I speak to you
as a son of a people whose suffering is the most ancient
in the world. I speak to you as a Jew who has seen
certain things in his life and yours and feels his duty
to share his vision, his words, with you. I speak to you
as a Jew who came from over there and would never have
believed that one day he will have to speak to
you.
I come from a
small city somewhere in Eastern Europe. I come from a
place where every Jew was drunk with God, whose faith was
burning as was burning the vision of the first Jew in
history. In that place, I would never have entered a
place such as this - I owe you truth. In that place I saw
that the world was divided, and there is an abyss between
the two. We were not accepted by the others and,
therefore, we did not accept the others, and I was
convinced that, until the Messiah would come, this is
what will happen until the Days of Days. We shall remain
alone.
It took war -
and some war - to take the "bachur yeshiva", the student
of the yeshiva that I was and hopefully still am, to come
to the Holy Cross and speak to you about Jews...about
Jewish suffering and about, you must forgive me, your
responsibility in it. I am saying it without bitterness
and surely without anger and, of course, without hate. I
believe that these events, as all events, must bring us
together instead of setting us apart. Whatever happened
during those years of darkness and anguish was a result
of separation and human denial; and, therefore, we must
do whatever we can to turn this abyss into a bridge. And
we should all respect one another. I mean we should all
respect the uniqueness, the originality, the specificity
in one another. We Jews must respect you and your
tradition, as you, I am sure you will agree with me, must
tolerate, respect mine.
Obviously, a
dedication is a day of rejoicing. Actually, it calls for
celebration but, since those events, we have learned that
things today are no longer what they used to
be.
Mr. and Mrs.
Hiatt, of course it's a great honor this College has done
to you. It's an honor to you and to our people. But,
then, why is there no celebration? Because, how can we
celebrate? We close our eyes and we open them again, and
what we see has everything in it to stifle the song. It
has everything in it to break our hearts. There is going
to be a library, and what are you going to read in the
books that will be in that library? You will read books
of sadness and tragedy, books of solitude. There is no
solitude that could be compared and that will ever be
compared to the solitude of our people in those years -
maybe God's. God alone has been and will be as alone as
the Jew was in Eastern Europe and in Germany in those
years. Suddenly we were expelled from history; suddenly
we were expelled from memory; suddenly the killers could
kill. And we had no friends, no allies, no one
cared.
For a time we
were convinced that the world didn't know and that was a
consolation, and therefore from every ghetto and from
every camp - even from the worst of the death camps, from
the Zonderkommandos in Auschwitz - messages were smuggled
out alerting good people, trying to tell them, "Look, do
something," because they were convinced that the world
didn't know.
My good friends,
had we known that the world did know, I wonder how many
of us would have had the courage to go on living, in such
a society which was doomed by its own indifference. Why?
Why build? For whom? Why proclaim faith, and in whom?
Only after the war did we learn the truth - that
everything was known. In fact, things were known in
Washington and in Sweden and the Vatican before we knew
them. The names Treblinka and Oszwiencim, or Auschwitz,
were known to the vatican and to Washington and to London
before we heard them, because nobody bothered to tell us,
nobody cared. So therefore, in the books that you will
read, you students and teachers, you will find many
reasons to despair. You will find children who grew old,
ageless - six-, seven-year old children who became wiser
than the oldest of my teachers, simply because what they
have seen in their youth no old man has ever
seen.
Truth - truth on
the scale of absolute - they have seen the face of
Creation and its Creator. You will find that old men,
helpless, desperate because they realized their wisdom
and their learning were for naught. You will find parents
who didn't know how to help their children; you will find
friends who lost all faith in friendship; you will find
people who tried to fight and had nothing to fight with,
people - young people, mainly young people.
The Warsaw
Ghetto, when it began its uprising it was from April to
May. The entire high command of Mordechai Anilewicz, who
was the chief commander of that ghetto, of that uprising
- the first civil uprising in occupied Europe - the
entire command did not amount to 120 years. They were all
teenagers, and they one day decided simply to take Jewish
history on their shoulders and carry it forward into
death and beyond it. And they appealed for help, and they
appealed again, and again, and the world
knew.
Forty-eight
hours after the uprising began, The New York Times
and, I imagine, the Boston Globe carried the story
with full details. Not one message was sent, not even a
message of encouragement. Not one message, let alone air
drops, agents - nothing. Almost in every ghetto there
were youngsters who tried to fight. With what? Of course,
you will find glory. There is glory in these youngsters
who defied the German army, which was then the mightiest
legion in Europe. And yet it took the Germans longer to
conquer the Warsaw ghetto than to conquer Poland or
France.
You will find
pages of despair written by the chroniclers in the ghetto
- Ringelblum, Kaplan, Huberband - everyone became a
chronicler. Everyone became a historian. Everybody wanted
to bear witness because that suddenly became the primary
mission - the ultimate task. Why do you think they wanted
to write? For you and me. For they knew they were doomed,
but they believed that, if the story could be told, more
people, all people, could learn certain lessons. And
therefore they wrote, and when you read their writings,
as you will, you will realize the strange texture of
their literature - half sentences - a word. Why? Because
they were always afraid they would not be able to finish
the sentence. Because they would begin a sentence and the
next minute they could be taken and carried to Treblinka
or Maidanek, and when they began a sentence therefore,
they stayed with the word - one word - but what
words!
These words one
day will enter our liturgy because they contain the
sacred memory and the sacred desire of a people to remain
human in an inhuman world. You will read stories of
people who prayed and of people who did not. You will
read stories in those books of people who went to their
death identity and of others who did not.
A universe lived
and died. Mankind lived and perished in those days, in
those nights. So, therefore, nothing can be more useful,
Mr. and Mrs. Hiatt, than to have a library in every
college and in this one, too. Nothing can be more urgent
for our generation than to remember those days. Not to
remember would turn us into accomplices of the killers.
For the killers had only one task: to erase the memory of
their deeds and, therefore, they did not kill once. They
killed twice. First they killed, and then they burned.
They burned their victims hoping that nobody will ever
know. That was their desire, that was their goal. So not
to remember would turn anyone into an accomplice of the
killers. To remember would turn anyone into a friend of
the victims. Did they need friends? Do they need friends
now? And yet, bear in mind that no matter how many books
we will read, you will never know the truth.
That is the
mystery, Mr. President, that you mentioned in your
remarks. There is a mystery of the Holocaust; it will
remain a mystery. Even if I were to give you the names
and you were to read all of the documents, all the
narrations, all the memoirs, all the books - still, you
will not know what happened. You will not know what was
the anguish and the nightmare of one child who belonged
to the procession - a nocturnal procession of men and
women, beggars and princes, teachers and students and all
converging, converging in the place of fire and death.
You will never know, but we must try to tell you.
Fragments, yes; tears, yes; but not a total picture. But
still if you hear well, then maybe salvation is
possible.
If you are ready
to absorb what has been offered to you, then maybe hope
is possible, but only then. You have begun, and for this,
as a Jew who came from a very far away place, I want you
to know that I am glad to be here, and that I thank
you.
.
