Speech by Pierre-François Veil on the occasion of the Hazkarah, commemoration dedicated to the unburied victims of the Shoah. Commemoration

Mr. President of the Memorial,

Mr. Ambassador,

Mr. the Chief Rabbi,

Gentlemen the Rectors,

Madam Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear friends,

At the moment of speaking before the living and the dead, I don’t know what prevails, gratitude, pride or humility.

Each of the names inscribed on this wall looks at us and obliges us. He is like an absent presence, like a mute cry, like a soul without a body that one cannot stare at but in front of which it is impossible, however, to turn away.

They are there, all those who never returned; all those whose return one has long, patiently, desperately, waited for without ever accepting, even after having resigned oneself to it, that this return would never take place.

They are there too, the few who have returned without ever being quite out of there,

without ever being completely removed from the night of their childhood, their youth, but who then testified, because testimony was for them both the only way to overcome the past and the only way to be worthy of it.

They are, finally, all those who, after having devoted their lives to passing the witness, left this world this year, or seven years ago, ten years ago or thirty years ago: these survivors who have stopped living but who will never stop surviving and transmitting.

And so here we are, today, gathered around this humble pride, that of memory.

The memory of the Shoah: how it seems both solid and fallible! How she expresses the frightening fragility of the least ephemeral goods!

I would like here to try to restore, as much as possible, the meaning and scope. The memory of the Shoah is first of all mourning.

It is above all absence. It should go without saying, but it is yet so difficult, not only to say, but especially to think. The awareness of such mourning is almost impossible.

Consciousness is the opposite of denial. And denial is the most natural attitude in the face of any unbearable loss.

We don’t want to know; therefore, we don’t know.

This is particularly true of the Shoah, not only because of the magnitude of the tragedy, but also because of the very nature of these assassinations which left no trace anywhere, of these millions of mourners without body or coffin.

El Male Rahamim, the prayer of the dead, and the Kaddish, which will be said in a few moments by Chief Rabbi Kaufmann, constitute our unique and eternal testimony of the living to our dead, as a desperate way of returning to them the word that was stolen from them.

It is also to give them justice by reminding that the crime is not forgotten.

And our first duty, to us, here and now, is therefore, today as yesterday, to know in full consciousness what we would have preferred to ignore; to recognize, in a word, that what is lost is forever.

All loss is by nature irreparable, but the Shoah is, if one may say so, an allegory of the irreparable.

The Jewish world has been amputated, it has lost a very large part of itself, and one of the most fruitful, it will never be whole again.

European Judaism missed very little of being assassinated and, in so many respects, it was.

The language of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, Yiddish, that language yesterday still so lively, so beautiful, so rich, so diverse, lives only by the bitter and ardent loyalty of their children who do not want to see their parents die.

The Polish Judaism of old, and German Judaism, that of the Enlightenment, of Prague and Antwerp, that of Haskala, that of Spinoza and Mendelssohn, have become extinct to the point where they barely have their cemeteries left.

We have nothing to celebrate together. We only need to recognize the irredeemable. But we are there. We are there every year.

And if our gathering has any meaning, it is to show that time is not destined to be a power that erases, that abolishes, that destroys, but that it can be, on the contrary, a force that builds up and gradually replaces mourning with remembrance, and thus absence with presence.

Why gather here, every time autumn returns, at the threshold of the Jewish year, in this time dedicated to introspection, assessment, projects and the so difficult art of starting again because we know how much more painful it is to start over than to begin?

Because memory is not about order, neither contemplation nor rumination, but action.

Remembering is not suffering, it’s acting.

If it begins with lucidity, with recognition, and therefore with the simple and serious sense of truth, memory is built day by day through transmission.

We know it. But still, we must agree on the words.

Because we, the activists of memory, are obliged to note the cruel paradox with which we are painfully and so often confronted: everything happens as if the voice of the memory of the Shoah was less and less listened to as it was more and more heard.

Everything happens as if the stories of the survivors, the publications, the conferences, the trips to Auschwitz and the visits of the children from the schools here, at the Memorial, in Drancy, at the Maison d'Izieu or at Chambon-sur-Lignon, did not prevent the flame of memory from being altered while, from day to day and year to year, we do not cease to revive her with the same fidelity, the same patience, the same demand and the same loyalty.

Everything happens, in short, as if knowledge of the Shoah was not, no longer, a barrier against anti-Semitism.

And, sometimes even, one would be tempted to add, with a hint of dread: on the contrary. What is it therefore, for us, in 2024, to convey?

The answer lies in two words, which are contradictory only on the surface: it is up to us to convey both the universality of the Shoah and its uniqueness.

The Holocaust is universal.

It is not the property of a community or of a people. It does not belong to the history of the Jews, but to the history of men.

The Shoah is a crime, not against Jewish identity, but against humanity. A crime of the human species against the human species.

And as such, no human being can feel foreign to that memory: it is an abyss that must have forever changed the way man looks at himself.

I would like every child who visits the rooms of the Memorial to say, not only:

«that’s what happened to the Jews!», but:

"this is what men have done to other men; this is what my fellow men have done to my fellow men."

The memory of the Shoah is the most immediate way to access, through the confrontation with nothingness, the awareness of the universality of the human condition.

Universal, the Holocaust is also – it is the second pillar of this transmission – of a radical and absolute uniqueness.

She cannot compare herself to anything. Comparing is relativising; and relativising, here, is an outrage.

