Speech by André Kaspi on October 9, 2016 at the Shoah Memorial © Pierre-Emmanuel Weck
The
Sunday 9 October 2016
Ladies and gentlemen,
The invitation you extended to me, Mr. President, touches me deeply. I never thought that one day, in this Memorial inaugurated 60 years ago, it would come down to me to commemorate the victims of the Shoah. You have entrusted me with a heavy responsibility, Mr. President, and the task that has been given to me seems all the more daunting.
At this particular moment, I would like to recall the memory of two members of my family. My grandfather’s name appears on the wall of the deportees. Icek Koralstein lived several lives, and was a butcher in Warsaw (at the time when fiercely anti-Semitic Poland was part of the Russian Empire). He immigrated to the United States. Milwaukee and Brooklyn did not satisfy him.
He settled for a short time in Mandatory Palestine. He finally chose to settle in France, in Paris in the Marais, then in Belleville. The country of Zola, the homeland of the Rights of Man, the nation – a beacon that had come to recognize Captain Dreyfus’s innocence, it was, he believed, the end of the journey. This is where he would live with his children and grandchildren.
Raflé on February 11, 1943, he was deported at the age of 67 with 700 other old men on March 2. I don’t even know if he made it to Auschwitz. You understand why I cannot remain indifferent to the Holocaust. On my shoulders weighs the weight of a family tragedy, and especially the weight of the Jewish tragedy.
I carry with me another past. My older brother, Lazare Kaspi, poses for a photo armed with a rifle from another war. He commanded a maquis of the Drôme. He had interrupted his studies in law to be part of this Resistance which has so courageously contributed to the liberation of our country.
Born to a father of Romanian origin and a mother of Polish origin, he died for France on 4 June 1944, two days before the Normandy landings. He was 22.
These broken lives haunt me. They made me a Jewish historian – I did say: a Jewish historian, not a Jewish historian. It is through history, the history of the Second World War, the history of deportations, the history of my family that I truly became a Jew.
In The Testament of a Murdered Jewish Poet, Elie Wiesel imagines a character who strives to define his Judaism. You don’t know it. A civilization? You don’t live it. A philosophy? You don’t practice it. A homeland? You don’t live in Israel. [... ] To be a Jew is an awareness." I would add that for me, it’s an historical awareness.
It was not by chance that I, still a young and shy researcher, chose the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, founded in 1943 by Isaac Schneersohn.
Georges Wellers, Léon Czertok, Joseph Billig, Léon Poliakov welcomed me with kindness. They didn’t take long to adopt me, to consider me as one of their own. They granted me their friendship, to the point that with Serge Klarsfeld, we set up and published in 1979 one of the very first conferences on Vichy, the Resistance and the Jews.
Since then, I have not ceased to scrutinize the recent history of the Jews, to include myself in it, to consider that this history is also my history, that I too bear the responsibility to analyze it, to make it known, to transmit it,
The last survivors tell us, with their poor words, with the pain they carry within them, with their inability to share it fully, the horror they experienced. They know that you can’t imagine what they’ve been through. Worse still, they guess that we do not want to hear them, that they are talking about a distant past, of a world that no longer exists. So, for a long time, they kept quiet.
Soon, as we all know, there will be no more survivors of the camps. The last witnesses will also disappear. The role of historians will be even more crucial than today. Even more than today, we will have to take over, assume a heavy succession, fully accept this responsibility.
Are we capable of it? That is the question that troubles us.
It is that, we are aware of this, it is up to us to explain the inexplicable. Even if one feels an emotion, legitimate as well as irrepressible. Clearly, the Holocaust was the most striking, the bloodiest, and the most incomprehensible moment in the history of the twentieth century. I insist on this point. We can analyze, weigh and dissect the massacres that tragically illustrated the twentieth century. None of them is really comparable to the Shoah.
