[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 2]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 2162-2163]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


 ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR ELIE WIESEL 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.
  Most of those individuals who spoke on this solemn and somber 
occasion were high government officials representing the United Nations 
or its member countries, but one of the most important and thoughtful 
speeches was given by Elie Wiesel, who like me is an American citizen 
by choice. He was welcomed to this incredibly generous nation as the 
American people reached out to those who were the victims of Nazi 
brutality, and our country has been enriched many times over by his 
talents and genius.
  Probably more than any other individual, my friend Elie Wiesel has 
given more serious thought and scholarly attention to how in the 
twentieth century a civilized nation such as Germany could execute in a 
brutal and mechanically efficient fashion over six million human 
beings. He has not only probed why, but he has also focused on the 
question of why and how we must prevent such violence and evil again.
  Mr. Speaker, Elie Wiesel has contributed a great deal to our nation 
as a professor and scholar, and as a man of action as the Founding 
Chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. The U.S. 
Holocaust Museum just a few blocks from this Capitol Building is an 
enduring testament to his vision, his understanding, and his 
commitment.
  I ask, Mr. Speaker, that the outstanding address of Professor Elie 
Wiesel be placed in the Congressional Record, and I urge my colleagues 
to read his thoughtful remarks.

                    Address of Professor Elie Wiesel

       Mr. President of the General Assembly, Mr. Secretary 
     General my friend, excellencies: The man who stands before 
     you this morning feels deeply privileged. A teacher and a 
     writer, he speaks and writes as a witness to a crime 
     committed in the heart of European Christendom and 
     civilization by a brutal dictatorial regime--a crime of 
     unprecedented cruelty in which all segments of government 
     participated.
       When speaking about that era of darkness, the witness 
     encounters difficulties. His words become obstacles rather 
     than vehicles; he writes not with words but against words. 
     For there are no words to describe what the victims felt when 
     death was the norm and life a miracle. Still whether you know 
     it or not, his memory is a part of yours.
       I speak to you as a son of an ancient people, the only 
     people of Antiquity to have survived Antiquity, the Jewish 
     people which, throughout much of its history, has endured 
     exile and oppression yet has never given up hope of 
     redemption.
       As a young adolescent, he saw what no human being should 
     have to see: the triumph of political fascism and ideological 
     hatred for those who are different. He saw multitudes of 
     human beings humiliated, isolated, tormented tortured and 
     murdered. They were overwhelmingly Jews but there were 
     others. And those who committed these crimes were not vulgar 
     underworld thugs but men with high government, academic, 
     industrial and medical positions in Germany. In recent years, 
     that nation has become a true democracy. But the question 
     remains open: In those dark years, what motivated so many 
     brilliant and committed public servants to invent such 
     horrors? By its scope and magnitude, by its sheer weight of 
     numbers, by the impact of so much humiliation and pain, in 
     spite of being the most documented tragedy in the annals of 
     history, Auschwitz still defies language and understanding.
       Let me evoke those times: Babies used as target practice by 
     SS men . . . adolescents condemned never to grow old . . . 
     parents watching their children thrown into burning pits . . 
     . immense solitude engulfing an entire people . . . infinite 
     despair haunting our days and our dreams even sixty years 
     later.
       When did what we so poorly call the Holocaust begin? In 
     1938, during Kristallnacht? In 1939 perhaps, when a German 
     ship, the St. Louis, with more than a thousand German Jewish 
     refugees aboard, was turned back from America's shores? Or 
     was it when the first massacres occurred at Babi Yar?
       We still ask: what was Auschwitz? An end or a beginning, an 
     apocalyptic consequence of centuries-old bigotry and hatred, 
     or was it the final convulsion of demonic forces in human 
     nature?
       A creation parallel to god's--a world with its own 
     antinomian United Nations of people of different 
     nationalities, traditions, cultures, socio-economic spheres, 
     speaking many languages, clinging to a variety of faiths and 
     memories. They were grown ups or young but inside that world 
     there were no children and no grandparents; they had already 
     perished. As have said many time: not all victims were 
     Jewish, but all Jews were victims. For the first time in 
     recorded history to be born became a crime. Their birth 
     became their death sentence. Correction: Jewish children were 
     condemned to die even before they were born. What the enemy 
     sought to attain was to put an end to Jewish history; what he 
     wanted was a new world implacably, irrevocably devoid of 
     Jews. Hence Auschwitz, Ponar, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno and 
     Sobibor: dark factories of death erected for the Final 
     Solution. Killers came there to kill and victims to die.
       That was Auschwitz, an executer's ideal of a kingdom of 
     absolute evil and malediction with its princes and beggars, 
     philosophers and theologians, politicians and artists, a 
     place where to lose a piece of bread meant losing life, and a 
     smile from a friend, another day of promise.
       At the time, the witness tried to understand; he still does 
     not. How was such calculated evil, such bottomless and 
     pointless cruelty possible? Had Creation gone mad? Had God 
     covered His face? A religious person cannot conceive of 
     Auschwitz either with or without God. But what about man? How 
     could intelligent, educated or simple law abiding citizens 
     fire machine guns at hundreds of children and their parents, 
     and in the evening enjoy a cadence by Schiller, a partita by 
     Bach?
       Turning point or watershed, that tremendous catastrophe 
     which has traumatized History has forever changed man's 
     perception of responsibility towards other human beings. The 
     sad, terrible fact is that had the Western nations intervened 
     when Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria; had America 
     accepted more refugees from Europe; had Britain allowed more 
     Jews to return to their ancestral land; had the Allies bombed 
     the railways leading to Birkenau, our tragedy might have been 
     avoided, its scope surely diminished.
       This shameful indifference we must remember, just as we 
     must remember to thank the few heroic individuals who, like 
     Raoul Wallenberg, risked their lives to save Jews. We shall 
     also always remember the Armies that liberated Europe and the 
     soldiers that liberated the death-camps, the Americans in 
     Buchenwald, the Russians in Auschwitz and the British in 
     Belsen. But for many victims they all came too late. That we 
     must also remember.
       When the American Third Army liberated Buchenwald, there 
     was no joy in our heart: only pain. We did not sing, we did 
     not celebrate. We had just enough strength to recite the 
     Kiddish.
       And now, sixty years later, you who represent the entire 
     world community, listen to the words of the witness. Like 
     Jeremiah and Job, we could have cried and cursed the days 
     dominated by injustice and violence. We could have chosen 
     vengeance. We did not. We could have chosen hate. We did not. 
     Hatred is degrading and vengeance demeaning. They are 
     diseases. Their history is dominated by death.
       The Jewish witness speaks of his people's suffering as a 
     warning. He sounds the alarm so as to prevent these things 
     being done. He knows for the dead it is too late. But it is 
     not too late for today's children, ours and yours. It is for 
     their sake alone that we bear witness. It is for their sake 
     that we are duty-bound to denounce anti-Semitism, racism and 
     religious or ethnic hatred. Those who today preach and 
     practice the cult of death, those who use suicide terrorism, 
     the scourge of this new century, must be tried and condemned 
     for crimes against humanity. Suffering confers no privileges; 
     it is what one does with suffering that matters. Yes, the 
     past is in the present, but the future is still in our hands.

[[Page 2163]]

       Those who survived Auschwitz advocate hope, not despair; 
     generosity, not rancor or bitterness; gratitude, not 
     violence. We must be enraged, we must reject indifference as 
     an option. Indifference always helps the aggressor, never his 
     victims. And what is memory if not a noble and necessary 
     response to and against indifference?
       But . . . will the world ever learn?

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