Mr. President of the Memorial,
Mr. Ambassador,
Mr. Chief Rabbi,
Gentlemen the Rectors,
Madam Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear friends,
When speaking before the living and the dead, I do not 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 look fixedly but in front of which it is impossible, however, to turn away the eyes.
They are there, all those who never returned; all those whose return we have long, patiently, desperately waited for, without ever accepting, even after having resigned ourselves to it, that this return would never take place.
They are there too, the few who have returned without ever having quite come out of there,
without ever being quite out of the night of their childhood, of 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 there, finally, all those who, after having devoted their lives to passing on 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 solid and fallible it seems at once! How it 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 and foremost mourning.
It is above all absence. This should go without saying, but it is nevertheless so difficult, not only to say, but especially to think. Awareness of such mourning is almost impossible.
Consciousness is the opposite of denial. And denial is the most natural attitude towards any unbearable loss.
We don’t want to know, so we don’t know.
This is particularly true of the Shoah, not only because of the scale of the tragedy, but also because of the very nature of these assassinations which left no trace anywhere, of these millions of mourns without body or coffin.
El Male Rahamim, the prayer of the dead, and the Kaddish, which will be said in a few moments by the Chief Rabbi Kaufmann, constitute our unique and eternal testimony of the living to our dead, as a desperate way to give them back the word that has been stolen from them.
It is also to do them justice by reminding them that crime is not forgotten.
And our first duty, 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 lost forever.
Any loss is by nature irreparable, but the Shoah is, so to speak, 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 by very little being murdered, and in so many ways it was.
The language of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, Yiddish, that language still so alive, so beautiful, so rich, so diverse, lives only by the bitter and ardent fidelity of their children who do not want to see their parents die.
The Polish Judaism of old, and the German Judaism, that of the Enlightenment in Prague and Antwerp, that of the Haskalah, that of Spinoza and Mendelssohn, have become extinct to the point that they barely have their cemeteries left.
We have nothing to celebrate together. All we have to do is acknowledge the irremediable. But we are here. We are here every year.
And if our gathering has any meaning, it is to show that time is not destined to be a power that erases, abolishes, or destroys, but that it can, on the contrary, be 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, to taking stock, to projects and to the so difficult art of starting over, because we know how much more painful it is to start again than to begin?
Because memory is not order, neither contemplation nor rumination, but action.
To remember is not to suffer, it is to act.
If it begins with lucidity, with recognition, and thus with the simple and serious sense of truth, memory is built day by day through transmission.
We know that. But we still have to agree on the words.
Because we, the activists of memory, are obliged to witness the cruel paradox that we are so often and painfully confronted with: everything happens as if the voice of the memory of the Shoah was less and less listened to as it was heard more and more.
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 in 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 stop reviving it with the same fidelity, the same patience, the same requirement and the same loyalty.
In short, everything happens 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 then, for us, in 2024, to convey?
The answer consists of two words, which are contradictory only in appearance: 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 himself a stranger 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 think, 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 reach, through confrontation with nothingness, the awareness of the universality of the human condition.
Universal, the Shoah is also – it is the second pillar of this transmission – of a radical and absolute uniqueness.
She can’t compare herself to anything. To compare is to put things into perspective; and to put things into perspective here is an outrage.
Never in the world has there been another event that could be brought closer to the Shoah or assimilated with it, from 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, all over Europe, down to the villages and statels, and even sometimes to the most distant 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 starve in their ghettos; there they were murdered by a bullet in the head, at the edge of a wood or on the bank of a river; and finally, there, over there, 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 being burned, so that, of this unprecedented and unparalleled undertaking, no trace remains, likely to recall their memory.
Thus died, one by one, nearly three-quarters of the Jews of Europe.
Assassinating, according to a carefully designed and established plan, nearly three-quarters of a people on the entire continent 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 use it lightly, to use it improperly, without regard not only for its gravity but for its meaning, to turn 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 failure of our time, which leads to install the great confusion of spirits through which anti-Semitic hatred finds all the ways to come back, again, to haunt human consciousness, eighty years after the Holocaust.
Because here we are.
We, the survivors, we, the children of the survivors, never for eighty years, never since our parents came back or did not come back, we had not been so hugged by the anguish of the flood, everywhere in the world, of anti-Semitic hatred.
What happened then?
Has the World already forgotten?
Tomorrow, it will be October 7, 2024.
Tomorrow, it will be a year since we were seized with dread; a year since it is impossible for us to think of anything else; a year since grief has fought with anger, patience has tried to keep despair at bay, and we are doing everything we can, each in its own place and as best we 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 extent of the profound shock that October 7 represented for Jews; in the personal, individual life of every Jew, wherever he is, even and perhaps especially if he was not used to defining himself first as such.
The State of Israel was born just three years after the Holocaust: it was the resurrection after the tomb.
It was not compensation, it was not revenge, it was hardly consolation.
But it was the promise of a refuge where never again would the Jews have to undergo, in a silent 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 hunted down, 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, to plant their trees, to 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, no doubt, but first of profound inner serenity.
It is all this that collapsed on October 7, and when I say "this," I also speak, perhaps above all, of 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, which is constantly being repeated, unfortunately leaves us with only respite;
nor in space, because we now feel that Israel is perhaps no longer the answer to our concerns, 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 – to use an expression that, despite the season, will refer more to the liturgy of Passover than to that of Yom 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, that’s how long it took for memory to emerge from silence in the 1980s and become part of human history, just as it had taken Moses and his people 40 years to go from the Red Sea to Mount Nebo.
But again, 40 years and two more generations have passed, and the threat of the erasure of this memory by a world, which, sometimes even through its highest international institutions, is trying to turn back the crime against the descendants of the victims.
So, here again, it is up to us, of course without ignoring or minimizing the violence of the world and the suffering of others, 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 being optimistic. But I am convinced that it depends only on each of us, in the way he leads his own life, to force fate and justify hope.
Yes, this year was the year of the return of pogroms and yes, this place is where 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 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 born and learning Hebrew, any bar mitzvah celebrated in the world, any form of loyalty to those who left Paris in 1943 or Kafr Aza in 2023 and never returned home: that’s 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 the meantime, how to stand up for ourselves, and in a way that does honor to those whose names are on this wall, then we will have lived. And it’s the least we owe to 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
