Speech by Bernard-Henri Levy on the occasion of the Hazkarah, a commemoration dedicated to the unburied victims of the Shoah. Commemoration

It is therefore the third time, dear friends, that I find myself thus speaking before you. 

The first time, I was thirty years old, and it was at the initiative of Simone Veil. 

The second, I was fifty, and it is already you, Eric, but not yet you, François, who had addressed this beautiful and perilous invitation to me. 

Today, years have passed; our ranks have thinned; but we are confronted with the same imperative, the same challenge, the same duty of intelligence and memory. 

The history of Europe and the massacres of its Jews... 

The alleged "deicide" that had to be made to pay the people of Israel...

The strange way in which Christian theology, for centuries, made the agony of Christ interminable; prolonged it indefinitely as if to make better heard the miracle of his resurrection; and, at the foot of his bloody cross, to offer, not books, but tons of Jewish meat with the axes of the pogromists... 

And then, at the dawn of modernity, in a dechristianized Europe where "God is dead" became the rallying cry of crowds made insane by their curious solitude, in the new world where the human shop was suddenly held only by men and, soon, by the data of men, this turning point, this metamorphosis, this molting: the hatred of the Jew became biological, scientific, medical, racial; from Jewish France to Mein Kampf, in the two rival nations that still dominated the West, it was the race to which would hunt down the henceforth cursed race most effectively; and, once established, with great reinforcements of literature, philosophy, anthropology, language sciences, I could go on, the aberration of this people, its toxicity for souls, arts, and cultures, once established the monstrous degeneration which had, through him, poisoned humanity – the final solution, extermination, the Holocaust. 

I devoted part of my work to explaining how this turning point was radical both in the history of the Jews and in that of a Europe whose entire civilization vacillated under the blows of these crowds who, from the geometrically paved streets of Paris and Berlin to the peat bogs of Romania or Moldova, screamed the same hatred.

I did it without Raoul Hilberg’s erudition. 

Without the holy patience of Serge Klarsfeld to whom we owe this innumerable ribbon of the dead that is there, on my right. 

I did it without the almost inhuman strength of Claude Lanzmann, that Jewish Orphea who took the risk of going, not once, nor twice, but many times, to cross the Acheron to seek it, without looking back, his Eurydice with six million faces that the Nazis had wanted to melt into a single vapor. 

But I did it as a philosopher. 

And I have established, I believe, what the Shoah had, compared to all other genocides, irreducibly singular. 

Not the number of his deaths. 

Not the cold technicality, the exponential industrialization, of the killing machine such as Martin Heidegger, as the black mage he was, characterized it. 

Not even its cruelty that, from Armenia to Rwanda, other genocides had, and will, share.

No. 

What was absolutely singular about this crime was that it was the only one to want itself without recourse (no border for killers; no city of refuge for victims; Europe and even, in theory, the planet like a gigantic trap for the Jewish game hunted by the global onslaught). 

Without remnants (men, women, children and old people, their culture and language, their places of prayer and their books, until the memory of their existence and vocation, everything had to disappear, everything).

And he is the only one who wanted to be, at this point, without number, without names and without graves – we don’t count the filth, do we? we don’t name the bacteria? we don’t have a funeral for the waste, the trash that clutters our sidewalks? so that the ultimate originality of the Nazi crime was to want the double erasure of bodies and corpses, souls and their memory – its most deeply diabolical specificity was that at the same time as we scratched the victims from the book of the living we also scratched them from the book of the dead...

I try to say this without emotion. 

It is the strict, exact and terrible reality. 

It is, in the general history of massacres, the atrocious, truthful, almost algebraic, singularity of the Shoah.

 

Hence, dear friends, the importance of the gesture we make here this year, like every year, by gathering on the forecourt of this memorial. 

We come, of course, to remember those who were gassed, burned, machine-gunned, buried alive or dead... 

We come to hear their voices and silences, their tears and screams, the choking and compressions of bodies in the trains, then the barracks and, finally, the gas chambers... 

And, when we remember these unforgettable men who were Primo Levi, Imre Kertesch, Aharon Appelfeld, we also come to force ourselves to review the selections, the rails in the grass not yet crazy, the burning snow under the bare feet, the empty suitcases, the blows, the dogs, the infirmaries of horror. 

But be careful! 

We also come to make a gesture of repair. 

And I hear the word, again, in the clearest, most precise, most concrete sense it has in the Jewish tradition of Tiqun Olam.  

For if it is true that the worst outrage that the Nazis inflicted on our dead was to plunge them into a night where they had to remain forever without grave, without name and without number, we come this morning, gathering in front of this crypt, very close to this ribbon of names exactly enumerated, do them a little justice. 

This is a gesture of piety and wisdom. 

It is a sepulture of stone and words that we offer to those who had none. 

It is a way, as the greatest of French poets said, to become the tomb of our elders.

But it is also a humble revenge that we offer to those murdered brothers who were the most innocent of men but whose "blood", says the Verse after the murder of Abel, cries out to us from the land that swallowed them.

You know the word of Chateaubriand to Madame de Staël: "It is in vain that Nero prospers because the historian seems charged with the vengeance of the peoples." 

Well, similarly: it is in vain that, for 17 years, from Bagneux to Toulouse, Paris, Tel Aviv and elsewhere, the number of our deaths has again increased; for the integral providence has made, dear friends, that you are here to demand justice. 

So, of course, the question still arises – the same as thirty-fifty years ago. 

Should this justice, this reparation be understood in truth or by metaphor?  

Is it a pious work that we are doing here, or just wishful thinking? 

