Hazkarah ceremony: speech by Dominique Schnapper

October 6, 2019, at the Shoah Memorial in Paris.

Commemoration dedicated to the memory of the unburied victims of the Shoah.

Transcription of the speech by Dominique Schnapper, sociologist, honorary member of the Constitutional Council and president of the Museum of Art and History of Judaism (MAHJ). 

One does not refuse the honor of speaking today, one 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 in which writers have seized upon their lived experience. In any case, writing has been a way of "coping", of learning again to present a face, but also of confronting a meaningless life. We know, however, from the end of Primo Levi’s life, that one never recovers from being alive after having seen this death of others.

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 made to my father by those who went every day to the Lutetia hotel, to see if the brother, husband, mother, father or husband had returned. My historical consciousness was developed at that moment. I think I have passed it on to my children and grandchildren, but what about what will then be transmitted from parent to child...

In front of the unnameable and incomprehensible, to control his emotions, everyone reacts according to his very being, by what he is, in the deepest part of himself, 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 giving in 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.

It is necessary to 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 of the past. But nothing will replace the knowledge that will be transmitted to the generations who 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 carry the universality of an experience that carries 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 feeling – which we have all shared at one time or another – when he writes: "One cannot explain Auschwitz because the Holocaust transcends History." As for Claude Lanzmann, he considered that only a work of art like his admirable film was up to the challenge and refused to recognize the legitimacy of historians in order to deal with it. I have no doubt that all those who write or speak about the Shoah 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 Holocaust, it is necessary to assert the rights of rational knowledge by applying it even to the Holocaust.

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, one is 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 could not make a good marriage with the historian. This one must remain faithful to a reasoned, analytical, explanatory approach, by guarding against any temptation of condemnation that would not allow the effort to understand what is incomprehensible.

The historian, in his daily endeavors, advances step by step, he relativizes, weighs and measures, he criticizes and discusses. It contains his emotions and passions to establish the indisputable facts. When he listens to the witnesses' testimonies, they are the words of survivors. And, yet, he must treat them as "sources", in the face of those of the executioners and their collaborators. This may appear as inhuman or superhuman.

Moreover, armed with his documents and analyses, he inevitably demystifies the idealized memories and images of Epinal. He replaces the perfect heroes with men, sometimes heroic, but also full of weaknesses and contradictions. He writes a story by definition profane, which offends the supporters of a sacred history, sometimes put at the service of the stakes of the present. It must not respond to the need for absolute certainties or to journalists' questions that demand an answer "in one and a half minutes", otherwise the listener will get bored.

It is however 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 don’t judge? What’s the point of claiming that we are not studying the Holocaust as well to pay one last 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, strives to publicly repeat the names – this upsetting reading of deportees whose alphabetical order unites entire families with the first names of these children aged five, nine and eleven.

What is the point of claiming that we do not hope, deep in our consciences, that, perhaps, this knowledge will prevent us from never having to do it in the future...? Of this hope the continuation 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 useless. 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 that must recognize the reason of all honest men. We want to believe that they are numerous, and that they will know how to hear. It is a bet on the humanity of man that we do this way. One can be impatient with the slowness of the historical process and the scruples of scholars. One can painfully feel the conflicts and rivalries of academics on such overwhelming topics. Because historians, like theologians and artists, are men, it 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 look at the objects and films. But they will also become aware of the collective work, cumulative and modest, but essential, of historians. History, like philosophy, is knowing how to answer children’s questions.

So true is it that the most rigorous, the most honest story, the one most in conformity with the requirements of reason and heart, is also a memory and a fidelity. It is this memory and this 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 can continue.

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 lighten men’s pain. With the exception of the Jews, we talk about them little, but I think that the end of the belief of the Europeans in their own values is due to this formidable repressed.

The work of teaching about the Holocaust 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 Khmer, the Tutsi, and many others. The feeling that the Jews always present themselves for victims annoys and it gives rise to this unbearable competition of victims. Some even come to think that there must be a reason why the project of the 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-minded people who refuse to think what the Jews know through knowledge definitively established by their experience, to know that the story is tragic.

That is why we cannot content ourselves with maintaining the memory of the Shoah and the 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 expulsions. 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 is not in vain. We must to be worthy of them and their resistance. It is by continuing the history of the 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 continues to live Judaism and the particular form of humanity it has brought into the world.

Dominique Schnapper