Ladies and gentlemen,
The Shoah Memorial, on this day 75
Today we are inaugurating an exhibition that is important and – for me, particularly significant. Indeed, it embraces all that is and makes the grandeur of the Memorial.
The Memorial represents so many things and the witnesses are one of its strongest components. They are the columns of the temple.
They are indispensable, and to listen to them is a necessity, because if the Memorial has become what it is today, a place of study and transmission, using its unique archives, it is essentially due to close cooperation between historians, archivists and witnesses.
The witnesses made this house theirs. They give it a soul, a flame, which humanizes and rehumanizes the millions of disappeared without burial. This house lives thanks to them, can transmit thanks to them, can teach thanks to them, because nothing is more pedagogical than their voices.
This exhibition is a tribute that we pay them with respect, gratitude and, I add, with tenderness and friendship.
For this inauguration, we invited the daughter and son of two of our most remarkable witnesses, Simone Veil and Sam Pisar. I greet Léah Pisar and Pierre François Veil who have agreed to be present today.
Simone Veil and Samuel Pisar are among the outstanding witnesses of our country, and were very committed to the Memorial. Léah, Pierre François, thank you for being with us today to help us keep the word of your parents and all the witnesses.
Pierre François, we had the honor of welcoming your parents here before their transfer to the Pantheon, a ceremony so moving for our country. For all of us, with Simone, these are all the victims of the Shoah who have entered the Pantheon.
She was among the most committed to creating the Shoah Memory Foundation, which she chaired for many years. She sat on the Board of Directors of the Memorial for more than 25 years, bringing us all her intelligence, energy, strength of conviction and enthusiasm that made us forget the difficulties of everyday life.
However, we cannot ignore his political career and his many struggles for human rights, especially for women.
Dear Léah, your father, Samuel Pisar, is a particularly striking model: deported as a child, while your grandfather, David, your grandmother, and your aunt Frida disappeared in the turmoil, he experienced the horror
In 2007, in an interview he said, I quote: "Today, as a survivor of the survivors, I feel an obligation to pass on the few truths that I learned during my time in the depths of the human condition, and then on some of its peaks. No one can experience what I have experienced without feeling the need to alert new generations to the dangers that can destroy their universe, as they once destroyed mine."
Our exhibition will leave a mark, no doubt: it gives the floor to witnesses, it brings them back to life by delivering their testimonies audible throughout the journey. With it, we measure this form of eternity that their stories have built, so that the memory of the Shoah is not lost.
In doing so, these witnesses are faithful to the oath they have made many times to their comrades who, sensing death approaching, urged them "you will tell, you will bear witness". These survivors struggled body and soul to survive and to keep this commitment.
The Shoah Memorial offers a symbolic burial place to millions of men and women, victims terrorized and then exterminated. It is by thinking of them every day that the Memorial pursues its mission.
The exhibition first explains how this term of witness was gradually used. The word itself appeared quite late. At the end of the war, those who returned were not named; there was no name for them. Then, the words "deportees", "survivors" and "survivors" were used.
It was only when we began to truly listen to their stories, in the 1960s, with the great trials of Nazi criminals, that the word "witnesses" emerged. The term therefore comes explicitly from the legal field: the witness attests, certifies. His act is of the order of evidence, as much as testimony. Through documents, audiovisual archives and unpublished manuscripts, the exhibition retraces the journey of these testimonies.
They begin with the first manuscripts buried at Birkenau in 1942 by Jewish prisoners from the Sonderkommandos enlisted in the most atrocious tasks.
These written testimonies that were miraculously found, as well as those buried in the Warsaw ghetto, are all the more poignant because they were written by people who knew perfectly well that they were soon promised certain death.
Our exhibition gives its place, its importance to the voice. The voice of witnesses, the voice of survivors. Their voice remains, beyond them, and will be heard in the future.
It is this initial idea that gave meaning to the exhibition we are inaugurating today and which gives it its title, "the voice of witnesses". For the witnesses have spoken, and what they left us is an answer to this legitimate question of the means we will have, after their disappearance, to transmit history.
We have chosen to organize the opportunity to listen to six great witnesses who have marked our collective memory through their work or commitment: Primo Levi, whose first translated interview with RAI where he spoke upon his return to Auschwitz, Simone Veil, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertesz, Aharon Appelfeld and Samuel Pisar.
You will be able to hear them, and you will see that their very real voice is also a major symbolic voice, the illustration of a fight that must constantly be waged.
Through them, what we hear is the need to never lower our vigilance, to fight tirelessly for the victims, for the survivors, for us and for our descendants. The world today reminds us of this every day. Multiple conflicts, which always feed on the hatred of others, are numerous on the planet.
In our societies there are obvious signs of intolerance, of rejection of differences, which translate into repeated violence. We understand that these signs can be the precursors of it. By recalling it, we try to avoid the unbearable reproduction of history.
But in this exhibition, we wanted to project ourselves into the future, and you will see eight testimonies from the "generation of again and after". We met a historian, a comic book author, a novelist, a visual artist, a filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, a photographer, and a Franco-German journalist.
