Transcription of the speech by
We do not refuse the honor of speaking today, we would feel guilty in front of the kind of absolute that is the Shoah. This does not prevent us from deeply feeling the difficulty of adding words to all those words that have already been spoken, to all those words that have been written since the camps and gas chambers were discovered. Some of the survivors were never able to speak, others wanted to speak but no one would listen to them, others devoted themselves to writing. Terms abound to describe the different ways writers have taken up their lived experience. In all cases, writing has been a way of "facing" oneself, of learning again to present a face, but also of confronting a life devoid of meaning. Yet we know, from the end of Primo Levi’s life, that one never recovers from being alive after seeing
Memory also has a history. As time passes, the memory of the disaster becomes part of history. The last witnesses are today less than a hundred and the most valiant of them hasten to go again to testify in high schools before the Shoah becomes for the historical consciousness of the new generations a phenomenon as abstract as the war of one hundred years. As a child during the war, I participated with a weakly articulated but indisputable consciousness in the anguish of my loved ones. I remember the daily phone calls my father made by those who went every day to the Hotel Lutetia, to see if the brother, the husband, the mother, the father or the husband had returned. My historical consciousness was developed at that moment. I think I passed it on to my children and grandchildren, but what about what will then be passed on from parent to child...
In the face of the unnamable and the incomprehensible, to control one’s emotions, each person reacts according to their own being, by what they are, in the depths of themselves, silence, imprecation, narrative, metaphysical reflection or historical research. I am one of those who control the expression of their most intimate emotions; you will forgive me today for not yielding to lyricism and for reflecting before you on the meaning of historical knowledge and the necessity of transmission. I do not have the talent of Wiesel, Georges Perec, or Primo Levi, nor the philosophical depth of Emmanuel Levinas.
We must praise the officials of the Memorial for having wanted to combine testimonies and historical knowledge. Those who could testify died today or are about to die, the objects that the Memorial strives to gather will bear witness in their own way to the past. But nothing will replace the knowledge that will be passed on to the generations that follow us. The study affirms man’s humanity in the face of absolute inhumanity. With the disappearance of witnesses and survivors, it is he who will bear the universality of an experience that bears the universal dimension of Judaism. Study remains and must remain a sacred duty for the Jews.
It is not easy to affirm the legitimacy of the historian to deal with a subject whose very idea seems to defy reason. Many believe that only witnesses have the right to speak, that only artists and theologians can, if not understand, at least evoke what may appear as an extreme experience. Elie Wiesel expresses this sentiment – which we have all shared at one time or another – when he writes: “Auschwitz cannot be explained because the Holocaust transcends history.” As for Claude Lanzmann, he thought that only a work of art like his admirable film was up to the challenge and refused to recognize the legitimacy of historians to deal with it. I have no doubt that all those who write or speak about the Shoah have sometimes had this feeling. And yet...
Reason knows its own limits and, in spite of everything and in spite of all, it remains the honor of man. Against the dehumanizing enterprise carried out by the Shoah, we must assert the rights of rational knowledge by applying it even to the Shoah.
This effort is particularly difficult because history defines itself as a science of the relative and the finite, whereas here, in the face of methodical and industrialized genocide, in the face of the project of dehumanization, we are seized by the idea of the absolute and the infinite. The negation of the human condition of the Other is an absolute of evil. It is important to resist at all costs the temptation of demonization, because the devil has a good back and he would not be able to make a good match with the historian. He must remain faithful to a reasoned, analytical and explanatory approach, avoiding any temptation of condemnation that would not allow the effort to understand what is incomprehensible.
The historian, in his daily activities, advances step by step; he relativizes, weighs and measures, criticizes and discusses. It contains his emotions and passions to establish the indisputable facts. When he listens to witnesses' testimonies, they are the words of survivors. And yet, he must treat them as "sources", in front of those of the executioners and their collaborators. This can appear as inhuman or superhuman.
