Minister of Foreign Affairs Jonas Gahr Støre

Opening Ceremony - The Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities

Villa Grande, Oslo, 23 August 2006

Your Majesty,
Your Royal Highness,
President of the Storting,
Ladies and gentlemen,

Does a building have a soul? Can a building speak?

I think the answer is yes. The people who build it and the people who use it give it a soul.

They convey a message to their time. And the building passes it on to future generations.

But people are just as responsible for the way they interpret the message that is handed down as they are for their own actions. People are responsible for shaping their own lives, developing the societies they live in, and distinguishing between right and wrong – for believing, doubting and seeking, but also for taking responsibility and making decisions.

We encourage young people to be true to themselves, to become the people they really are. But we cannot say the same thing to a building. A building can only be what people make it.

For many Norwegians, the building where I work, Victoria Terasse, is a strong symbol from a dark period of our history. In its cellar, prisoners were tortured by the Gestapo. Today, two floors above the torture cellar, the Foreign Ministry staff working on human rights, peace, reconciliation and humanitarian efforts have their offices.

It we look at this development from a wide perspective, we see that it was the fight for freedom and democracy that made this transition possible. People took responsibility, chose a new direction and renewed the building’s soul.

Villa Grande was built by the great industrialist Sam Eyde, and is a landmark on Bygdøy with its strong and monumental architecture. Before the Second World War, there were plans for the Meteorological Institute to move in here, but events took a very different turn.

Villa Grande became Vidkun Quisling’s home and base – a symbol of dishonour and treason. This shaped the soul of the building at the time and for many years afterwards.

From the tower, people must have been able to see the ships carrying Jews to the concentration camps in the winter of 1942-43. More than 760 people were deported in cramped conditions; fewer than 30 returned.

Last January, we were gathered at the Akershus quayside to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day and to pay tribute to the people who started their journey there, from a quayside in Oslo.

But genocide – both as an idea and as a system – begins elsewhere. It begins in people’s minds. It develops in buildings like this one, where people are going about their everyday business.

The Holocaust was not a natural disaster. It was an atrocity created by people. And its horrors were perpetrated in our country as well, by ordinary people with ordinary lives.

This was under German occupation. But the people who deported the Jews, who drew up the lists, who kept them in line, and who drove them to the quayside – they were all Norwegians.

And these were not isolated actions. They arose from motives found at a deeper level – in the people themselves, in the culture, in history, in the spirit of the time.

Today we have come together to bring a new vision to Villa Grande and give its story a new direction. We are bringing a new message – the desire to learn from the past, to shed light on the small streams that can run together to create a flood of man-made tragedy. We will continue to study the chain of events that led civilisation from indifference, discrimination and prejudice right to the edge of the abyss – even to genocide.

It is a pleasure for me to represent the Government here today at the opening of the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities.

I am particularly delighted that this project has had the support of several different governments over the years, and that there are several former heads of government and ministers here this evening.

This endeavour is intended to bring the nation together in a joint effort to foster the fundamental values that are essential to our society.

The process leading up to today’s opening started almost ten years ago. Step by step we have worked together to achieve our goal.

I would like to extend a warm thank you to the many people who have been involved.

And I would particularly like to pay tribute to those who have survived the concentration camps, all those who have tirelessly borne witness, who have told us not only about their ordeals but also about the historical process that led up to the Holocaust.

You have been called to pass on your knowledge and your experiences, especially to young people. Our society is deeply indebted to you.

Villa Grande will absorb your message. You are helping to shape the building’s soul for our time.

High quality research and should not only illuminate the past, it should also – and this is far more difficult – shed light on our own time, and help us to understand what is happening now before it is too late.

It is needed. The currents that led to the Holocaust have not gone away. They raise their head and find expression; they rise up in new forms and in new places. New place names have been added to a dark list: Srebrenica, Rwanda, Darfur.

A head of state has publicly denied that the Holocaust took place. Minorities are openly being discriminated against and persecuted – sometimes to death. Behind the scenes, prejudices are growing that will find expression in the public arena.

It is in these grey zones that the fight must be fought – against anti-Semitism, against all ideologies that exclude groups of people and spread hatred.

We are not immune. There are groups in our society, on our streets who feel they are stigmatised, apprehensive, even afraid.

We cannot accept this. We as a society must fight against it.

People are not buildings. They can make decisions. But we can only understand with our minds what our hearts can feel.

The task of the centre is to help us to do both.

I wish all who work here every success in their endeavours. I hope that Villa Grande and the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities will make a real mark.

Thank you for your attention

For more information about the centre, please see: www.hlsenteret.no