Hazkarah 2026, the speech by Anne Sinclair

Speech of the Hazkara 2009-2026

When the President of the Memorial asked me – when you yourself, dear Éric de Rothschild, asked me – to deliver this annual Hazkarah speech, I was filled with horror. How could I succeed the eminent speakers who, for more than fifteen years, have spoken in this context—philosophers, writers or historians—and whose words, in this place and on this day, fully deserve to be heard? After this moment of stupor, on which I will not dwell in order not to appear to give way to coquetry, I wondered in what capacity I could come this morning to speak to you about the Hazkarah.

This word, familiar, for years that I have come here every year, on these Sundays in September, was at first completely foreign to my family and traditional vocabulary, which rather than Hazkarah, cultivated the yahrhalloween, a Yiddish word that has a quite similar meaning: a ceremony of remembrance, the celebration of a birthday.

Since always, I have been saying Yahrhadith. I saw my parents observing the yarhhadith of my grandparents; I in turn observed that of my parents, and more recently, my husband’s first yarhhadith. Pierre Nora, for whom I have been in mourning for a little over a year and who gave the Hazkarah speech before you 11 years ago. My deep grief today blends with the collective mourning for which, every year, a few days after Rosh Hashanah, we gather to remember the unburied dead during the Holocaust.

Collective mourning that has obsessed me since I belatedly discovered it. If personal mourning is therefore very present for me, I have also been living for a very long time and until the obsession with the one we are talking about this morning:

As a child, I didn’t know what the war had been, and even more so, the Shoah. We didn’t talk about those things to children... They didn’t say Shoah at the time, but Holocaust... When I was 16 or 17, my first shock was reading Jean-François Steiner’s book Treblinka. I learned later that this book had been controversial because it was fictionalized. Often confused with the misunderstanding and disapproval that surrounded at the same time, the relationship of the Eichmann trial by Hannah Arendt. Not for the same reasons: Arendt seemed to exonerate, by her concept of "banality of evil", the horrors perpetrated by Eichmann, an SS convinced of the correctness of his murderous ideology, which applied to the letter the instructions of the final solution. Moreover, Arendt seemed to make the Jews co-responsible for their tragedy by stigmatizing the Judenrat and other Jewish councils of the ghettos. But let’s get back to Steiner. At the time, it must have been in 1965 or 1966; reading Treblinka was an earthquake for me... No reading since then has provoked me such a feeling of horror: hell, yes the flames of hell as in the tales of Revelation, it must have been that! I was unaware of the extermination camps, which were most often a subset of what were called concentration camps, where – to use the words of the time – "the unfortunate Jews suffered a terrible fate." And now I suddenly discover the roundups, deportations, trains, arrival at camp, selection, fireplace, smell, misleading showers, gas chambers, crematoria... and for those who were kept alive, the torture by degrees, the drudgery, the diseases, the fear, the excruciating hunger, the Polish cold, the endless calls in the snow, Le Revier, and finally the death awaited at the end of the road, when it was not the electrified barbed wire against which the most desperate threw themselves to end things faster; Yes, Treblinka was fictionalized, but he said everything for the ignorant like me, and, following so many men and women, I could not believe that men had subjected other men to such outrages... From that moment, I wanted to read everything, as if seized by a fever of wanting to know everything down to the smallest detail. Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Robert Antelme, Raul Hilberg... I fell asleep with Mengele and woke up with Frank, the sinister Nazi governor-general of Poland. Later still the world of the Disappeared, the shtetl of Wiesel or Apelfeld, or the family of Mendelsohn, and the Benevolent ones of course.

Not to mention the films, the American soap opera Holocaust, the monumental and immortal Shoah by Lanzmann, the son of Saul by Lazlo Nemezs, the pianist by Roman Polanski... So I was in permanent Hazkarah, in continuous Yarhhadith, seasoned with notorious collaborators, fascists of all stripes, from Drieu to Céline, Déat or Brasillach, the roundups of the Vel d'hiv, or that of the Notables.