Moreover, armed with his documents and analyses, he inevitably demystifies the idealized memories and images of Epinal. He replaces perfect heroes with men, sometimes heroic, but also full of weaknesses and contradictions. He writes a story by definition profane, which offends the proponents of a sacralized history, sometimes put at the service of present issues. He must not respond to the need for absolute certainty or to journalists' questions that demand a response "in one and a half minutes", otherwise the listener will get bored.
However, it is useless to claim that we study the Shoah like any other historical phenomenon, the price of wheat or even wars. What’s the point of pretending that we’re not judging? What’s the point of pretending that we don’t study the Shoah as well, to pay a final tribute to the victims, to all the victims? Because the dead die a second time when the living have forgotten them. Because statistics, whatever their necessity, do not replace the names of each of the victims whose Memorial, Year after year, he strives to repeat publicly the names – this moving reading of the deportees whose alphabetical order unites entire families with the first names of these children aged five, nine and eleven.
What is the point of pretending that we do not hope, in the depths of our consciences, that perhaps this knowledge will make it possible to avoid never again in the future...? Of this hope, the rest of history has sadly shown the limits and the Memorial, which has extended its research since the Second World War to other genocides, knows it well. But from the full awareness of these limits one cannot conclude that the task of the historian is pointless. The historian does not explain everything. But it is not because reason does not explain everything that we must give up the effort of rational knowledge.
The tribute that the historian pays to the victims is to establish facts, indisputable facts which must be recognized by the reason of all honest men. We want to believe that there are many of them, and that they will know how to hear. It is a bet on the humanity of man that we make thus. One can be impatient with the slowness of the historical process and the scruples of scientists. It can be painful to feel the conflicts and rivalries of academics on such moving subjects. Because historians, like theologians and artists, are men, this is the price to pay for establishing facts and trying to understand. A day will come, alas, and it is near, when all the witnesses of the Shoah will have disappeared. Our children and grandchildren who want to know and try to understand will read the written testimonies and they will watch the objects and the movies. But they will also learn about the collective work, cumulative and modest, but essential, of historians. History, like philosophy, means knowing how to answer children’s questions.
So true is it that the most rigorous, the most honest history, the one most in conformity with the requirements of reason and heart, is also a memory and a fidelity. It is this memory and fidelity that we can continue to work, each with our means, with what we are, so that the history of the Jews and a human history of humanity may go on.
Europe lost its soul during the Second World War. The belief in the moral virtues of scientific progress has been definitively eliminated, the technique could also be mobilized to assassinate a people and not only to alleviate the pain of men. With the exception of the Jews, there is little talk about it, but I think that the end of Europeans' belief in their own values stems from this formidable repressed state.
The work of teaching about the Shoah did not prevent the return of anti-Semitism that marked the new century and the new vitality of ancestral stereotypes, nor did it prohibit new genocides, the Khmers, the Tutsis, and many others. The feeling that Jews always present themselves for victims is annoying and gives rise to this unbearable competition of victims. Some even come to think that there must be a reason why the project of destruction of the Jews of Europe was born and that the victims are responsible for being victims.
The best work of research and memory now clashes with the questioning, negation, relativization, and weariness of all right-thinking people who refuse to think what Jews know through knowledge definitively established by their experience, to know that history is tragic.
That is why we cannot simply maintain the memory of the Shoah and awareness of the tragic dimension of history.
It is also necessary to recall the role of Judaism in the Christianization of the European world, the ancient presence of the Jews on French soil and their link with the history of France, their contribution to the birth and thought of democracy, the exchanges they have continued to maintain with others despite persecution and expulsion. Whatever the past, it is important to act, without illusions – the Second World War has dissipated them once and for all – but with vigor so that the fight of the Jews who resisted will not be in vain. We must in order to be worthy of them and their resistance. It is by pursuing the history of Jews and their culture that we will serve their memory. We must pass on the story of their martyrdom and resistance, and also have, as they had, the will that Judaism continues to live and the particular form of humanity it has brought into the world.
Dominique Schnapper
