[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 18 (Monday, January 30, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1735-S1736]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


         ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ

  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I rise to solemnize the 50th anniversary 
last Friday of the liberation of Auschwitz, the concentration camp 
where nearly 1\1/2\ million innocents were exter- minated by 
the Nazi regime, most of them for the simple reason that they were 
Jews.
  The Nazi Holocaust represents one of the blackest eras of the 20th 
century, a time which casts a shadow across the landscape of the entire 
second half of this century.
  I quote Paul Johnson, one of our eminent living historians, from one 
of his many great books, ``A History of the Jews'':

       Hitler had wiped out a third of all Jews, especially the 
     pious and the poor, from whom Judaism had drawn its peculiar 
     strength. The loss could be seen in secular terms. In the 
     nineteenth century and early twentieth century the world had 
     been immeasurably enriched by the liberated talent streaming 
     out of the old ghettos, which had proved a principal creative 
     force in modern European and North American civilization. The 
     supply continued until Hitler destroyed the source forever. 
     No one will ever know what the world thereby sacrificed. For 
     Israel the deprivation was devastating. It was felt at a 
     personal level, for so many of its citizens had lost 
     virtually all their families and childhood friends, and it 
     was felt collectively: one in three of those who might have 
     built the state was not there. It was felt spiritually 
     perhaps most of all.

  ``No one will ever know what the world sacrificed.'' We will always 
live with that absence; we will always live with the darkness of what 
was lost.
  Churchill called it ``the crime without a name.'' Last Friday at the 
ceremonies in Poland, Lech Walesa spoke of ``the martyrdom of all 
nations, especially the Jewish Nation.'' And in Germany Helmut Kohl 
said it was ``the darkest and most terrible chapter in German 
history.'' They were all correct.
  Civilized men and women are fortunate today that the lands where the 
Holocaust occurred are free. But the truly free societies must bear 
burdens, and a burden of freedom is to examine one's past--for the 
purpose of recognizing the most brutal of realities; for the purpose, 
perhaps, of understanding; but most
 importantly, for the purpose of never forgetting. I submit that 
nations are never completely free until they have the ability, will, 
and courage to examine their pasts free of censorship, free of cant, 
free of willful neglect.

  The Holocaust Museum in Washington provides a somber, moving ,and 
dramatic memorial to man's most evil capabilities, and it draws 
thousands to pay homage to the millions of victims of genocide. There 
is strength in a society that can bear such witness.
  Fifty years later, we still live in the shadow of the Holocaust, and 
indeed, until we can say that all men will respond instinctively and 
courageously with the highest outrage against genocide, we can never 
stray far from this darkness.
  Last week we commemorated the liberation of Auschwitz. In the same 
week, 19 Israeli men were killed in a terrorist attack by one of the 
extremist groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In the same 
week, more intelligence reports surfaced about Iran's nerve gas 
production, which, combined with its current ballistic missile 
capabilities, puts it in a position to threaten Israel with gas 
attacks.
  Again, I will quote Paul Johnson:

       The overwhelming lesson the Jews learned from the Holocaust 
     was the imperative need to secure for themselves a permanent, 
     self-contained and above all sovereign refuge where if 
     necessary the whole of world Jewry could find safety from its 
     enemies. The First World War made the Zionist state possible. 
     The Second World War made it essential.

  [[Page S1736]] It is a bitter realization to know that 50 years after 
the Nazi Holocaust, the Jewish State remains under attack; anti-
Semitism is growing in certain parts of the world, as in Russia; 
genocide is practiced and ignored, as in Rwanda and, on the European 
Continent drenched in Jewish blood, in Bosnia.
  The Nazi Holocaust demonstrated a human depravity that many refused 
to believe was possible. We must never forget that men are capable of 
the most heinous destruction of their fellow men. The name of Auschwitz 
should forever echo in the memories and consciences of civilized people 
as one of the pinnacles of evil achieved in the 20th century. For it 
was in Auschwitz and the other concentration camps of the Nazi era that 
genocide was practiced as a tool of nationalism. And if we ever choose 
to ignore the shadows of such a loss, of such a despicable past, we do 
so at the risk of blindly allowing it to happen again.


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