Never in the world has there been another event that could be brought closer to the Shoah or assimilated to it, near or far.

Throughout Europe, from the Atlantic coast to the plains of Ukraine and Silesia, a meticulous list has been made of all Jews, whatever their age, whatever their origin, whatever their condition.

And then, in a methodical, scientific, industrial way, everywhere in Europe, to the depths of villages and statels, and even sometimes the most remote islands, they went to look for them, at their place, to track them, to mark them, to park them.

And then, here they were left to die of hunger in their ghettos; there they were shot in the head, at the edge of a wood or on the banks of a river; and finally, there, all the way down, at the end of the world of the living, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, at Treblinka, at Belzec, at Sobibor, at Chelmno, in Maidanek, they were gassed before burning them, so that, of this unprecedented undertaking, without equivalent, there remains no trace, likely to recall their memory.

Thus died, one by one, nearly three-quarters of the Jews of Europe.

Assassinate, according to a carefully designed and established plan, nearly three-quarters of a people across an entire continent, it has a name.

This is called genocide.

And if there is a reminder that today imposes itself with more solemnity than ever, it is that of the sacred terror that this word must inspire: genocide.

To employ it with lightness, to use it improperly, without regard not only for its gravity but for its meaning, to return it even, with sadistic perfidy, against the descendants of those who have suffered it in their flesh, is not simply a semantic error, it is a moral fault, it may even be the major bankruptcy of our time, the one that leads to the installation of the great confusion of minds through which antisemitic hatred finds all the ways to return, again, haunt human consciousness, eighty years after the Holocaust.

Because we are here.

We, the survivors, we, the children of the survivors, never for eighty years, never since our parents came back or they did not come back, we had not, to this extent, been embraced by the anguish of the onslaught, everywhere in the world, of anti-Semitic hatred.

What happened then?

Has the World already forgotten?

Tomorrow, we will be on October 7, 2024.

Tomorrow, it will be a year that we have been seized with terror; a year that it is impossible for us to think of anything else; a year that sorrow disputes him with anger, that patience tries to hold despair in respect and that we ensure, each in his own place and as he can, that the experience of misfortune does not overcome the demand for justice.

I am not always sure, to say the truth, I am even certain of the opposite, – that beyond the Jewish community, everyone has truly grasped the measure of the profound shock that October 7 represented for the Jews; in the personal, individual life of each Jew, wherever he is, even and perhaps especially if he wasn’t used to first defining himself as such.

The State of Israel was born barely three years after the Holocaust: it was the resurrection after the tomb.

It was not a compensation, it was not a revenge, it was hardly a consolation.

But it was the promise of a refuge where never again would the Jews have to endure, in mute powerlessness, the millennial curse of their condition.

Israel was both the state of the survivors and the country where a new Jewish life, dignified and free, could begin and flourish.

Thanks to Israel, the Jews would no longer be humiliated, tortured, or persecuted for the sole reason of their birth.

There would finally be a place on Earth where, whatever happens, they would be allowed to speak their language, plant their trees, pray to their God or not to pray to him, and above all, first of all, to defend themselves.

Israel, for all the Jews of the world, was a source of pride without doubt, but first of profound intimate serenity.

It is all of this that collapsed on October 7, and when I say "this," I am also talking, perhaps above all, about the idea that the Jews could have of themselves and of the world.

In case of danger, should we fear that there will be no refuge anywhere?

Neither in time, because the history of anti-Semitism, always repeated, leaves us, alas, only respite;

nor in space, because we now feel that Israel is perhaps no longer the answer to our worries, but on the contrary one more worry, which we carry with a kind of worried and disarmed tenderness.

We all feel how much this year, and – to use an expression that, despite the season, will refer more to the Passover liturgy than to that of Kippur, – this ceremony of the Hazkarah is different from other ceremonies of the Hazkarah.

But this year also brings us back to a temporality that haunts me.

40 years, two generations, it is the time that it took for the memory to emerge from silence in the 80s and be inscribed in human history, as it had taken Moses and his people 40 years to pass from the Red Sea to Mount Nebo.

But again, 40 years and still two generations have passed, and the threat of the erasure of this memory by a world that, sometimes even by its highest international institutions, tries to return the crime against the descendants of the victims.

So, there again, it is up to us, of course without ignoring or minimizing the violence of the world and the suffering of the other, our equal in humanity, to denounce and fight against this deception.

However, I would not want to end this statement with a desperate message.

Not that I am optimistic: history forbids us from optimism. But I am convinced that it only depends on each of us, in the way he leads his own life, to force fate and justify hope.

Yes, this year was that of the return of the pogroms and yes, this place is the one in which death is inscribed in the flesh of the city.

But there is only one answer to death: it is life. Yes, every Jew inherits memory; But, that does not mean suffering or the status of a victim,

This means life and the duty to do something with it. Life is the only victory over death, there is no other.

Any child who is born and learns Hebrew, any bar mitzvah celebrated in the world, any form of loyalty towards those who left Paris in 1943 or Kfar Aza in 2023, never returned home: this is all we have left.

It’s not much, no doubt, but it’s all we have, this interval that separates our arrival on Earth from our inevitable departure,

and, after all, if we know, in that interval, how to stand tall, and in a way that does honor to those whose names are on this wall, then we will have lived. And it is the least we owe them.

May this ceremony of the Hazkarah bring, in each of our lives, and for all the years that are opening up, courage, exigency, light and life.

Thank you.

Allocation by Pierre-François Veil, president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.

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