Gedenkveranstaltung des IAK am 25.1.2005 im Deutschen Theater Berlin

Speech by Rabbi Israel Singer

Herr Bundestagspräsident, Herr Bundeskanzler, Vorsitzender Noach Flug, Du hast mich als Student ausgelernt wie diese schwere Frage zu beurteilen. Gott soll Dir geben viele Jahre. Du sollst nicht mehr und weiter lernen und die, die kommen nach mir, weil ohne die Zeugen und ohne die Wahrheit die Zeugen kann geben, hätten wir nichts heute gewusst. Noach, Du bist unser Maßstab und unser Lehrer.

(Jiddische Worte)

(Hebräische Worte)

This week we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. At the same time, the BBC study finds that nearly half of those surveyed in England have never heard of Auschwitz, suggesting that the memory of the Holocaust remains unacceptably corralled and cornered and isolated in a very small ghetto becoming smaller every day. A Jewish ghetto, for Jews to commemorate with their friends, with politicians to come and speak together and remember as the nation that initiated and perpetrated the greatest of all human crimes, Germany bears particular and unforgivable responsibility. And I choose the word that you chose, Mr. Chancellor, responsibility, because we agree that the word guilt does not apply. But the word responsibility for moral and material restitution which forced Europe to confront its sordid past, shattering decades of old myths that Germany alone was responsible for the sins of the Holocaust became clarified.

Austria was not the first victim, but the first willing accomplice. Not all Frenchmen supported de Gaulle, Swiss neutrality in the face of evil, too, was a crime, that European governments and industry worked in concert to support and to participate and to finance the German war machine, that nations sided and aided the genocide by turning Jewish refugees away at their borders, these are just some of the contemporary confessions that we learned during the negotiations and during our study.

Shamefully, the lessons born from this continental introspection has been forgotten so quickly, one wonders if they were ever taught widely at all. While apologists clamour Holocaust fatigue, deniers receive open forums to spread their lies and instructors teaching the Holocaust this week are shouted down by their students in various European countries and we experience insensitivity towards the Holocaust by Europe’s younger generation, sometimes from the highest and most important families.

In the past decade, Holocaust memorials and museums have sprung up around the globe in nearly every cosmopolitan city, yet inexplicably, the world seems satisfied to merely remember the murder of the six million Jews instead of confronting the causes of their extermination. Through the achievement of moral and material restitution, billions of dollars and heirless Jewish assets have been set aside by European governments and industry for Holocaust memory and for teaching. Funding these foundations long into the future is critical but having taught so little to so few until now is criminal. A Europe-wide commission to consult, to construct and to implement principals for spreading this information and for spending this money must be established now while the victims are still alive and able to give witness correctly. Not some day later on. Only now when Noach Flug is here to tell us the truth and to tell us the direction can we understand what happened in Kristallnacht, can we believe that a person was a slave for fifty-five months, can we believe that someone survived, can we believe that these events took place.

Holocaust conferences, memorials and museums attract select government officials and myriads of Jews. It selects and collects their friends while the masses remain ignorant. The time has long passed to liberate the Holocaust from this ghetto. The Jewish community has created important programmes like the March of the Living for Jewish children but this year, it will have non-Jews marching with them. All these programmes must include non-Jews because their priority is for those who weren’t the children of those who survived. This year, the 60th anniversary shall see a change and that change will be that we all will become students, that we will have life-altering programmes supported by European governments and that these European governments shall create a motto which shall spread throughout the world so that we no longer have to hear and fear Darfour as the result of our inaction and worry about Nigeria as its successor.

Those who believe these actions are necessary need only to observe the resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric. They need only to watch the violence in their city squares. Those who believe this is a uniquely Jewish problem only have to study what happened in Rwanda. Those who believe that Jews and Sinti and homosexuals alone are hated don’t know the extent of hate. We must teach everyone what hate is and was, where this road led and what was at the end of this road. Otherwise the blood of the victims will not demand just of us to speak out but for others to speak out yet again in later generations. We cannot afford this. Thank you.