Speech by André Kaspi for the Hazkarah (9 October 2016)

Speech by André Kaspi on October 9, 2016 at the Shoah Memorial © Pierre-Emmanuel Weck

The Hazkarah is an annual commemoration dedicated to the memory of the unburied victims of the Shoah.

Sunday, October 9, 2016 – Address by André Kaspi, historian, professor emeritus at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

'Ladies and gentlemen,

The invitation you addressed to me, Mr. President, touches me deeply. I did not think that one day, in this Memorial inaugurated 60 years ago, it would come down to me to commemorate the memory of the victims of the Shoah. You have entrusted me with a heavy responsibility, Mr. President. The task that has been assigned to me seems all the more formidable.

At this particular moment, I would like to evoke the memory of two members of my family. My grandfather’s name appears on the deportees' wall. Icek Koralstein lived several lives. He was a butcher in Warsaw (at the time when Poland, fiercely anti-Semitic, was part of the Russian Empire). He immigrated to the United States. Milwaukee and Brooklyn did not satisfy him.

He settles 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 human rights, the lighthouse nation that had finally recognized the innocence of Captain Dreyfus, it was, he believed, the end of the journey. This is where he would live with his children and grandchildren.

Rafled on February 11, 1943, he was deported at 67 years old with 700 other old men on March 2. I don’t even know if he reached Auschwitz. You understand why I cannot remain insensitive to the Shoah. On my shoulders weighs the weight of a family tragedy, and especially the weight of the Jewish tragedy.

I carry within me another past. My older brother, Lazare Kaspi, poses for the 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 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 June 4, 1944, two days before the Normandy landing. He was 22 years old.

These broken lives haunt me. They made me a Jewish historian – I did say: a Jewish historian and 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 really became Jewish.

In The Testament of a murdered Jewish poet, Elie Wiesel imagines a character who strives to define his Judaism. « A culture? You don’t know it. A civilization? You don’t experience it. A philosophy? You don’t practice it. A homeland? You don’t live in Israel. [... ] To be Jewish is an awareness." I would add that for me, it is a historical awareness.

It was not chance that guided me, still a young and timid researcher, to 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 quickly adopted 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 stopped scrutinizing 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 of analyzing it, making it known, transmitting it, in a word, it belongs to me, like to many others, to save it.

The last survivors tell us, with their poor words, with the pain they carry within them, with their inability to fully share it, the horror they experienced. They know that one cannot imagine what they have experienced. Even worse, they guess that we do not want to hear them, that they are talking about a distant past, a world that no longer exists. So, for a long time, they kept quiet.

Soon, we all know, there will be no more survivors of the camps. The last witnesses will disappear in turn. 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? This is the question that troubles us.

It is that, we are aware of it, it falls to us to explain the inexplicable. Even if one feels an emotion, legitimate as well as irrepressible. Obviously, the Holocaust was the most striking, the bloodiest, the most incomprehensible moment in the history of the twentieth century. I insist on this point. One can analyze, weigh and dissect the massacres that tragically illustrated the 20th century. None is really comparable to the Shoah.

How a country like Germany, such a brilliant civilization that gave the world Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and so many other musicians, which sheltered illustrious painters, immortal philosophers, writers like Goethe and Schiller, who built cities like Munich, Berlin or Weimar, which has shone on Europe, which has never stopped testifying to its intelligence, its spiritual development, its common sense, how and why did Germany abandon itself to the delusions of a psychopathic criminal?

How and why did she cover herself with a thousand concentration and extermination camps and sub-camps?
How and why did a state, in principle based on the 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 most industrialised nations in the world put its knowledge, dynamism and state-of-the-art technology at the service of a genocidal enterprise?
How could doctors have conducted 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, should have accepted for two years, to defend its national interests, to form an alliance with the Third Reich?
How to make it understood that the democratic world did not react sooner? Why didn’t the Americans and the British do everything 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 on the Shoah a silence as cautious as it is guilty?
All these questions require answers.

In the absence of understanding everything and explaining everything, in the absence of appealing to reason where the irrational and the incomprehensible reign, one must not give up. We are all stewards of history, bearers of memory, citizens aware of their duties towards their elders and descendants. The Holocaust does not belong only to the Jews. It is a painful legacy of the 20th century. All historians are aware of it or should be aware. We all have the imperative obligation to say what it was, failing to give a rational and irrefutable explanation.

