[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 138 (Tuesday, September 18, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Page S11653]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                          LOSS OF RAUL HILBERG

 Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, the State of Vermont has lost one 
of its greatest scholars, Raul Hilberg. I wish to honor this remarkable 
man, the central figure in the founding and establishment of Holocaust 
studies, not just in the United States, but in the world. It is fitting 
that he was also a central contributor to the establishment and 
development of the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
  So horrific were the events of the Holocaust that for many years 
scholars avoided the subject. Not Raul Hilberg. Born in Vienna, 
Austria, he and his family fled the Anschluss of Hitler and the Nazis 
to emigrate, first to Cuba, and ultimately to the United States. While 
in Cuba, he saw the fate of the S.S. St. Louis, a ship full of Jews who 
had fled Germany seeking asylum. The ship was denied permission to land 
in Havana, and only after a long voyage from port to port were its 936 
Jewish passengers finally allowed to disembark in several European 
countries.
  In the United States, Hilberg served in the Infantry of the U.S. 
Army. Upon his return to this country he did graduate work at Columbia 
University, where he received a Ph.D. under the tutelage of Franz 
Neumann. His doctoral thesis was on the Holocaust: he took careful and 
copious notes on Nazi documents seized by the U.S. Army, transcribing 
the information he uncovered on index cards. Then he sat at a small 
table in his parents' apartment and wrote his thesis on the basis of 
those cards. That thesis was the kernel of the greatest scholarly work 
ever written on the Holocaust.
  In 1956, Raul Hilberg became an assistant professor of political 
science at the University of Vermont. He later became professor and 
chairman of that department. He remained at U.V.M. for the rest of his 
career until his retirement in 1991, despite many enticements to go to 
major research universities, sustained in his academic life by his 
friends Jay Gould, Stan Staron, and Sam Bogorad. He was a great 
teacher. One of his colleagues remembers attending his course on the 
Holocaust: ``His words came out in perfectly structured paragraphs, 
eloquent with a quiet gravity, so compelling that every student in the 
class was transfixed from the moment Raul began speaking until the bell 
rang for the end of class.''
  In 1961, Raul Hilberg's magisterial ``The Destruction of the European 
Jews'' was published, but only after rejections from many publishers. 
Even Yad Vashem rejected the manuscript because some scholars disagreed 
with Hilberg's perspective. Thereafter revised and updated in 
succeeding editions, the book was then, and has remained, the most 
important, the most seminal, work on the Holocaust. It, more than any 
other scholarly work, was responsible for the creation of what we know 
today as the field of Holocaust Studies.
  The great documentary filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, spoke recently of 
his discovery of Hilberg's book, which occurred as he was considering 
making the film that was to become ``Shoah.'' ``It took me months to 
get through this formidable, magnificent, monstrous book. Hilberg was a 
man of details, and that is what I especially liked. The first time he 
appears in ``Shoah'' he says, `All along, during my work, I never began 
with the big questions because I feared inadequate answers.''' Lanzmann 
continues, ``He laid bare the implacable mechanism of what he held to 
be a bureaucratic process of destruction. From the moment the German 
bureaucracy made its object, it could only go all the way, as through 
carried by its own logic.''
  Hilberg published other important books, among them ``Perpetrators, 
Victims, Bystanders'' and a memoir, ``The Politics of Memory.'' He 
edited ``The Warsaw Diaries of Adam Czerniakov,'' which was translated 
by his colleague, Stanislaw Staron.
  But he was not just a scholar in an archive. As one of the Senate's 
representatives on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, I am very aware 
of his work in the public sphere, work which richly supplemented his 
great contributions as an academic scholar. An original member of the 
President's Commission on the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, played a central 
role in the founding of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. He then served on 
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council from 1980 through 1988, and further 
served on the Museum's Academic Committee from its inception through 
2005.
  His friend, Michael Berenbaum recently wrote this about his 
involvement with our Nation's great memorial to the ``Shoah'': ``For 
his work with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hilberg never once 
accepted remuneration, even when others were paid for their work. He 
was a consistent, gracious and insisting presence demanding the highest 
of standards of others and measuring up to them himself.'' In his 
honor, the museum has established the Raul Hilberg Scholarship.
  For his great scholarly and public accomplishments, Raul Hilberg was 
named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
  An enthralling and inspiring teacher, Raul Hilberg will be missed by 
many generations of students at the University of Vermont. The absence 
of his deep knowledge and unsparing honesty leaves the world of 
Holocaust studies bereft of its presiding genius. And his passing 
leaves a great loss in the lives of his wife, Gwendolyn and his 
children, David and Deborah.
  Raul Hilberg's work, however, which so carefully details the 
bureaucracy of annihilation, will live on to serve as a constant 
reminder of the responsibilities that we have, as citizens and as 
individuals, for the sufferings of others.

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