When the first bombs were dropped on Warsaw in the morning of 1 September 1939, Władysław Bartoszewski was 17 years old.

It was the summer holidays – like now – and he had just earned his Polish Matura.

Like all young people, he was full of hope and dreams.

On 1 September 1939, however, he and his parents, like so many citizens of Warsaw, were awakened by air defence fire, followed by explosions.

The first people in Warsaw to die were killed in their sleep, at home in their beds. They died even before war was declared on their country – a declaration that took place here, in the Kroll Opera, which formerly stood where we stand today.

When bombs rained down on Warsaw, Bartoszewski went to the nearby hospital and volunteered to help, carrying the wounded to the clinic on a stretcher. One, and then another, and then another.

As we all know, Bartoszewski would later survive Auschwitz.

He would join the resistance.

He would fight in the Warsaw Uprising.

He would survive the war.

Warsaw, his home town, had been almost fully destroyed.

“I lived through the darkest hours of war,” he would later say.

Today, and especially these days, I ask myself time and again: how do people manage?

Not only how do they survive such things, but from where do they draw the unbelievable strength to turn horror into hope, and above all to build a new, shared future? That’s what he, like so many others, did.

Decades later, as Poland’s Foreign Minister, he spoke about his dream that Poland and Germany would be neighbours rather than enemies.

This is how he put it:

“Both people, Poles and Germans, should be only one thing to each other: just normal people – [...] viewed as human beings, not judged based on their nationality.”

Poland lost far more than five million people – one-fifth of its population – in the war of annihilation, including three million Jews from Poland.

Five million lives – men, women and children, people like us.

Five million people that would have no future, because many Germans did not view them as people like themselves.

Because many Germans did not want to envision a shared future with their Polish neighbours.

For there to be a just future, you must have a vision and people who fill it with life, day in and day out.

On 1 May 2004, 60 years after the inconceivable crimes that Germans committed in Poland, hundreds of people stood on the Oder River bridge connecting Frankfurt with Słubice.

Poles and Germans – children and grandchildren of the perpetrators and the victims.

As luck would have it, I ended up being there to witness the moment.

How people there fell into each other’s arms at midnight, celebrating Poland’s accession to the European Union – to our peaceful, forward-looking Union.

This was, and is, by no means a foregone conclusion. Especially on the German side – on our side – there were those who were opposed to this. Those who did not want Germans and Poles hugging one another on the bridge spanning the Oder River.

This year, 20 years later, on 1 May 2024, many people again stood on that bridge; although in fact they were not standing but instead walking back and forth, because the two cities on both sides were jointly celebrating 20 years of eastward enlargement. They were also celebrating because, back then, despite the prejudices and those who did not want the country to join, people had chosen not to take the easy way out. Instead, they decided: “Of course that’s what we’ll do.”

This time, not by chance but because I was Foreign Minister, I once again was lucky enough to be there. This time I was there together with my colleague Radek Sikorski, the current Foreign Minister and my counterpart, and with the former Foreign Ministers of Germany and Poland who along with many others had made accession possible 20 years ago – Joschka Fischer and Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz.

Gathered there, we all celebrated how Bartoszewski’s dream had become a reality. Namely, that we are not just normal people, but neighbours and friends.

How normal it has become now for Poles and Germans to live a shared future could be felt during the COVID pandemic, when that very bridge was closed and people said, “You can’t do that. We simply can’t live without each other, as a community.”

Because it has meanwhile become normal for hundreds of Frankfurt’s pupils to learn Polish, and for the fifth and sixth graders at many schools in Słubice to learn German;

for craft enterprises on both sides of the Oder River to not only work together, but to actively recruit workers from the neighbouring country;

for 100,000 people a day to cross the Oder in both directions – on their way to work, to visit friends or to participate in sports activities;

for students from both countries to join up and take charge of prefab buildings that had been slated for demolition, instead using them to screen films, organise concerts and put on parties.

And, as is generally the case in these border regions – we do, after all, have a number of neighbouring countries – for German and Polish police officers to go on joint patrols on both sides of the shared border.

All this is normal today – while it should be seen as anything but a matter of course.

We know this normalcy is a privilege – and a precious one. I say this precisely today, on a day when we are holding elections here in Germany.

It will always be precious to us, meaning that we will always have a special responsibility.

Because, for us Germans, a future – one that does not pit us against one another, but one we can share – has been enabled not least by the courage and vision of our Polish neighbours.

It was they who, with their Solidarity movement, made it possible for independent candidates to run for office for the first time in the June 1989 elections. And who then elected them by an overwhelming majority.

It was they who thereby also gave courage to people in the former GDR and throughout the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Director Neumärker has already mentioned it: it was they who helped make the Baltic Way possible, which then paved the way to freedom for all of us.

They were the ones who made it possible for us to live in a reunited Germany in the heart of Europe.

The history of our two countries, Germany and Poland, is closely intertwined,

from the depths of suffering and unspeakable crimes that Germans committed against Poles,

to the moment the Poles set out to fight for freedom and self-determination

up to today, when Germany and Poland are jointly committed to the security of Europe and the security of Ukraine.

As Germany, we stand ready to help, just as all of Eastern Europe was there to help us when we were in need of them. We must never forget that.

Our friendship today must therefore never become a matter of course. Our solidarity is not a gift. Rather, it is a show of respect for everything that others have done for us.

For this, we need remembrance, especially here in Berlin, where the German crimes of the Second World War originated.

I am pleased that you, Mr Neumärker and Professor Loew, are today unveiling a plaque that provides information on what this place means, a plaque of remembrance.

What we want and what we are working for is a permanent and prominent memorial commemorating the suffering of the Polish population under German occupation, a memorial in the heart of Berlin, along with the establishment of a German-Polish House.

That is why we are here today, at precisely this spot, in the heart of Berlin.

So that we Germans, become more aware of this memory, which to this day is so vivid and painful for our Polish neighbours. Because this is currently not the case. To be fully honest with ourselves, this is something we must always admit to.

I mean not only the point that Heiko Maas just made about how, in Germany, not everyone knows that the Warsaw uprising and the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto are not one and the same thing.

I also mean that not everyone knows what happened on 1 September, when Germany marched on Poland. Or why Poland will always have its own, valuable perspective on matters – a perspective that we, too, must adopt time and again.

But I am happy that, together and across party lines, as democratic parties, we in recent years have worked intensively on this matter. And I am happy that since the last time we gathered here for our commemoration one year ago substantial progress has been made. I want to say a word of thanks to you, as well, Claudia Roth.

I’m grateful that the plans for building such a place of commemoration and remembrance for the victims of Germany’s war against Poland have been adopted by the German cabinet.

I’m grateful that we clearly and jointly expressed our desire to have this House built as quickly as possible, including at the last German-Polish intergovernmental consultations.

Next, the German Bundestag will examine the plans, after which it will issue its opinion.

We all want the project to be implemented as swiftly as possible. And by this, I mean very swiftly. Because, to be honest, too much time has already passed.

Those who bore witness, like Władysław Bartoszewski, are no longer with us. That makes gathering places like this more and more important. Places that make clear how today, thankfully, Germans and Poles are an “astronomical distance” removed from the tragic events of back then. That is how the Auschwitz survivor, resistance fighter, Foreign Minister and great figure of reconciliation analysed the two countries’ relationship. Places that make clear that this is anything but a matter of course.

We all must work every single day to make sure it stays that way.

To make sure that Germans and Poles are not only now, but will always remain, “just normal people” for one another.

Neighbours.

Friends.

Europeans, in our shared Europe.

Thank you very much.