[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 14 (Thursday, February 10, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E216-E217]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   ADDRESS OF ISRAEL'S DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER AND MINISTER OF FOREIGN 
 AFFAIRS, SILVAN SHALOM, AT THE SPECIAL SESSION OF THE UNITED NATIONS 
 GENERAL ASSEMBLY COMMEMORATING THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION 
                          OF NAZI DEATH CAMPS

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, February 10, 2005

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, on January 24 of this year, the United 
Nations General Assembly commemorated the 60th anniversary of the 
liberation of Nazi death camps. January 27, 1945, was the date on which 
Russian troops liberated Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death 
camps, and the symbol of the Holocaust, in which over 6 million Jews 
and hundreds of thousands of other nationalities were brutally murdered 
during World War II.
  The United Nations commemoration, which was held three days before 
the anniversary, began with a moment of silence for the victims. Among 
the major speakers at the General Assembly special session was the 
distinguished Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of 
the State of Israel, Silvan Shalom.
  Israel, like the United Nations, was born from the ashes of the 
Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who fled Europe as the Nazi 
grip was tightening around Europe and hundreds of thousands more who 
survived the Nazi terror immigrated to Israel. The State of Israel 
became their refuge, and they became citizens of a state dedicated to 
remembering and never to allow a repetition of the Holocaust.
  Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Shalom previously served 
as Finance Minister and Science Minister in the Israeli government. He 
has been a member of the Knesset since 1992. Born in Tunisia, his 
family brought him to Israel when he was only a year old.
  Minister Shalom's address at the United Nations General Assembly 
session draws upon three millennia of Israeli history and tradition. 
From the dry bones of the horror of the Holocaust a living Israel has 
emerged, an Israel that is absolutely and irrevocably committed that 
such a tragedy shall not happen ever again.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask that the outstanding address of the Foreign 
Minister of Israel be placed in the Congressional Record. I urge my 
colleagues to give thoughtful attention to his statement.

   Address of Israel's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign 
                         Affairs Silvan Shalom

       Mr. Secretary-General, Mr. President, Fellow Foreign 
     Ministers, Survivors of the Holocaust, Distinguished 
     Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen:
       Sixty years ago, allied soldiers arrived at the gates of 
     the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nothing could prepare them 
     for what they would witness there, and at other camps they 
     liberated--the stench of the bodies, the piles of clothes, of 
     teeth, of children's shoes. But in the accounts of the 
     liberators, more than the smell, more even than the piles of 
     bodies, the story of the horror was told in the faces of the 
     survivors.
       The account of Harold Herbst, an American liberator in 
     Buchenwald, is typical of many, and I quote: ``As I walked 
     through the barracks I heard a voice, and I turned around, 
     and I saw a living skeleton talk to me. He said, `thank God 
     you've come.' And that was a funny feeling. Did you ever talk 
     to a skeleton that talked back? And that's what I was doing. 
     And later on I saw mounds of these living skeletons that the 
     Germans left behind them.''
       Thousands of years ago the prophet Ezekiel had a similar 
     vision. In one of the most famous passages of the Bible, the 
     prophet describes how he came to a valley full of bones. The 
     bones, says Ezekiel, are the House of Israel. And the bones 
     are dry, and their hope is lost. Faced with this scene, he 
     asks the questions: shall these bones live? Shall these bones 
     live?
       Ezekiel asked the question that every liberator of the 
     camps asked himself: Can any hope or humanity emerge from 
     such horror? Shall these bones live?
       Here with me today, are those who have given life to dry 
     bones, both survivors and liberators. Men like Dov Shilanksy 
     who fought in the ghetto and later became speaker of Israel's 
     parliament, the Knesset; like Yossi Peled, who after being 
     evacuated from the terrors of the Nazis, eventually became a 
     Major-General in the Israeli Defense Forces, to protect his 
     people form the horrors of another calamity; and like David 
     Grinstein, who survived the labor camps, and now heads an 
     organization for restitution for the forced laborers under 
     Nazi rule; and women like Gila Almagor--today the first lady 
     of Israeli stage and screen--who has translated her 
     experiences as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, into art 
     that has touched millions.
       When we see what the survivors have managed to create, and 
     build, and contribute to humanity--families, careers, 
     literature, music, even countries--we can only marvel at 
     their strength and courage.
       At the same time, when we see what the survivors have given 
     to humankind, we can

[[Page E217]]