I am torn, this year, between two feelings. 

On one side, I look, yes, at our ranks that thin out. 

I remember in my mind the absent ones who were there, in front of me, the other times, and who have gradually left. 

And I see well that we are entering, for good, this new time that I dreaded in my previous speeches: the one where the last survivors will almost all have disappeared; the one where it will be necessary to do without them so that the witness passes; and the one where women and men of my kind will be dinosaurs, increasingly rare heirs, beautiful souls risking, as the prophet says, to work for nothing, to plead for nothingness. 

But, on the other side, I see the other crowd of those who, this morning, are reconstituting the ranks. 

I see these young faces in front of me starting with those of my daughter, Justine and my granddaughter, Suzanne, both Jewish as were the children of Tsippora. 

And I realize that paradoxically, I am more optimistic today than I used to be. 

First of all, dear friends, I think back to those deniers who made us so afraid 45 years ago; I think back to their way of saying that nothing happened at Auschwitz and that we saw nothing there, like in Hiroshima; I think back to this monstrous repetition of the crime that consisted in pretending that it did not take place, or not really, and which we feared would eventually become a school and law; well, that has not happened; negationism, if it is far from being defeated and still makes common cause, too often, with this hatred of Israel which is the new fuel for anti-Semitic crime, has been held in respect; the monstrous shame that the Shoah must inspire to the world has not, at least in Europe, been extinguished; and there are, thanks be to heaven, even for the Jews, not only lost battles!

Then, it is confirmed what we were, for the moment, from that time on, some to foresee: namely that memory is not a mine of memories that would be exhausted over time; that there is not, at the beginning, a stock of living memory that, as we move away from the radiation of the event, it would become smaller and paler; and it is Simone Veil who was right when she said that it’s the other way around – we start by not wanting to know anything; we refuse to listen to the survivor; and over time, thanks to the efforts of the "horrible workers" Nietzscheans, that a memory ends up being built and overcoming the will to ignore the task, my dear friends, that you have, that we have, rather successfully, from year to year, for 80 years, or almost, that exists the Memorial!

And then my great source of optimism is, I repeat it to you, this Jewish youth of today: it’s not much to say that they are more numerous, this morning, than they were in the photos I found 47 years ago and where it seems to me that almost no one, apart from me, had not been born after the Shoah – the truth is that the chain has not broken and that, as always in Judaism, as in the most obscure times where everything seems lost, the transmission is assured. 

A last word. 

The best way to avenge is to take responsibility for what has been attributed to crime. 

It is, in the circumstances, to carry with positivity and pride this Judaism that the Hitlerians wanted to eradicate from the face of the earth.  

And it is to reconnect with this Jewish vitality that made them crazy because it made us build, here, cities; found, there, Republics; foment, even, revolutions; it is to reconnect, in France for example, with this civilizing and beneficent presence that illuminated our terroirs at the time when they barely discovered the grandeur of a Christianity trapped between the thick walls of monasteries. 

Now, isn’t this again what the Jews do today? 

And this regained Jewish splendor, this assumed and joyful Jewish strength, this idea that the Jewish people are a treasure for humanity and that they intend to, this treasure, this Segula, to spend themselves without counting the cost so that humanity can be redeemed, isn’t this the great novelty compared to Judaism in 1979?  

I see the quiet audacity of the Jews of France who entered, fully Jewish, into the secular city.

I observe the Jewish youth who, from decade to decade since my first speech here, has developed a sixth sense in the face of Evil and, without ever forgetting that it is upon their fathers and grandfathers that the ultimate face of the devil was leaned, carried themselves, from Bosnia to Rwanda and, today, in Ukraine, on all the places of the world where the muzzle reappears.

And I think of those young and less young Jews who, when they repeat, as it is said on this pediment, "Zakhor, remember," think "remember Amalek," that is to say at the same time, as Rashi of Troyes wants, "remember the harm he has done you", "remember the harm he did to other people" and "remember to forget it, to erase it from under heaven". 

That Judaism, I repeat, its dead are not buried.

They do not know rest, contrary to the promise made to the sons of Adam that the earth, adama, would always offer them a burial. 

They do not have pyramids, eternal tombs like the great dead of primordial Egypt. 

They were not mummified, they were gassed. 

They were not embalmed, they were burned. 

They have not been scented, but transformed into charred flesh, acrid and malodorous. 

And this, it must be said and repeated, is a crime unlike any other.

But we know it too, dear friends. We are not from the death camp. We are not from the embalmed and mummies camp. Our birth certificate was to tear us away from him, from this camp, and from his civilization which had death for secret. And this is the reason why we have this vocation: once our dead are mourned, remembered and welcomed into our midst of the living, to ensure that thanks to the erasure of the name of Amalek, life resumes its position in the camp of Israel and Israel takes its position in the disorders of the world.

Outside and inside... 

Camping apart from nations, but more precious to these nations than the fetid air they sometimes breathe or exhale.... 

The sense of the few, the heroism of the few, this grace and intelligence of the few that the Jews promised to the world they would never be overwhelmed – and which are the salt of his land... 

This is the genius of Judaism.

Such is his deep vocation.

And to know that we know it, to know that more and more of us remember that being Jewish is helping the world be world and the human be human, imagine it, this spirit of Judaism, like an eternal tree separated from us by an angel of fire who holds a sword whose blade swirls and towards which, however, one must walk, this is what repairs and that, this morning, restores hope.

Speech by Bernard–Henri Lévy, philosopher, writer, filmmaker.

Review the 2023 Hazkarah ceremony