

"I couldn't keep all these terrible experiences in my belly, so when I came to Israel I felt it is my duty and my privilege to tell the story, because I survived. I was doomed to die because I was Jewish, but my will to live prevailed," she said.

The annual commemoration day will continue until Thursday, when a siren will sound throughout the country at 10 a.m. local time, at which time all the population will pause for a few minutes in remembrance of the victims.

After the siren, the names of the victims will be read in different ceremonies.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is typically marked in Israel as a day of mourning. All the entertainment places, such as bars, theaters and cinemas are closed from Wednesday evening to Thursday evening and special shows and movies about the Holocaust are broadcast on television.

Visitors look at pictures of Jews killed in the Holocaust during a visit to the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem's Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem April 18, 2012.[Photo/Agencies]