[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 123 (Friday, July 25, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1561]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         HONORING BENJAMIN DYE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. GEORGE RADANOVICH

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, July 24, 2008

  Mr. RADANOVICH. Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate and 
express my pride in Mr. Benjamin Dye for winning first place in the 
2008 Holocaust Remembrance Project essay contest with his essay, 
``Choices.'' I invite my colleagues to join me in wishing Mr. Dye 
success in his future endeavors.
  Mr. Dye resides in Modesto, California and is a recent graduate from 
The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. As a high school 
student, Mr. Dye was an involved and passionate young man who excelled 
in many activities, but above all, committed himself to academic 
excellence.
  In the award-winning essay, ``Choices,'' which is printed below, Mr. 
Dye discusses the Holocaust and its effect on three individuals, author 
and Holocaust victim Elie Wiesel, newspaper editor-cum-rescue organizer 
Varian Fry, and a young Jewish man who would become the (former) United 
States Ambassador to Denmark, John Loeb.
  This fall, Mr. Dye will begin a new chapter of his academic career as 
an honors student at University of California at Irvine. He will study 
political science and economics, in preparation for his goal of one day 
continuing his education in law school.
  Madam Speaker, I rise today to commend and congratulate Benjamin Dye 
for winning the Holocaust Remembrance Project essay contest. I invite 
my colleagues to join me in wishing Mr. Dye continued success.

                                Choices

                           (By Benjamin Dye)

