[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 63 (Wednesday, May 14, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E923-E924]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 ADDRESS OF JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA AT THE NATIONAL DAYS OF REMEMBRANCE 
                                CEREMONY

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 14, 1997

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, at an extremely moving ceremony in the 
rotunda of the U.S. Capitol last Thursday, Members of Congress, the 
Diplomatic Corps, representatives of our Nation's executive and 
judicial branches, and hundreds of survivors of the Holocaust with 
their friends and family gathered to commemorate the National Days of 
Remembrance. This was an occasion when we take the time to remember the 
horror and inhumanity of the Holocaust.
  Mr. Speaker, in recognition of the unspeakable horror of the 
Holocaust and the importance that we never forget that tragedy, the 
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council was established by Congress to preserve 
the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. One of the most important 
tasks in this effort is the annual Days of Remembrance commemoration in 
the rotunda of our Nation's Capitol. This year, Antonin Scalia, 
Associate Justice of the U.S.

[[Page E924]]

Supreme Court gave the principal address at the ceremony.
  Mr. Speaker, I am inserting the remarks of Justice Scalia into the 
Record, and I urge my colleagues to give thoughtful attention to his 
excellent comments:

       Distinguished Members of the United States Senate and House 
     of Representatives; Members of the Diplomatic Corps; 
     Survivors of the Holocaust; Ladies and Gentlemen:
       I was profoundly honored to have been invited to speak at 
     this annual ceremony in remembrance of those consumed in the 
     holocaust. But it is not, I must tell you, an easy assignment 
     for a non-Jew to undertake. I am an outsider speaking to an 
     ancient people about a tragedy of unimaginable proportions 
     that is intensely personal to them. I have no memories of 
     parents or children, uncles or cousins caught up in and 
     destroyed by the horror. I have not even that distinctive 
     appreciation of evil that must come from knowing that six 
     million people were killed for no other reason than that they 
     had blood like mine running in their veins.
       More difficult still, I am not only not a Jew, but I am a 
     Christian, and I know that the antisemitism of many of my 
     uncomprehending coreligionists, over many centuries, helped 
     set the stage for the mad tragedy that the National 
     Socialists produced. I say uncomprehending coreligionists, 
     not only because my religion teaches that it is wrong to hate 
     anyone, but because it is particularly absurd for a Christian 
     to hate the people of Israel. That is to hate one's spiritual 
     parents, and to sever one's roots.
       When I was a young man in college, spending my junior year 
     abroad, I saw Dachau. Later, in the year after I graduated 
     from law school, I saw Auschwitz. I will of course never 
     forget the impression they made upon me. If some playwright 
     or novelist had invented such a tale of insanity and 
     diabolical cruelty, it would not be believed. But it did 
     happen. The one message I want to convey today is that you 
     will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if 
     you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most 
     educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the 
     world.
       The Germany of the late 1920's and early 1930's was a world 
     leader in most fields of art, science and intellect. Berlin 
     was a center of theater; with the assistance of the famous 
     producer Max Reinhardt, playwrights and composers of the 
     caliber of Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weil flourished. Berlin 
     had three opera houses, and Germany as a whole no less than 
     80. Every middle-sized city had its own orchestra. German 
     poets and writers included Hermann Hesse, Stefan George, 
     Leonhard Frank, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, who won the 
     Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In architecture, Germany 
     was the cutting edge, with Gropius and the Bauhaus school. It 
     boasted painters like Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer. Musical 
     composers like Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Arnold Schonberg, 
     Paul Hindimith. Conductors like Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, 
     Erich Kleiber and Wilhelm Furtwangler. And in science, of 
     course, the Germans were preeminent. To quote a recent 
     article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:
       In 1933, when the National Socialist Party came to power in 
     Germany, the biomedical enterprise in that country was among 
     the most sophisticated in the world. German contributions to 
     biochemistry, physiology, medicine, surgery, and public 
     health, as well as to clinical training, had shaped to an 
     important degree the academic and practice patterns of the 
     time, and clinical training and research experience in the 
     great German clinics and laboratories had been widely sought 
     for decades by physicians and basic scientists from around 
     the world.
       To fully grasp the horror of the holocaust, you must 
     imagine (for it probably happened) that the commandant of 
     Auschwitz or Dachau, when he had finished his day's work, 
     retired to his apartment to eat a meal that was in the finest 
     good taste, and then to listen, perhaps, to some tender and 
     poignant Lieder of Franz Schubert.
       This aspect of the matter is perhaps so prominent in my 
     mind because I am undergoing, currently, the task of 
     selecting a college for the youngest of my children--or 
     perhaps more accurately, trying to help her select it. How 
     much stock we place in education, intellect, cultural 
     refinement! And how much of our substance we are prepared to 
     expend to give our children the very best opportunity to 
     acquire education, intellect, cultural refinement! Yet those 
     qualities are of only secondary importance--to our children, 
     and to the society that their generation will create. I am 
     reminded of words written by John Henry Newman long before 
     the holocaust could even be imagined.
       ``Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is 
     not conscience, refinement is not humility, . . . Liberal 
     Education makes . . . the gentleman. It is well to be a 
     gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a 
     delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a 
     noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life. These 
     are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they 
     are the objects of a University. . . 
       Yes, to the heartless.
       It is the purpose of these annual holocaust remembrances--
     as it is the purpose of the nearby holocaust museum--not only 
     to honor the memory of the six million Jews and three or four 
     million other poor souls caught up in this 20th-century 
     terror, but also, by keeping the memory of their tragedy 
     painfully alive, to prevent its happening again. The latter 
     can be achieved only by acknowledging, and passing on to our 
     children, the existence of absolute, uncompromisable 
     standards of human conduct. Mankind has traditionally derived 
     such standards from religion; and the West has derived them 
     from and through the Jews. Those absolute and uncompromisable 
     standards of human conduct will not endure without an effort 
     to make them endure, and it is to that enterprise that we 
     rededicate ourselves today. They are in the Decalogue, and 
     they are in the question put and answered by Micah: ``What 
     doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love 
     mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.''
       For those six million Jews to whom it was not done justly, 
     who were shown no mercy, and for whom God and his laws were 
     abandoned: may we remember their sufferings, and may they 
     rest in peace.

     

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