     only begin to appreciate, what might have been given to the 
     world by the millions who did not survive. We mourn their 
     loss, to this day. Every fiber of our people, feels their 
     lack. Every family knows pain, including my own--my wife's 
     grandparents and seven of their eight children, were taken 
     and killed.
       Mr. President, Israel and the Jewish people owe a debt to 
     the liberators of the death camps, and so does all of 
     humankind. In the face of unspeakable evil, these liberators, 
     from many nations represented here today, showed the human 
     capacity for good. In the face of overwhelming indifference 
     to the suffering of others, they showed compassion. And in 
     the face of cowardice, they shoed bravery and resolve.
       We recognize, too, the courage and humanity of Righteous 
     Among the Nations, we refused to look away. People such as 
     Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jewish lives, and 
     whose niece, Nane is here with us today. These heroes helped 
     our dry bones live again. Mr. President, the dry bones have 
     lived again not only in the lives of the survivors, but also 
     in two entities established on the ashes of the Holocaust: 
     the United Nations and the modern State of Israel.
       The tragedy of the Holocaust was a major impetus in the 
     reestablishment of the Jewish people's home, in its ancient 
     land. As Israel declared in its Declaration of Independence:
       The Holocaust, which engulfed millions of Jews in Europe, 
     proved anew the urgency of the reestablishment of the Jewish 
     state. A state which would solve the problem of Jewish 
     homelessness, by opening the gates to all Jews, and lifting 
     the Jewish people to equality in the family of nations.
       And indeed, since its establishment, Israel has provided a 
     haven Jews facing persecution anywhere in the world. At the 
     same time, it has built a society, based on the values of 
     democracy and freedom for all its citizens, where Jewish; 
     life and culture and literature and religion and learning--
     all those things which the Nazis sought to destroy--can 
     flourish and thrive.
       The fact that so many survivors came and played their part 
     in the building of the State of Israel, was itself a 
     remarkable fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy. As the prophet 
     said: ``Thus says the Lord: Behold, O my people, I will take 
     you from the graves. I will put my spirit in you, and you 
     shall live in your own land, in the land of Israel.''
       Mr. President, if Israel represents one heroic attempt, to 
     find a positive response to the atrocities of the Second 
     World War, the United Nations represents another. The very 
     first clauses of the UN Charter bear witness to the 
     understanding of the founders, that this new international 
     organization must serve as the world's answer to evil, that 
     it comes, and I quote: ``to save succeeding generations from 
     the scourge of war,'' to ``reaffirm faith in fundamental 
     human rights'' and ``the dignity and worth of the human 
     person.''
       By convening here today in this historic special session, 
     we honor the victims, we pay respect to the survivors, and we 
     pay tribute to the liberators. We convene here today for 
     those who remember, for those who have forgotten, and for 
     those who do not know. But we also convene to remember that 
     the Charter of this United Nations, like Israel's Declaration 
     of Independence, is written in the blood of the victims of 
     the Holocaust. Unbelievable as it seems, there are those who 
     would delete form history, six million murders.
       Could anything be worse than to systematically destroy a 
     people, to take the proud Jewish citizens of Vienna, 
     Frankfurt and Vilna and even Tunisia and Libya, to burn their 
     holy books, to steal their dignity, their hair, their teeth; 
     to turn them into numbers, to soap, to the ashes of Treblinka 
     and Dachau? The answer is yes, there is something worse; to 
     do all this and then deny it. To do all this and then take 
     form the victims--and their children and grandchildren--the 
     legitimacy of their grief.
       To deny the Holocaust is not only to desecrate the victims 
     and abuse the survivors. It is also to deprive the world of 
     its lessons--lessons which are as crucial toady, as they were 
     60 years ago.
       These lessons are crucial today for three urgent reasons.
       First, because today, once again, the plague of anti-
     Semitism is raising its head. Who could have imagined, that 
     less than 60 years after Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the 
     Jewish people and Israel would be targets of anti-Semitic 
     attacks, even in the countries that witnessed the Nazi 
     atrocities. Yet this is exactly what is happening. The 
     Holocaust teaches us that while Jews may be the first to 
     suffer from anti-Semitism's destructive hate. They have 
     rarely been the last.
       The lessons of the Holocaust are crucial today for a second 
     reason: because today once again we are witnessing, against 
     Jews and other minorities, that same process of 
     delegitimazation and dehumanization, that paved the way to 
     destruction. Let us not forget. The brutal extermination of a 
     people began, not with guns or tanks, but with words, 
     systematically portraying the Jew--the other--as less than 
     legitimate, less than human. Let us not forget this, when we 
     find current newspapers and schoolbooks borrowing caricatures 
     and themes from the Nazi paper Der Sturmer, to portray Jews 
     and Israelis.
       And finally these lessons are crucial today, because once 
     again, we are witnessing a violent assault on the fundamental 
     principle of the sanctity of human life. Perhaps the greatest 
     single idea that the Bible has given to humanity, is the 
     simple truth that every man, woman and child, is created in 
     the divine image, and so, is of infinite value. For the 
     Nazis, the value of a man was finite, even pitiful. How much 
     work could he do? How much hair did she have? How many gold 
     teeth? For the Nazis, the destruction of one human being, or 
     of a hundred, a thousand, six million, was of no consequence. 
     It was just a means to an evil end.
       Today again, we are pitted against the forces of evil, 
     those for whom human life--whether the civilians they target, 
     or their own youth who they use as weapons--are of no value, 
     nothing but a means to their goals. Our sages teach us that 
     he who takes a single life, it is as if he has taken an 
     entire world.'' No human life is less than a world. No 
     ideology, no political agenda, can justify or excuse the 
     deliberate taking of an innocent life.
       Mr. President, for six million Jews, the State of Israel 
     came too late. For them, and for countless others, the United 
     Nations also came too late. But it is not too late, to renew 
     our commitment, to the purposes for which the United Nations 
     was founded. And it is not too late, to work for an 
     international community that will reflect these values fully; 
     that will be uncompromising in combating intolerance against 
     people of all faiths and ethnicities; that will reject moral 
     equivalence; that will call evil by its name.
       We will never know whether, if the United Nations had 
     existed then, the Holocaust could have been prevented. But 
     this Special Session today confirms the need for the United 
     Nations, as well as each individual member state, to 
     rededicate to ensuring that it will never happen again. In 
     the context, I wish to commend the Secretary General for his 
     moral voice and leadership in bringing this Special Session 
     to fruition, and my colleague foreign ministers, for their 
     presence here today.
       As the number of survivors shrinks all the time, we are on 
     the brink of that moment, when the terrible event will 
     change--from memory, to history. Let all of us gathered here 
     pledge, never to forget the victims, never to abandon the 
     survivors, and never to allow such an event to be repeated.
       As the Foreign Minister of Israel, the sovereign state of 
     the Jewish people, I stand before you, to swear, in the name 
     of the victims, the survivors, and all the Jewish people: 
     Never again.

                          ____________________