They are between 29 and 56 years old, and share the common desire to "pass on the witness", to widely disseminate these words and these diverse experiences, but which will equip future generations to fight against all hatred, fascism, contempt of others.
We will multiply during this year the meetings with the witnesses and they will try to make feel the unimaginable, the incomprehensible, the most absolute anguish and the psychic, moral, physical annihilation which suffered the deportees.
This exhibition will not leave its visitors unscathed. Elie Wiesel often repeated at the end of his life: "He who listens to a witness becomes one in turn." Will visiting this exhibition make us witnesses? I sincerely hope so.
We must thank all those who participated, especially Léa Veinstein, scientific curator of the exhibition, who brilliantly developed and designed "the voice of witnesses". His work is remarkable and particularly moving and educational.
I would also like to thank the INA, which has opened its exceptional visual audio archives to us.
Allow me to make a slight digression to thank the teams of the Memorial, their Director Jacques Fredj, their executives and the whole team, Sophie Nagiscarde and Lucile Lignon who are working hard to preserve this story for eternity. All continue tirelessly our work of transmission and education, both on the history of genocides and on the consequences of antisemitism and intolerance.
The recent developments in teacher training and education in difficult neighborhoods, where young people are often exposed to racist, brutally anti-Semitic propaganda, is remarkable.
Today, nearly 100,000 young people at the Memorial or in their own establishments take ownership of our message of tolerance and warn them against these nauseating propaganda. We are also training more than 6,000 teachers from all the academies in France so that they can better resist student interpellations, especially those that are the most brutal, denialist, anti-Semitic or conspiratorial.
I will conclude my remarks by once again thanking Léah Pisar and Pierre François Veil, who will speak shortly in their presence today, and by recalling our determination to continue fighting against all intolerances and for our freedom, because I leave the last word to Chateaubriand "without freedom, there is nothing in the world".
How moving and sad it is to be here today.
Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz... and look at the world around us. At the dawn of this new decade, where conflicts are threatening on all sides, where extremist regimes are stirring, where economic uncertainty is expressed in the streets, can we still learn the lessons of this bloody past? Or are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes?
The gradual disappearance of the last survivors of Hitler’s Final Solution signals the twilight of an era. It fills me with a deep sadness, mixed with anxiety.
A concern that, as my father said, one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Dachau and Majdanek:
«After us, history will speak, at best, with the impersonal voice of academics and novelists; at worst with the malevolent voice of demagogues and falsifiers. We must continue to pass on the legacy of martyrs to all humanity.”
Today it is up to us, their children, their friends, their disciples, to take up their torch again, to carry their message, to transmit their testimony. To be vigilant.
Not just to recount their tragic pasts, but to warn future generations against the fanaticism, hatred and violence that threaten to destroy our universe as they once destroyed theirs.
This process has already started.
We cannot sit idly by while anti-Semitism manifests itself in ways that are both obvious and insidious. Hate crimes, violence, Holocaust denial, vitriolic slurs and desecration – in Europe, America ... and elsewhere. In our increasingly confused world, contaminated by
Tomorrow, when the international community gathers in Auschwitz to commemorate the greatest catastrophe ever perpetrated by man against man, our leaders, elected officials, law enforcement agencies and media would do well to reflect on the lessons of the Holocaust, which remain painfully contemporary and universal. The only long-term remedy is transmission and education. I would like to commend the remarkable educational work of the Memorial, particularly in the field of training. What you do, dear Jacques, is vital, and must continue with greater vigor. Let us hope, then, that the international community emerges from this brief period of mourning with a tangible determination to follow and sustain your commitment to make the voices of these witnesses resound loudly. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a call to action. Each of us must do our part to help with this duty of vigilance and transmission. Of course for me, as for almost everyone here, all this is deeply personal. When my father left us four years ago, my deep sadness quickly gave way to the realization that I could not remain idle. I feel a visceral duty to help fight against this rise of intolerance, of violence against my own people and against other peoples. To make his message and that of his deported brothers and sisters resonate. But with my own voice. I consider myself, humbly, part of a new generation of torchbearers. Elie Wiesel says that by listening to a witness, one becomes a witness oneself.
Well, I spent my formative years listening to and reading Elie Wiesel, Simone Veil, Marceline Loridan and, of course, my father. I have a very strong feeling that he wanted my sisters, my brother, and me, and our children to participate in this transmission.
Let me end on a personal note:
I have a son, Jeremiah, who is five years old. He came into the world under difficult circumstances – he lost his father before he was born, then he lost his only grandfather at the age of 6 months. When I look at this funny, lively, joyful and mischievous child, I often have to suppress tears wondering what I am going to tell him about his grandparents – who each survived the war in different ways – and what will become of his world. What role will he play in this? How can we teach him to do what is right, without placing too heavy a burden on his young shoulders? Curiously, the answer is simple, and I think it’s relevant for all of us: there is no choice. No matter how difficult the world may be, we have an obligation to be vigilant, to teach our children to stand up for what is right ... And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what brings us here today. So, seventy-five years later, let us all commit ourselves to making the eloquent and profound voices of these witnesses echo, whose warnings are, alas, increasingly relevant.
