"O' that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night, for the slain of the daughter of my people."
We stand here tonight, in painful silence at Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day. Exactly seventy years since April 15th 1945, a Sunday afternoon. The day when the first British soldiers crossed the gates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The joy of liberation was replaced by horror. The horror that was revealed before their eyes was inconceivable. In the camp, lay thousands of bodies. In March 1945alone - a few weeks before the camp was liberated - eighteen thousand, one hundred and sixty-eight people died at Bergen-Belsen ; most of them Jews, men, women and children, some of them nameless. Fourteen thousand people died of hunger and disease during the first five days after the camp's liberation. In the barracks were sixty thousand men and women, most of them sick, in a serious condition. They could not move. They lay in the bunks, starving, thirsty, exhausted and sick. The living dead. Their families were murdered, burned, slaughtered, or disappeared. They lost everything. Each was sure they were ‘The Last Jew’. Their return to life seemed impossible at the time. They needed to create a new existence for themselves. To fill their empty bodies with the human spirit, instill their arteries once more with the desire for life, the ability to love, rejoice, and to renew their hope. How would those stumbling legs know how to walk once more? How would the bent over bodies, succeed in standing up straight? How dare the mind dream, there, in the midst of the destruction? To look out of the dark into the future. To look forward.
Uri Zvi Greenberg came to Israel two weeks after the war broke out. He, who lost his entire family in the Holocaust, wrote the following words : “So they went rattling, in shuttered carriages, Jews consumed by the furnaces – crowded together. And between them and us then, an entire sea’s distance, and the ability to forget the contact strip affixed between souls, billions of miles apart. The rattle of wheels, and night, that has no dawn to exit, the journey of speeding night.” So he wrote.
I was born in Jerusalem in the month when the Second World War began. When the bolt to the gates of the death camps were opened - Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Chelmno and Majdanek, my friends and I here, we made our way to the first grade. The distance was so great, as it is today. An entire sea between Jerusalem and the killing pits of Babi Yar. Between Tel Aviv and the death marches. From Dora-Nordhausen to the selections. The round-up of local Jews. The transports. The hunger and cold. The horror and despair. I remember the first survivors arriving in the city of Jerusalem. Bit by bit, we were exposed to the face and magnitude of the horror. A new neighbor appeared suddenly; a teacher; a distant cousin, sad Jews muttering the Mourner's Kaddish for an entire town. Anxious for any scrap of information, weaving wiry memories and longing. I remember lone soldiers we met in the army, the last descendants ; Freddie, who came from Hungary - and to this day I do not know his family name - three days, after arriving and being taken in by our neighbors, went off to war never to return. Slowly they began piecing together a mosaic of chilling testimonies, about a world that once was, and shall never return. We saw for the first time the tattooed number on their arms. At first we thought they were mad. Slowly we realized, that it was the world that had gone mad.
Dear friends. For seventy years we have, all of us, native and non-native-born, old and young, from east and west, been in a constant and unceasing tension between the past and future. Holocaust and rebirth. Not just today, but every day, we walk the depths of the valley, extruded between two mountains. This mountain of memorial and remembrance, on one side and the mountain of revival and vision on the other. From where loud and varied cries emanate, sometimes contradicting one another. The mountain of memory, commands us, the Jewish people, to remember. Remember the sounds. Remember the sights. Remember the names. And yet the mountain of vision and rebirth, of construction and creation, calls on us to look ahead, and step into the future. Continuing to build a magnificent country, continuing to strive to construct another world, a safe world, full of promise - for us and for future generations.
My brothers and sisters, Holocaust survivors, heroes of revival. During this uneasy journey, you have been our 'Pillar of Fire' before the camp. You - who found the strength to shake off the ashes of the crematoria, and the soil drenched with tears and blood - have instructed us to select the path of life, and realize a vision. You, who have loved and laughed, who have planted an orchard, have built a national home, as well as private homes. You have guided the entire nation. Today, seventy years after the liberation of the death camps, we stand before you and we swear an oath, and promise, 'All of us, each and every one of us, have a number tattooed on their arm'. Yet, at the same time and in the same breath we remember : we came from Auschwitz, not because of Auschwitz. We cannot let the pogroms, the bellowing smoke of the crematoria blind us or blur our abilities to recognize our past, our identity, our heritage - which are stronger than those who with destroy us. The Holocaust is our lowest point, the most dreadful, in Jewish history. The moment of horror for all humanity, but the Jewish journey does not begin with it, just as it does not end with it. The Jewish journey begins in the Land of Israel, and it is here that it always strives to return. There are those who mistakenly think that the State of Israel is some form of compensation for the Holocaust. There is no greater mistake. The State of Israel is not a compensation for the Holocaust. The State of Israel was established, in its own right, out of a love and longing for an ancient homeland, by virtue of a dream that came true, a dream that became a reality. Not out of the fear of extinction or out of hatred of the other.
Four months ago, I stood in Poland, whose earth is soaked in blood, and I said that the State of Israel will forever deplore Auschwitz, and everything it symbolizes: anti-Semitism in all its forms and manifestations; The desecration of human dignity, whoever and wherever it is found, the desecration of that which was created in the image of God. The State of Israel, will continue its struggle against these and will not surrender. We build our future here, with open and alert eyes. We will not belittle any threats. Nor belittle, shameful statements calling for the extinction of the Jewish people. Yet, while we are prepared, we are not scared. The horrors of the past and the threats of the present, will not dictate our lives, nor shape the lives of our children. They will not dim our hopes for a future of creation and prosperity.
My brothers and sisters, Holocaust survivors. We will continue to walk in the spirit in which you led us for seventy years. We will continue to impart the memory of the Holocaust, from generation to generation, as it is tattooed into our flesh, but will not determine our future. We will build our future as a free nation. A nation which draws its power and vitality, from three thousand years - forged in the vision of the Prophets of Israel, out of the treasured soul of the generations of rabbis, sages, poets, and philosophers of our nation. As a nation, which sees itself as an integral part of the family of nations, as a Jewish and democratic state - democratic and Jewish.
Friends, on 13 November, 1941 , Etty Hillesum, the young intellectual was murdered.
Shortly before she was sent on the freight trains from the Netherlands to her death, she wrote: "If we are incapable of offering the impoverished world after the war, nothing but our bodies, and a new meaning, which stems from our plight and angst, it won’t be enough. From the camps themselves, new thoughts must project forward and a new understanding needs to shed new light on our wire fences.” As the years pass, we must take on the moral imperative, to fight for commemoration and memory, but also for the dream of the victims and survivors. Their dream of building a society, a better society, a more inclusive society, a more compassionate society. A society whose strength is in its human spirit, and it's creativity. May the memory, of our brothers and sisters, be engraved on our hearts forever. May their memories be blessed.