Allow me, first of all, to recall what we all know. Parents in particular, the family in general play a key role in the transmission of memory. For too long, many of us have remained silent, perhaps out of modesty, ignorance or indifference. Today, it is our duty, wherever we can and in the right circumstances, to remember with insistence the tragedies of history, of our history, to encourage our children and grandchildren to participate in commemorations. Commemorations are not only intended for those who know. They are also and especially made for the youngest. They serve, it must be said and repeated, to safeguard memory, to train minds, to guarantee the future.

And then, I must insist on the responsibility of teachers. I know that in some schools it is not easy, perhaps even impossible to teach the history of the Holocaust. We must not give up, neither in the first degree nor in the second degree. Our determination must not weaken. It is up to us to reconquer what we now call «the lost territories of the Republic».

It is a task all the more formidable as the secondary education programs have something to surprise.

The teaching of history is reduced to a bare minimum in scientific classes. 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 banned from administrative language, in favor of the word "genocide", a too vague legal term, 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 "the memories of the Second World War" or "the memories of the Algerian war". Yes, by choice, as if the memories all had the same values. And the 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 the prisoners of war, the former members of the STO and the "Malgré Nous" Alsatians and Lorraine.

The memory of the Shoah is part of a mishmash as incomprehensible as it is unacceptable.

All in all, by questioning the memories, opposing them, criticizing them, one can also challenge 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 memoirs?

It is time to reset the history programs. We must insist without complexes on the history of the nation. It is by becoming aware of the national past of which they are the 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 the history of wars in the 20th century is taught before addressing the history of totalitarianisms. Yet this is what the official programs provide. Teachers should, accordingly, teach the history of Hitler’s Germany after dealing with the Holocaust. An absurdity! It is a serious mistake to form generations who will only have a vague idea of the world in which their grandparents and great-grandparents lived. The citizens that we are cannot remain passive in the face of a policy of forgetting and confusion.

Fortunately, most professors do their best to get around this absurdity. There are many who use the Shoah Memorial to complete their knowledge, to update them, to lead their students there. With the assistance of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, the Memorial provides essential work tools. The archives of the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, the library, meetings and colloquiums, events of all kinds, including commemorations such as today’s one, links with research centres abroad, notably 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.

The school trips to Auschwitz-Birkenau, some today criticize them. 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 good prices, by taxi, three hours round trip, visits to the extermination camp. Cohorts of tourists follow one another, behind busy guides, sometimes overwhelmed by the crowds. But is this a sufficient reason to waive sending high school classes there? I don’t believe it, knowing that these school trips do not look like pilgrimages.

Of course, there is indecency, even obscenity in these journeys towards 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. One enters Birkenau, where one discovers the ruins of the gas chambers, more or less well-maintained barracks, one listens to the guide. Then, without the slightest embarrassment, we picnic in the coaches. In the half-light of a winter afternoon, one enters the buildings, sinister and gloomy, of Auschwitz. In the evening, exhausted, we take the plane back to Paris.

In less than twelve hours, we went from paradise 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 these criticisms are both founded and irrefutable. It is, however, difficult to remain insensitive in the face of these sinister watchtowers, in these broken-down shanties that have housed hundreds of thousands of inmates destined for death, in front of these ruins of the gas chambers, in front of 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 quickly when entering history.

I can tell you that, in my city in Saint-Maur, as in other cities, each year several high schools participate in the trip, with the help of the municipality and the Shoah Memorial. The students return upset. They saw with their own eyes. They now 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 knew. It is no longer virtual that would call on the only imagination. This vision of reality has marked them. They talk about it and they will talk about it. They will no longer be accessible to the lies of the deniers.

It is a history course that is better than a lesson given in the hall of a high school. 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, upon return, be the subject of new reflection. Their students will keep alive a story that, without them, would fall into oblivion, even in denial.

Yes, an increasing number of students in primary and secondary school need to benefit from a trip to Auschwitz.

In conclusion, I would like to deliver a message of hope. The scholarly or less scholarly works on the Shoah are numerous and increasingly better documented. Cinema and literature hold a not insignificant place. Overall, we 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 requirements of history.