Statement on Awarding the Congressional Gold Medal
to Elie Wiesel
(April 19, 1985)
The
President. I'm pleased that each of you could
be with us today to celebrate Jewish Heritage Week. We recall today
the great accomplishments in science, philosophy, literature, art, and
music made throughout history by the Jewish people. And we remember
that it is the spiritual and moral values of Judaism which encompass
the dream of peace and human dignity that has enabled the Jewish people
-- and ennobled the Jewish people, I should say, and through them, their
fellow men.
Throughout the world, the Jewish people have just finished celebrating
Passover, the holiday that marks the exodus from Egypt, the deliverance
from slavery.
But this week, we commemorate a nondeliverance, a time when exodus
was refused, when the doors of refuge were closed, and in their place
came death. In the Passover narrative, the Haggadah, there is the phrase,
``In every generation, they rise up against us to annihilate us.'' In
the generation of the Holocaust, that annihilation nearly succeded in
Europe; 6 million murdered, among them, over a million children.
How does life continue in the face of this crime against humanity?
The survivors swore their oath: Never again. And the American people
also made that pledge: Never again. And we've kept it. We kept it when
we supported the establishment of the state of Israel, the refuge that
the Jewish people lacked during the Holocaust, the dream of generations,
the sure sign of God's hand in history. America will never waver in
our support for that nation to which our ties of faith are unbreakable.
To say ``never again,'' however, is not enough. When, with Israel,
the United States reached out to help save Ethiopian Jewry, we were
also fulfilling our pledge. This was truly God's work.
Today we work on and on to help Soviet Jewry, which suffers from persecution,
intimidation, and imprisonment within Soviet borders. We will never
relinquish our hope for their freedom, and we will never cease to work
for it. If the Soviet Union truly wants peace, truly wants friendship,
then let them release Anatoly Shcharanskiy and free Soviet Jewry.
But our pledge was more than ``Never again.'' It was also ``Never forget.''
And we've kept that pledge, too. We kept that pledge when we established
the Holocaust Memorial Commission and set the cornerstone for its museum.
We keep that pledge when, in our colleges and universities, we teach
each new generation of Americans the story of the Holocaust. And in
our lives, we keep that pledge when we privately, in our own families
and in our hearts, remember.
From the ashes of the Holocaust emerged the miracle of Israel and another
miracle, that the survivors began life again. They came to new lands,
many to Israel and many, thank God, to America. They built new families
and with each child gave us the greatest symbol of this faith in the
future. They brought to us the eloquence of a people who, in surviving
such suffering, asked only for the right to remember and be remembered,
a people who did not permit themselves to descend into the pits and
quagmires of hatred but lifted themselves instead -- and with them all
of humankind -- out of darkness up toward a time when hatred is no more
and all nations and all people are as one.
We who had not suffered the tragedy of the Holocaust directly shared
their grief and mourned for their victims. We, too, prayed for a better
future and a better world, where all peoples and all nations would come
together in peace and defense of humanity.
Today, there is a spirit of reconciliation between the peoples of the
allied nations and the people of Germany and even between the soldiers
who fought each other on the battlefields of Europe. That spirit must
grow and be strengthened.
As the people of Europe rebuilt their shattered lands, the survivors
rebuilt their shattered lives, and they did so despite the searing pain.
And we who are their fellow citizens have taken up their memories and
tried to learn from them what we must do. No one has taught us more
than Elie
Wiesel. His life stands as a symbol; his life is testimony
that the human spirit endures and prevails. Memory can fail us, for
it can fade as the generations change. But Elie Wiesel has helped make
the memory of the Holocaust eternal by preserving the story of the 6
million Jews in his works. Like the Prophets whose words guide to this
day, his works will teach humanity timeless lessons. He teaches about
despair but also about hope. He teaches about our capacity to do evil
but also about the possibility of courage and resistance and about our
capacity to sacrifice for a higher good. He teaches about death. But
in the end, he teaches about life.
Elie, we present you with this medal as an expression of our gratitude
for your life's work.
[At this point the President presented Elie Wiesel with the Congressional
Gold Medal.]
In honoring Elie Wiesel, we thank him for a life that's dedicated to
others. We pledge that he will never forget -- or that we will never
forget that in many places of the world, the cancer of anti-Semitism
still exists. Beyond our fervent hopes and our anguished remembrance,
we must not forget our duty to those who perished, our duty to bring
justice to those who perpetrated unspeakable deeds. And we must take
action to root out the vestiges of anti-Semitism in America, to quash
the violence-prone or hate groups even before they can spread their
venom and destruction. And let all of us, Jew and non-Jew alike, pledge
ourselves today to the life of the Jewish dream: to a time when war
is no more, when all nations live in peace, when each man, woman, and
child lives in the dignity that God intended.
On behalf of your fellow citizens, now let me sign this proclamation
commemorating Jewish Heritage Week.
Mr.
Wiesel. First, give this medal to my son.
Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, Secretary Bennett, Mr. Agresto,
Mr. Regan, very distinguished members of the Senate, my friends -- and
of the House:
Mr. President, speaking of reconciliation, I was very pleased that
we met before so a stage of reconciliation has been set in motion between
us. But then we were never on two sides; we were on the same side. We
were always on the side of justice, always on the side of memory, against
the SS, and against what they represent.
It was good talking to you, and I'm grateful to you for the medal.