How can a country like Germany, such a brilliant civilization that gave the world Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and so many other musicians, that has housed famous painters, immortal philosophers, writers like Goethe and Schiller, that built cities like Munich, Berlin or Weimar, which radiated on Europe, which never stopped testifying to its intelligence, its spiritual development, its common sense, how and why did Germany abandon itself to the delusions of a criminal psychopath?
How and why did she cover herself with a thousand concentration and extermination camps and subcamps?
How and why did a state, in principle based on law, create Einsatzgruppen to assassinate nearly two million Jews with machine guns?
How and why did he operate gas chambers to supply crematory ovens?
How and why did one of the world’s most industrialized nations put its knowledge, dynamism, and most modern technology at the service of a genocidal enterprise?
How were doctors able to carry out criminal experiments on children?
Can it be justified that a state which proclaimed itself socialist, which announced the birth of a new world, which proclaimed the end of the exploitation of man by man, that this state accepted, for two years, to defend its national interests, to forge an alliance with the Third Reich?
How can we make it clear that the democratic world has not reacted sooner? Why didn’t the Americans and the British do everything they could to destroy the extermination and concentration camps? Why did the Soviets remain inactive?
Why did the Pope murmur a condemnation of the murder of the Jews and keep as cautious a silence on the Shoah as guilty?
All of these questions require answers.
Failing to understand everything and explain everything, failing to appeal to reason where the irrational and the incomprehensible reign, we must not give up. We are all passers of history, bearers of memory, citizens aware of their duties towards their elders and their descendants. The Shoah does not belong to Jews alone; it is a painful legacy of the twentieth century. All historians are aware of this, or should be. We all have the imperative obligation to say what it was, if not to give a rational and irrefutable explanation.
Allow me, first of all, to recall what we all know. Parents in particular, and the family in general, play a key role in transmitting memory. For too long, many of us have remained silent, perhaps out of modesty, ignorance or indifference. Today, it is up to us, wherever we can and in appropriate circumstances, to insist on the tragedies of history, our history, to encourage our children and grandchildren to take part in commemorations. Commemorations are not only intended for those who know. They are also, and above all, made for the youngest. They serve, it must be said and repeated, to safeguard memory, to shape minds, to guarantee the future.
And then, I have to insist on the responsibility of teachers. I know that in some schools it is not easy, maybe even impossible to teach the history of the Holocaust. We must not give up, neither in the first nor in the second degree. Our determination must not weaken. It is up to us to reclaim what we now call "the lost territories of the Republic".
This is a task that is all the more daunting because secondary school curricula are so surprising.
The teaching of history is reduced to a bare minimum in science classrooms. Why? Just because a teenager will become an engineer, a doctor, or a business owner doesn’t mean he shouldn’t know the past.
The term Shoah is banished from administrative language, in favor of the word "genocide", a legal term too vague, alas! too trivialized, which does not really reflect the specificity of the Shoah.
In addition, the teachers of the final classes are called upon to teach either "memories of the Second World War" or "memories of the Algerian War". Yes, by choice, as if the memories all had the same values. And official programs specify that the memories intersect, that they oppose each other, that they fluctuate, that one is worth the other, that the memories of the victims of genocides are comparable to the memories of prisoners of war, former STO soldiers, and "Malgré Nous" Alsatians and Lorraine.
The memory of the Shoah is part of a mish-mash as incomprehensible as it is inadmissible.
All in all, by dint of questioning the memories, opposing them, criticizing them, one can also contest the memory of the Shoah and deny the existence of the gas chambers. Under these conditions, wouldn’t negationism be part of the debate on memories?
It is time to put history programs straight. We must insist without any complexes on the nation’s history. It is by becoming aware of the national past of which they are heirs that today’s young people will understand the importance of history. Common sense requires that chronology once again become the backbone of teaching. It is impossible to accept that we teach the history of wars in the twentieth century before addressing the history of totalitarianisms. Yet this is what the official programs provide. Teachers should, therefore, teach the history of Hitler’s Germany after dealing with the Holocaust. An absurdity! It is a grave mistake to train generations that will have only a vague idea of the world in which their grandparents and great-grandparents lived. As citizens, we cannot remain passive in the face of a policy of oblivion and confusion.