       One Saturday night in fall 1944, a crowd of boys packed 
     into the auditorium of their boarding school for the weekly 
     movie, preceded as usual by a newsreel. But this week's 
     footage was not just another montage of Allied victories; 
     tonight, it contained some of the first publicly-released 
     photos of the Holocaust, taken by Soviet soldiers liberating 
     the Majdanek concentration camp. Tonight, the boys saw heaps 
     of skulls, rows of genocidal crematoria, and processions of 
     emaciated survivors. How did they react? John L. Loeb, Jr., 
     one of the few Jewish students present, remembers with 
     painful clarity: ``[i]t's hard to believe, but when they 
     first showed those terrible pictures, the entire school 
     cheered. ' '' (Kolowrat, 265)
       As these teenagers cheered, another teenager thousands of 
     miles away lived in constant terror on the brink of 
     starvation. In fall 1944, sixteen-year-old Elie Wiesel 
     struggled to maintain his humanity in the Auschwitz III-
     Monowitz labor camp as he subsisted on meager rations, 
     endured arbitrary beatings, and watched his father's health 
     deteriorate. (Wiesel, 66-78) After the Red Army took Warsaw 
     in January 1945 and its resumed race to Berlin, the S.S. 
     force marched Wiesel, his father, and 66,000 other prisoners 
     to Gliwice (Gleiwitz), Poland, where they were herded into 
     cattle cars and taken to the Buchenwald camp. (Wiesel 82) 
     Shortly thereafter, Wiesel's father--whom Elie believed was 
     his last living relative--died. When liberation finally came 
     a few months later, Wiesel found himself utterly alone, his 
     family, his possessions, and his faith incinerated by Nazi 
     hatred. He had one thing left: a choice. How would he respond 
     to his horrific experience? Would he despair and bury his 
     ordeal as society tried to forget its nightmarish past? Or 
     would he hope, remember, and speak out?
       Wiesel chose the latter. As he recalls in the preface to 
     the new translation of Night, in postwar Europe, ``[t]he 
     subject [of the Holocaust] was considered morbid and 
     interested no one''; even in the Jewish community, ``. . . 
     there were always people ready to complain that it was 
     senseless to `burden our children with the tragedies of the 
     Jewish past.' '' (Wiesel xiv.) Nonetheless, he chose to bear 
     witness, concluding that ``. . . having lived through this 
     experience, one could not keep silent no matter how 
     difficult, if not impossible, it was to speak'' (Wiesel x.) 
     And he spoke of his ordeal without succumbing to despair; as 
     he noted 41 years later in his Nobel lecture, ``Because I 
     remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to 
     reject despair.'' (Wiesel (2)) The consequences of his choice 
     have been far-reaching; by calling attention to the Holocaust 
     Wiesel has likely done more than any other individual to 
     promise the children of tomorrow that ``his past [will not] 
     become their future.'' (Wiesel xv.)
       Five years before Wiesel's liberation, Varian Fry arrived 
     in France, 14 years after leaving the aforementioned school. 
     He had been sent to Marseille by the Emergency Rescue 
     Committee (ERC), a private American organization established 
     in 1940 to secretly evacuate 200 intellectuals sought by the 
     Nazis. Immediately upon arrival, Fry realized that there were 
     many more than 200 people in imminent danger. Like Wiesel, 
     Fry had a choice to make.
       As Elie Wiesel rejected despair, Varian Fry rejected 
     indifference. His original mission called for three weeks in 
     Marseille, but he chose to stay as long as possible saving as 
     many as possible. With only $3000 from the ERC and no 
     clandestine operations training, Fry set up a latter-day 
     underground railroad, helping Jews and dissidents 
     intellectuals escape into Spain, on to Portugal, and by boat 
     to the U.S. By the time the Gestapo expelled Fry in 
     September, 1941, his choice had saved nearly 4000 lives.
       Wiesel's and Fry's stories show that we must remember the 
     Holocaust above all for its lessons about human nature. While 
     we may know that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, accounts 
     like Wiesel's Night personalize and sharpen this statistic. 
     And though putting individual faces on the victims helps us 
     emphasize with victims of current crimes against humanity, it 
     is perhaps even more important to humanize the perpetrators. 
     It is easy to think of the Holocaust as a uniquely terrible 
     deed committed by ``them''--ruthless incarnations of evil, 
     with sinister black uniforms and totenkopfe on their caps--
     but if we are to avert the Holocausts of the future, we must 
     remember that the men responsible for the slaughter were once 
     as human as their victims. If men born into one of the 
     world's most ``civilized'' societies could become genocidal 
     automatons, so could we.
       However, the Holocaust also reminds us of humanity's 
     tremendous capacity for good. Varian Fry was a normal 
     newspaper editor before the war, but confronted with evil, he 
     became a hero, rising above the anti-Semitic conditioning of 
     his high school years and risking his life to act ``beyond 
     himself.'' (Isenberg, ix.) And Elie Wiesel's commitment to 
     raising awareness of humanitarian issues--a commitment forged 
     as a direct result of the Holocaust--is equally heroic, 
     although it is impossible to calculate how many lives he has 
     saved. While the Holocaust is generally seen as a grim 
     reflection on humanity, we must remember it also as a 
     reminder that ordinary individuals can choose to rise above 
     any evil.
       Examining Wiesel's and Fry's experiences and choices, we 
     see that we too have a profound choice to make. We can choose 
     the path of least resistance, or we can follow Elie Wiesel in 
     rejecting despair and Varian Fry in rejecting indifference, 
     and in doing so empower ourselves to combat prejudice, 
     discrimination, and violence today's world. In order to make 
     a difference, however, not everyone needs to be a Wiesel or 
     Fry. In the long term, the subtle choices we make to fight 
     indifference and despair within our immediate communities are 
     crucial in ensuring that ``never again'' is not an empty 
     promise. We must, of course, stand up against modern day 
     atrocities like the genocide in Darfur, but for deeper 
     change, we must work in our everyday lives, doing what is 
     right before crisis strikes.
       A final example demonstrates the power of this focus. John 
     Loeb, after witnessing the callous anti-Semitism that night 
     in 1944 at his and Varian Fry's alma mater, ultimately became 
     the United States Ambassador to Denmark and a delegate to the 
     United Nations. Despite his high profile work for peace, Loeb 
     never forgot the seeds of hatred and indifference sowed that 
     Saturday in the auditorium. So in 1993, he subtly helped 
     uproot them by establishing the John L. Loeb Jr. prize, 
     awarded annually at his former school for the best essay on 
     tolerance and mutual respect. We will never know how much 
     bigotry Loeb's action prevented, but quiet aggregation of 
     such contributions brings about immense change to places like 
     the Nazi-applauding prep school--change evident to me as a 
     current student at this institution. I recently participated 
     in a school sponsored trip to Poland, touring the camp where 
     Wiesel thought his life would end and seeing ruins of the 
     crematoria that had turned his mother and sisters to ash. A 
     few weeks later, I saw Wiesel in person as he addressed the 
     student body that 60 years earlier would have cheered his 
     death, but which now empathized deeply with his suffering.

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