But this medal is not mine alone. It belongs to all those who remember
what SS killers have done to their victims. It was given to me by the
American people for my writings, teaching, and for my testimony.
When I write, I feel my invisible teachers standing over my shoulders,
reading my words and judging their veracity. And while I feel responsible
for the living, I feel equally responsible to the dead. Their memory
dwells in my memory.
Forty years ago, a young man awoke, and he found himself an orphan
in an orphaned world. What have I learned in the last 40 years -- small
things. I learned the perils of language and those of silence. I learned
that in extreme situations when human lives and dignity are at stake,
neutrality is a sin. It helps the killers not the victims. I learned
the meaning of solitude, Mr. President. We were alone, desperately alone.
Today is April 19th, and April 19, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto rose in arms
against the onslaught of the Nazis. They were so few and so young and
so helpless, and nobody came to their help. And they had to fight what
was then the mightiest legion in Europe. Every underground received
help, except the Jewish underground. And yet, they managed to fight
and resist and push back those Nazis and their accomplices for 6 weeks.
And yet, the leaders of the free world, Mr. President, knew everything
and did so little or nothing or at least nothing specifically to save
Jewish children from death.
You spoke of Jewish children, Mr. President; one million Jewish children
perished. If I spent my entire life reciting their names, I would die
before finishing the task. Mr. President, I have seen children -- I
have seen them being thrown in the flames alive. Words -- they die on
my lips.
So, I have learned. I have learned, I have learned the fragility of
the human condition. And I'm reminded of a great moral essayist, the
gentle and forceful Abe Rosenthal, having visited Auschwitz once wrote
an extraordinary reportage about the persecution of Jews, and he called
it, ``Forgive them not Father, for they knew what they did.''
I have learned that the Holocaust was a unique and uniquely Jewish
event, albeit with universal implications. Not all victims were Jews,
but all Jews were victims. I have learned the danger of indifference,
the crime of indifference. For the opposite of love, I have learned,
is not hate but indifference. Jews were killed by the enemy but betrayed
by their so-called allies who found political reasons to justify their
indifference or passivity.
But I've also learned that suffering confers no privileges. It all
depends what one does with it. And this is why survivors of whom you
spoke, Mr. President, have tried to teach their contemporaries how to
build on ruins, how to invent hope in a world that offers none, how
to proclaim faith to a generation that has seen it shamed and mutilated.
And I believe, we believe, that memory is the answer -- perhaps the
only answer.
A few days ago on the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald,
all of us Americans watched with dismay and anger as the Soviet Union
and East Germany distorted both past and present history. Mr. President,
I was there; I was there when American liberators arrived, and they
gave us back our lives. And what I felt for them then nourishes me to
the end of my days, and will do so. If you only knew what we tried to
do with them then, we who were so weak that we couldn't carry our own
lives -- we tried to carry them in triumph!
Mr. President, we are grateful to the American Army for liberating
us. We are grateful to this country -- the greatest democracy in the
world, the freest nation in the world, the moral nation, the authority
in the world. And we are grateful especially to this country for having
offered haven and refuge and grateful to its leadership for being so
friendly to Israel.
Mr. President, do you know that the Ambassador of Israel, who sits
next to you, who is my friend and has been for so many years, is himself
a survivor? And if you knew all the causes we fought together for the
last 30 years, you could be prouder of him. And we are proud of him.
And we are grateful, of course, to Israel; we are eternally grateful
to Israel for existing. We needed Israel in 1948 as we need it now.
And we are grateful to Congress for its continuous philosophy of humanism
and compassion for the underprivileged.
And as for yourself, Mr. President, we are so grateful to you for being
a friend of the Jewish people, for trying to help the oppressed Jews
in the Soviet Union and to do whatever we can to save Shcharanskiy and
Abe Stolyar and Iosif Begun and Sakharov and all the dissidents who
need freedom. And of course, we thank you for your support of the Jewish
state of Israel.
But, Mr. President, I wouldn't be the person I am, and you wouldn't
respect me for what I am, if I were not to tell you also of the sadness
that is in my heart for what happened during the last week. And I am
sure that you, too, are sad for the same reasons. What can I do? I belong
to a traumatized generation. And to us, as to you, symbols are important.
And furthermore, following our ancient tradition -- and we are speaking
about Jewish heritage -- our tradition commands us, quote: ``to speak
truth to power.''
So may I speak to you, Mr. President, with respect and admiration,
of the events that happened. We have met four or five times, and each
time I came away enriched, for I know of your commitment to humanity.
And, therefore, I am convinced, as you have told us earlier when we
spoke that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg
cemetery. Of course, you didn't know. But now we all are aware. May
I, Mr. President, if it's possible at all, implore you to do something
else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place,
Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of
the SS.
Oh, we know there are political and strategic reasons, but this issue,
as all issues related to that awesome event, transcends politics and
diplomacy. The issue here is not politics but good and evil. And we
must never confuse them, for I have seen the SS at work, and I have
seen their victims. They were my friends. They were my parents. Mr.
President, there was a degree of suffering and loneliness in the concentration
camps that defies imagination. Cut off from the world with no refuge
anywhere; sons watched helplessly their fathers being beaten to death;
mothers watched their children die of hunger. And then there was Mengele
and his selections, terror, fear, isolation, torture, gas chambers,
flames -- flames rising to the heavens.
But, