[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 37, Number 16 (Monday, April 23, 2001)]
[Pages 631-632]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on the Observance of the National Days of Remembrance

April 19, 2001

    Members of Congress, members of my Cabinet, Ambassador Ivry, Elie 
Wiesel, Benjamin Meed and other survivors, Rabbi Greenberg and Dr. 
Mandel, ladies and gentlemen: Laura and I thank you for asking us to 
join you on this Day of Remembrance.
    Some days are set aside to recall the great and hopeful moments of 
human experience. Other days, like today, we turn our minds to painful 
events. In doing so, we honor the courage and suffering of martyrs and 
heroes. We also seek the wisdom and courage to prevent future tragedies 
and future evils.
    World War II ended and camps were liberated before many of us were 
born. The events we recall today have the safe distance of history, and 
there will come a time when the eyewitnesses are gone. And that is why 
we are bound by conscience to remember what happened, and to whom it 
happened.
    During the war, a Nazi guard told Simon Wiesenthal that in time no 
one would believe his account of what he saw. Evil on so grand a scale 
would seem incredible. Yet, we do not just believe; we know. We know 
because the evidence has been kept; the record has been preserved.
    It is fitting to remember the Holocaust under the dome of our 
Nation's Capitol, with Members of the United States Congress who are 
here. Some Members had relatives among the victims. Some of you played a 
part in the liberation of Europe. One Congressman here today fought in 
the underground, and he, himself, was put into forced labor by the 
Nazis. We are honored by the presence of the gentleman from California, 
Tom Lantos.
    We remember at the Capitol because the United States has accepted a 
special role: We strive to be a refuge for the persecuted; we are called 
by history and by conscience to defend the oppressed; our country stands 
on watch for the rise of tyranny, and history's worst tyrants have 
always reserved a special hatred for the Jewish people. Tyrants and 
dictators will accept no other gods before them. They require 
disobedience to the First Commandment. They seek absolute control and 
are threatened by faith in God. They fear only the power they cannot 
possess, the power of truth.
    So they resent the living example of the devout, especially the 
devotion of a unique people, chosen by God. Through centuries of 
struggle, Jews across the world have been witnesses not only against the 
crimes of men but for faith in God and God alone. Theirs is a story of 
defiance and oppression and patience and tribulation, reaching back to 
the Exodus and their exile. That story continued in the founding of the 
State of Israel. That story continues in the defense of the State of 
Israel.
    When we remember the Holocaust and to whom it happened, we also must 
remember where it happened. It didn't happen in some remote or 
unfamiliar place; it happened right in the middle of the Western world. 
Trains carrying men, women, and children in cattle cars departed from 
Paris and Vienna, Frankfurt and Warsaw. And the orders came not from 
crude and uneducated men but from men who regarded themselves as 
cultured and well-schooled, modern, and even forward-looking. They had 
all the outward traits of cultured men, except for conscience.
    Their crimes show the world that evil can slip in and blend in amid 
the most civilized of surroundings. In the end, only conscience

[[Page 632]]

can stop it. And moral discernment and decency and tolerance--these can 
never be assured in any time or in any society. They must always be 
taught.
    Yesterday I had the honor of visiting the United States Holocaust 
Memorial Museum, surrounded by the familiar buildings and symbols of our 
democratic Government. Outside the museum are expressions of the best of 
mankind's earthly aspirations; inside are images realized of the worst 
possibilities of the human mind, the attempted elimination of a people 
and the millions more targeted for destruction. The pictures, the 
clothes, the toys, all tell of genocide, our word for 6 million acts of 
murder.
    This Day of Remembrance marks more than a single historic tragedy, 
but 6 million important lives--all the possibilities, all the dreams, 
and all the innocence that died with them.
    The Holocaust is defined as much by the courage of the lost as by 
the cruelty of the guilty. As Viktor Frankl observed, man is that being 
who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz. However, he's also the being 
who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema 
Israel on his lips. When all the crimes are finished, the fears 
realized, and the cries silenced, that was the hope that remained--to be 
remembered by the living and raised up by the living God.
    God bless.

Note: The President spoke at 12:45 p.m. in the Rotunda at the United 
States Capitol. In his remarks, he referred to Israeli Ambassador to the 
U.S. David Ivry; Nobel Prize winner and author Elie Wiesel, former 
chair, Rabbi Irving 
Greenberg, chair, Ruth B. Mandel, vice chair, and Benjamin Meed, member, 
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council; and Holocaust survivor, author, and 
human rights activist Simon Wiesenthal.