[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 54 (Tuesday, May 5, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E758]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E758]]
    ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT RICHARD C. LEVIN OF YALE UNIVERSITY AT THE 
        NATIONAL CIVIC COMMEMORATION OF THE DAYS OF REMEMBRANCE

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 5, 1998

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, on Thursday, April 23, Members of Congress 
joined with representatives of the diplomatic corps, executive and 
judicial branch officials, and hundreds of Holocaust survivors and 
their families to commemorate the National Days of Remembrance in the 
rotunda of the United States Capitol. The keynote address at this 
solemn ceremony was delivered by the distinguished President of Yale 
University, Dr. Richard C. Levin's meaningful words served to remind us 
all of our communal responsibility to educate our children and 
grandchildren.
  Dr. Levin is the twenty-second President of Yale University. Prior to 
his outstanding service in this office, he added to the University's 
unparalleled reputation through his efforts as the Frederick William 
Beinecke Professor of Economics at Yale. In addition to teaching a wide 
variety of courses on subjects ranging from the oil industry to the 
history of economic thought, President Levin served on dozens of major 
committees and rose in the administrative ranks to become the chairman 
of the economics department and the dean of the graduate schools at 
Yale before his October 2, 1993 inauguration as President of the 
University.
  Mr. Speaker, I insert President Levin's thought-provoking remarks for 
the Record, and I urge my colleagues to take note of their meaning and 
importance.

                     ``Blessed is the March. . .''

                         (By Richard C. Levin)

       The main camp at Auschwitz was situated, not in remote 
     isolation, but in a densely populated region. To the east, 
     immediately adjacent to the camp, was a pleasant village, 
     complete with a hotel and shops, built to house SS troops and 
     their families. One mile farther east was the town of 
     Auschwitz, intended by the very men who ordered the 
     construction of the camps to be a center of industrial 
     activity, a focus of German resettlement at the confluence of 
     three rivers, with easy access to the coal fields of Upper 
     Silesia.\1\
       In his chilling work on the origins of Auschwitz, Robert-
     Jan van Pelt documents the Utopian vision that drove the 
     systematic planning for German colonization of the East. In 
     December 1941, Hans Stosberg, the architect and master 
     planner, sent his friends a New Year's greeting card. On the 
     front he wished them ``health, happiness, and a good outcome 
     for every new beginning.'' The card's central spread depicted 
     his drawing for a reconstruction of the central market place 
     in Auschwitz. The inscription on the back of the greeting 
     card connected Stosberg's current project with National 
     Socialist mythology;
       ``In the year 1241 Silesian knights, acting as saviors of 
     the Reich, warded off the Mongolian assault at Wahlstatt. In 
     that same century Auschwitz was founded as a German town. 
     After six hundred years [sic] the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler is 
     turning the Bolshevik menace away from Europe. This year, 
     1941, the construction of a new German city and the 
     reconstruction of the old Silesian market have been planned 
     and initiated.''
       To Stosberg's inscription, I would add that during the same 
     year, 1941, it was decided to reduce the space allocated to 
     each prisoner at the nearby Auschwitz-Birkanau camp from 14 
     to 11 square feet.
       How, in one of the most civilized nations on earth, could 
     an architect boast about work that involved not only 
     designing the handsome town center depicted on his greeting 
     card but the meticulous planning of facilities to house the 
     slave labor to build it?
       This is but one of numberless questions that knowledge of 
     the Holocaust compels us to ask. In the details of its 
     horror, the Holocaust forces us to redefine the range of 
     human experience; it demands that we confront real, not 
     imagined, experiences that defy imagination.
       How can we began to understand the dehumanizing loss of 
     identity suffered by the victims in the camps? How can we 
     begin to understand the insensate rationality and brutality 
     of the persecutors? How can we begin to understand the 
     silence of the bystanders? There is only one answer: by 
     remembering.
       The distinguished Yale scholar, Geoffrey Hartman, tells us, 
     ``the culture of remembrance is a high tide. . . .At present, 
     three generations are preoccupied with Holocaust memory. 
     There are the eyewitnesses; their children, the second 
     generation, who have subdued some of their ambivalence and 
     are eager to know their parents better; and the third 
     generation, grand-children who treasure the personal stories 
     of relatives now slipping away. \2\
       The tide will inevitably recede. And if there are no 
     survivors to tell the story, who will make their successors 
     remember and help them to understand? Holocaust Memorial 
     Museum in Washington, along with those of sister museums in 
     other cities, are educating the public about the horrors of 
     the Shoah. Museums, university archives, and private 
     foundations are collecting and preserving the materials that 
     enable us to learn from the past, and it is the special role 
     of universities to support the scholars who explore and 
     illuminate this dark episode in human history. Our 
     universities have a dual responsibility: to preserve the 
     memory of the Holocaust and to seek a deeper understanding of 
     it.
       This is a daunting and important responsibility. To 
     confront future generations with the memory of the Holocaust 
     is to change forever their conception of humanity. To urge 
     them to understand it is to ask their commitment to prevent 
     its recurrence.
       In the words of Hannah Senesh, the 23 year-old poet and 
     patriot executed as a prisoner of the Reich in Budapest, 
     ``Blessed is the match that is consumed in kindling a 
     flame.'' May the act of remembrance consume our ignorance and 
     indifference, and light the way to justice and righteousness.


                               footnotes

     \1\ Robert-Jan van Pelt, ``Auschwitz: From Architect's 
     Promise to Inmate's Perdition,'' Modernism/Modernity, 1:1, 
     January 1994, 80-120. See also Deborah Dwork and Robert-Jan 
     van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, New York: W.W. 
     Norton, 1996.
     \2\ Geoffrey Hartman, ``Shoah and Intellectual Witness,'' 
     Partisan Review, 1998:1, 37.

     

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