It was only much later that I went to Auschwitz, about twenty years ago. I admit that I didn’t experience the shock I was expecting, that I even hoped for, as if the readings, through their power of suggestion, were stronger than a place that seemed beautiful to me under the snow, with that little birch wood in the back, and these pretty houses whose fireplaces smoked as they were supposed to smoke then... , the ramp of the Hungarians who arrived between May and July 44, very clean, clear, and silent to me, who walked along it without the cries and barks of dogs, wrapped in a good coat and dressed in fur-filled boots. A bit of emotion all the same at Auschwitz 1, in front of the display cases of wooden legs, hair, crumbling talliths, spoons, shoes, and suitcases. But I already knew all this and found myself experiencing little emotion, and being ashamed of it.

I missed this journey, I did not experience a recollected Hazkharah, because it was dulled by too many readings, as if I were wandering through a museum emptied of its shadows.

I also remember my first trip to Germany, to Munich. I wanted to go to Dachau the day after my arrival, but the barracks, too new and reconstructed, smelled of the wood of the pines in the forests of Bavaria, and there too, the emotion was not at the rendezvous.

It was at Yad Vashem, and curiously in a museum, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, or even, a few years ago, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, that tears arose in front of the unbearable photos, hanging next to each other, those of the villages of Germany or Poland in the summers of 38 or 39, of those young people who played tennis like the Finzi Contini, where I could almost hear little girls in white dresses and ribbon in their hair, playing a sonata by Beethoven, a prelude to Chopin, like so many little Dominique Sanda, picked one or two years later, silhouettes piled up in windowless trains towards terror and horror!

It was also later that I wanted to look for traces of the tragedy in my own family, and, through two books about my two grandfathers, to trace a few episodes of collective history, our history, of which we are the depositories, and the impact it had on my family.

This research has moved the place of memory for me. Until then, I had been looking for it in books, archives, testimonies, museums, photographs. Suddenly, she was also in a close story, in lives that had preceded mine and of which I often only knew fragments.

That’s when I realized that collective history does not add to our personal stories as an external backdrop. It runs through them. It is transmitted in the stories that are repeated, but also in those that are not told; in habits, silences, fears sometimes incomprehensible, in certain loyalties whose origin is no longer very well known.

Writing about my grandfathers was therefore not just a matter of getting to know them better. It was trying to understand what, from their time and its upheavals, had happened to me. We are custodians of a memory, not because we would possess all the truth about those who preceded us, but because something of their history continues to live in us, even when we do not always know how to recognize it.

Finally, October 7 brought us back – if we had forgotten it – to the conviction that the destruction of the Jews remains possible, desirable for some, like an irruption of this ancient memory into a traumatic present. We read the stories with trembling, looked at the images with tears, of those children massacred at the Nova festival, of those families destroyed in the southern kibbutzim, before we thought for months about the fate of the unfortunate hostages whose ordeal continued....

October 7 not only awakened an ancient fear, it also changed the words with which we thought we could speak of the present. Many of us felt, that day, the terrifying sensation that history was no longer behind us, that it could burst into our lives with a violence we thought had become impossible. The images, the stories, the faces of the victims and the endless wait for the hostages have penetrated our consciousness like a new wound.

But this injury was not experienced in the same way by everyone. She went through the Jewish community, sometimes bringing it closer together, sometimes deeply divided. To pain, fear, and the demand for security have been mingled other pains, other fears, other broken lives.

And it has become even more difficult for us to speak together, without any word being immediately suspected of treason, denial or indifference.

I do not want here to confuse events, nor to put on the same level stories that are not. But October 7 reminded us that memory is never definitively acquired. It can be revived by the present, and the present can in turn be distorted by a wounded memory.

If I spoke to myself about my Yarthzeit, it was also when I reread the speech Pierre gave here 11 years ago, it was because, next to the word Hazkarah, he brought back to life the word Zakhor: remember this Jewish injunction to remember, and his closeness to the author of the magnificent book bearing that name, Yerushalmi, about whom he has often spoken, struck by the proximity of their questions about history and memory. And pronouncing this Hazkarah, one year after his disappearance, necessarily gives the word souvenir a special resonance for me. To remember is not just about preserving the past, it’s about continuing to live with those who are absent.

