[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
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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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