Find all the speeches by Leah Pisar and Eric de Rothschild given on the occasion of the inauguration of our exhibition "La voix des témoins" this Sunday, January 26, 2020
Speech by Eric de Rotschild
Ladies and gentlemen,
The Shoah Memorial, in this 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, continues his work: documenting and explaining how Nazi barbarism hit Europe in the middle of the last century and so that no one can ever say he has forgotten or could not know.
We are inaugurating today an important and – for me, particularly significant exhibition. Indeed, it embraces all that is and makes the greatness 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 listening 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 a close cooperation between historians, archivists and witnesses.
The witnesses made this house theirs. They give it a soul, a flame, which humanize and rehumanize 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 to them with respect, recognition 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 perpetuate 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 the creation of the Shoah Memory Foundation, which she chaired for many years. She sat on the Memorial’s Board of Directors for more than 25 years, bringing us all her intelligence, her energy, her strength of conviction and her enthusiasm that made us forget the difficulties of everyday life.
However, we cannot ignore his political background and his numerous fights for human rights, particularly 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 of three extermination camps: Majdanek, Auschwitz then Dachau. Released at 16, he was one of the youngest survivors of the Shoah. He will be a tireless actor in actions commemorating the Shoah.
In 2007, in an interview he stated, and I quote: "Today, as a survivor of the survivors, I feel an obligation to convey the few truths that I learned during my time in the depths of the human condition, 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 the witnesses, it brings them back to life by delivering their audible testimonies 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 made many times to their comrades who, feeling the approaching death, urged them "you will tell, you will testify". These survivors struggled body and soul to survive and to keep this commitment.
The Shoah Memorial offers a symbolic burial place to these millions of men and women, to these victims terrorized then exterminated. It is by thinking of them every day that the Memorial continues its mission.
The exhibition first explains to us 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, we had no name for them. Then, the words 'deportees', '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 we saw the emergence of the word «witnesses». The term therefore comes explicitly from the legal field: the witness certifies, certifies. His act is in the order of evidence, as much as testimony. Through documents, audiovisual archives, or even unpublished manuscripts, the exhibition traces the journey of these testimonies.
They begin with the first manuscripts buried in Birkenau as early as 1942 by the Jewish prisoners of 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 full well that they were quickly promised a certain death.
Our exhibition gives all its place, all 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 convey the story.
We have chosen to organize the possibility of listening to six great witnesses, who have marked our collective memory by their work or their commitment: Primo Levi, whose translated for the first time an interview at RAI where he speaks 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 fought.
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 current world reminds us of it 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 and rejection of differences, which translate into repeated violence. We understand that these signs can be the precursors. 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 of the "generation after". We met a historian, a comic book author, a novelist, a visual artist, a filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, a photographer, 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 diverse words and experiences, but which will arm future generations to fight against all hatreds, fascism, contempt for 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 the deportees underwent.
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 so in turn." Will visiting this exhibition make us witnesses? I sincerely hope so.
We must thank all those who participated, and 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 particularly opened its exceptional audio visual 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 work hard in order 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 neighbourhoods, where young people are often targeted by racist propaganda, brutally anti-Semitic, is remarkable.
Today, nearly 100,000 young people at the Memorial or in their own establishments appropriate our message of tolerance and warn them against these nauseating propaganda. We also train more than 6,000 teachers from all the academies of France so that they can better resist student interpellations, especially those which are the most brutal, denial, antisemitic or conspiracy-minded.
I will conclude my remarks by thanking once again Léah Pisar and Pierre François Veil who are going to speak in a moment of their presence today, and by recalling our determination to continue fighting against all intolerances and for our freedom, because I leave the final word to Chateaubriand "without freedom, there is nothing in the world".
Speech by Leah Pisar
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 threaten from all sides, where extremist regimes stir up, where economic uncertainty is expressed in the streets, can we still draw lessons from 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 concern.
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 malicious 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, to carry their message, to convey their testimony. To be vigilant.
Not just to tell their tragic past, but to warn future generations against 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 antisemitism manifests itself in both obvious and insidious ways. Hate crimes, violence, Holocaust denial, insults to vitriol and profanation – in Europe, America ... and elsewhere. In our increasingly confused world, contaminated by fake news, what divides us is unfortunately starting to take precedence over what brings us together. The frenzy, hysteria, hatred and violence that are exacerbated by social media carry strange echoes of the 1930s. The consequences are felt at local and planetary levels. Five years after the Hyper Kosher and Charlie Hebdo, as synagogues and mosques are targeted from Halle, Germany to Christchurch, New Zealand; while echoes from Charlottesville continue to echo across states-United; as the list of incubators for terrorism grows across the Sahel and the Levant, each of us can fear for our safety and that of our children. We can worry about levels of ignorance and ambivalence about the Holocaust. A new study from the Claims Conference looks at France, and the conclusions are alarming.
Tomorrow, when the international community gathers at Auschwitz, in commemoration of the greatest catastrophe ever perpetrated by man against man, our leaders, our elected officials, our law enforcement officers and our 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 pedagogical work of the Memorial, particularly in the field of training. What you do, dear Jacques, is vital, and must continue even more. So let’s hope that the international community will emerge from this brief period of mourning with a tangible determination – to follow and support your commitment to make the voices of these witnesses resonate loudly. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a call to action. Each of us must do our part to help in this duty of vigilance and transmission. Of course for me, as for just about 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 resonate his message and that of his deported brothers and sisters. But with my own voice. I consider myself, humbly, as part of a new generation of torchbearers. Elie Wiesel saying 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. He came into the world under difficult circumstances – he lost his father before birth, then he lost his only grandfather, at the age of 6 months. When I look at this funny, lively, cheerful and mischievous child, I often have to suppress tears, wondering what I will 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? How to 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 is relevant for each of us: there is no choice. No matter how difficult the world, 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 each commit to making resonate the eloquent and profound voices of these witnesses, whose warnings are unfortunately more and more current.