Hazkarah: memory, Zakhor: remember. The first is a name, the second is almost an order.

But why an order? Why should we be ordered to remember?

I asked myself the question when I reread Yerushalmi. After all, we hardly need to be ordered to remember those whom we have loved. They are there. Sometimes even far too much. Their absence accompanies our lives.

And yet: Zakhor, this Remember!

I ended up wondering if this imperative meant something else. If he did not just ask us to turn back to the past, but to know what we want to do with it.

Much more demanding than "how not to forget?" the question then becomes: "what should we do with what we remember?"

For a long time, to me, remembering the Holocaust meant knowing.

To know what had happened. To read. To seek. To see. To know the names, places, and stories in order to pass them on in turn. I told you about this kind of bulimia that was my own, perhaps up to Auschwitz, where I realized that the accumulation of traces did not necessarily bring the dead to life.

Today, I think I understand a little better what I was missing.

Memory is not the accumulation of the past, nor even the ardent obligation to revive it in order to prevent it from being reborn.

She is what the past makes of us.

Pierre Nora devoted a large part of his work to the places where memory is housed when those who lived it disappear; he who had been so struck by the Zakhor of Yerushalmi; he who had spent his life as a historian distinguishing history from memory without ever ceasing to question their connection,

I don’t want to speak on his behalf. And even less make him say today what he didn’t say. But just add this:8

We are not only the custodians of a memory. We are responsible for it.

Those responsible first and foremost for those who have disappeared. For their names. For their history. It is this responsibility that Serge Klarsfeld magnificently exercised by restoring their end, the truth about what had happened to them. And this responsibility falls on us, today perhaps more than we would have imagined a few years ago, since anti-Semitism has returned among us with a violence that we had believed, or wanted to believe, belonged to the past. This is what bends us in two when we pass here in front of the wall of names, overwhelmed that we are in front of these steles which remind us of the extent and the specificity of their martyrdom.

But can we stop there?

That’s the question that troubles me the most. If the memory of persecution only teaches us to recognize persecution when it reaches us, then what has it taught us?

I don’t want to make any comparison here. The Holocaust is not a metaphor available to comment on the world’s woes. It has its history, its uniqueness, its project of annihilation, its millions of deaths.

But precisely because we know what the designation of certain men as strangers to the common world can produce, our memory cannot be only an enclosure within which we would protect our dead.

She also has to keep us on alert.

Maybe this is what I am hearing today in Zakhor.

No, just remember what happened to them.

But: remember what you know.

And try, if you can, to live accordingly, by alerting on the symptoms that we know how to recognize, and also avoiding to endorse the indefensible, when it is practiced here or elsewhere, even in the name of Jewish exceptionality!

This is perhaps where our greatest difficulty lies today: to remain faithful to our dead without locking ourselves in fear; to defend Jewish lives without becoming indifferent to the lives of others; to be able to name anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews without giving up our ability to see the suffering that surrounds us, including those of which we might be the authors. Not to erase our pain, nor to relativize what has happened to us, but so that memory remains a force of consciousness and not a border that would prevent us from looking at the world.

So I return to the word of that morning: Hazkarah.

There was the yahrhadith of my childhood, the family memory, the names of our dead pronounced year after year during the prayers we

let’s say tomorrow, Yom Kippur day at the office of Yiskor. Then came the immense and terrible memory of the Shoah, into which I wanted to enter completely. There is today Pierre, whose absence gives me to the word souvenir a meaning that I did not know him yet. And there are these tremors, sometimes even this fracture within a Jewish community torn apart by the aftershocks of the earthquake of October 7.

All these memories now mingle within me.

I thought at the beginning of this text that Hazkarah was a way of living with the dead.

I always think so.

But perhaps it is also a way of living among the living.

A line that goes from those who are no longer there to those who are, and to those who will come after us.

A memory line, of course.

But also, perhaps, a life line...

Thank you.