Fortunately, most professors do their best to circumvent this absurdity. There are many who use the Shoah Memorial to complete their knowledge, to update them, to lead their students there. With the support of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, the Memorial provides essential work tools. The archives of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, the library, meetings and symposia, events of all kinds, including commemorations like today’s, links with research centers abroad, especially with Washington and Jerusalem, these are some of the actions that give the Memorial a primordial place in the research and teaching of history, literature, philosophy, sociology.
Some today criticize the school trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In their eyes, memorial tourism is another form of tourism. I read that "respecting Auschwitz means no longer going there." I am not unaware that there is a real Auschwitz Business. In Krakow, it is said, they offer, at a good price, by taxi, three hours round trip, visits to the extermination camp. Cohorts of tourists follow one another, behind busy guides, sometimes overwhelmed by crowds. But is this a sufficient reason to give up sending high school classes there? I don’t think so, even though I know that these school trips do not look like pilgrimages.
Of course, there is indecency, even obscenity in these journeys to horror. We leave early in the morning from Charles de Gaulle airport. After two hours of flying, we arrive in Krakow. We get into brand new coaches that drive on beautiful highways. We enter Birkenau, where we discover the ruins of the gas chambers, barracks more or less well maintained, we listen to the guide. Then, without any discomfort, we picnic in the coaches. In the half-light of a winter afternoon, one enters the sinister and gloomy buildings of Auschwitz. In the evening, exhausted, we take the plane back to Paris.
In less than twelve hours, we went from heaven to hell and from hell to heaven. Under these conditions, it is impossible to imagine the endless journey of the deportees, the smells, the thirst, the hunger, the anguish, the death in the leaded wagons. Impossible to imagine the atmosphere of the camp, the living and the dead, the screams of the kapos, the cold, the diseases, the selections, this immense cemetery without graves.
All of these criticisms are both well-founded and irrefutable. It is, however, difficult to remain insensitive in the face of these sinister miradors, in these broken-down barracks that have housed hundreds of thousands of inmates destined for death, in front of these ruins of the gas chambers, facing this heap of glasses, hair, suitcases, who bear witness, in their own way, to the tragedy. Contrary to what the poet claims, blood does not dry up quickly when entering history.
I can tell you that in my city of Saint-Maur, as in other cities, every year several high schools participate in the trip, with the support of the municipality and the Shoah Memorial. The students returned upset. They had seen it with their own eyes. Now they know what an extermination camp was. Auschwitz, Maïdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno are no longer just names they used to read in their textbooks, unknown places that they could not locate. These are no longer images. It is a tragic reality that they have faced, even if it is not exactly the one the deportees experienced. It is no longer virtual, which would call only on imagination. This vision of reality has marked them. They are talking about it and will talk about it. They will no longer be accessible to the lies of the deniers.
This is a history class that’s better than a lesson given in a high school classroom. Especially since this visit was carefully prepared by the teachers. It is part of an educational project that has been developed over several months, which will be the subject of new reflection upon return. Their students will keep alive a story that, without them, would fall into oblivion or even denial.
Yes, an increasing number of students in the first and second form should benefit from a trip to Auschwitz.
In conclusion, I would like to deliver a message of hope. Scholarly or less scholarly works on the Holocaust are numerous and increasingly well documented. Cinema and literature play an important role. In the end, it would be wrong to despair. The Shoah will not fall into the dustbin of history. Let’s not be overly optimistic, time will do its work. We will not be able, in twenty years, in fifty years, to feel today’s wound, and already our wound is not as deep as that of our parents. But I am certain that we will remain faithful to the memory of the deportees, that we will preserve the memory of the six million who did not return from the death camps and the testimonies of the survivors, that we will meet the demands of history.”
