So this is the third time, dear friends, that I have found myself thus speaking before you.
The first time, I was thirty years old, and it was at the initiative of Simone Veil.
The second time, I was fifty, and it’s already you, Eric, but not yet you, François, who had sent me this beautiful and perilous invitation.
Today, the 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, rendered 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 axes from the pogromists...
And then, at the dawn of modernity, in a de-Christianized Europe where "God is dead" became the rallying cry of crowds made insane by their curious loneliness, in the new world where the human shop was suddenly no longer held by men and, soon, through the data of men, this turning point, this metamorphosis, this molting: hatred of the Jew became biological, scientific, medical, racial; from
I have 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 faltered 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 here on my right.
I did it without the almost inhuman strength of Claude Lanzmann, that Jewish Orpheus who took the risk of going, not once, not twice, but many times, as a victor, crossing the Acheron to seek there, 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 a black mage that he was, characterized it.
Not even the cruelty that, from Armenia to Rwanda, other genocides had and will share.
No.
What this crime had of absolutely singular is that it was the only one to want oneself without recourse (no border for the killers; no city refuge for the victims; Europe and even, in theory, the planet as a gigantic trap for the Jewish game hunted by the world).
Without remnant (men, women, children and old people, their culture and language, their places of prayer and books, until the memory of their existence and their 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 can’t count the filth, can we? Don’t we name bacteria? Don’t we have funerals 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, of souls and their memory – its most diabolical specificity was that at the same time as we scratched off 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.
This is the strict, exact and terrible reality.
It is, in the general history of massacres, the atrocity, truthful, almost algebraic, singularity of the Shoah.
Hence, dear friends, the importance of the gesture we make here this year, as in 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 again their voices and silences, their tears and screams, the choking and compressions of bodies in trains, then the huts and finally the gas chambers...
And, when we remember those 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 bare feet, the empty suitcases, the blows, the dogs, the infirmaries of horror.
But be careful!
We also come to make a gesture of reparation.
And I hear the word, again, in the clearest, most precise, most concrete sense that it has in the Jewish tradition of the 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 were to remain forever without grave, without name and without number, we come this morning, by gathering in front of this crypt, very close to this ribbon of names very exactly enumerated, to do them a little justice.
This is a gesture of piety and wisdom.
It is a tomb 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, cry out to us from the earth which swallowed them.
You know the words of Chateaubriand to Madame de Staël: "It is in vain that Nero thrives 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 perfect providence has made you, dear friends, here to demand justice.
So, of course, the question still arises – the same as it did thirty-fifty years ago.
Should this justice and reparation be understood in truth or metaphorically?
Is it a pious work that we are doing here, or just wishful thinking?
I am torn between two feelings this year.
On one side, I look, yes, at our ranks as they split into thin rows.
I remember in my mind the absentees who were there, in front of me, the other times, and who gradually left.
And I can clearly see that we are entering, for good, this new time that I had dreaded in my previous speeches: the one when the last survivors will almost all have disappeared; the one when they will have to be dispensed with in order for the witness to pass; and 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 I am paradoxically more optimistic today than I was before.
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 there was, as in Hiroshima, nothing seen; I think back to that monstrous doubling of crime, which consisted of pretending that it hadn’t happened, or not really, and which we feared would eventually become a school of law; well, that hasn’t happened; negationism, if it’s 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 check; the monstrous shame that the Shoah must inspire in the world has not, at least in Europe, been extinguished; and there is, thank heaven, even for the Jews, not only lost battles!
Then, it is confirmed what we were, for the moment, at that time, some of us 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 diminish, turning pale; and it was Simone Veil who was right when she said the opposite – 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, a memory is finally built and overcomes the will to ignore – task, my dear friends, that you have, that we have rather succeeded, year after year, for 80 years, or almost, that the Memorial exists!
And then my great source of optimism is, I repeat it to you, this Jewish youth today: it’s not much to say that they are more numerous, this morning, than they were in the photos I found from 47 years ago, where it seems to me that almost no one, Except for me, it was not born after the Shoah – the truth is that the chain did not break and that, as always in Judaism, as in the darkest times when everything seems lost, transmission is assured.
One last word.
The best way to avenge is to take responsibility for what has been blamed as a crime.
It is, on this occasion, to carry with positivity and pride that Judaism which 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 lands at the time when they were barely discovering the grandeur of a Christianity sealed between the thick walls of monasteries.
Now, isn’t that 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 fully intend, this treasure, this Segula, to spend themselves without counting the cost so that humanity may 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 on their fathers and grandfathers that the ultimate face of the devil was bent, carried, from Bosnia to Rwanda and, Today, in Ukraine, in all the places in 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 evil he has done you," "remember the evil he did to other people" and "remember to forget him, to erase him from under heaven".
This 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,
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 like no other.
But we know it too, dear friends. We are not from the death camp. We are not from the camp of the embalmers and mummies. Our birth certificate was to tear us away from him, from this camp, and from his civilization, which had death for secret. And that is why we have this vocation: once our dead are mourned, remembered, and welcomed into our womb as living beings, to make life resume its position in the camp of Israel, and Israel take its position in the disorders of the world, thanks to the erasure of the name of Amalek.
Outside and inside...
Camping apart from nations, but more precious to these nations than the foul air they sometimes breathe or exhaled....
The meaning of the few, the heroism of the few, that grace and intelligence of the few which the Jews promised to the world never to be overwhelmed – and which are the salt of his earth...
Such is the genius of Judaism.
This is its profound vocation.
And to know that we know it, to know that more and more of us are remembering that being a Jew means helping the world to be a world and the human being to be human, to 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, it is necessary to walk, this is what repairs and that, this morning, gives hope again.
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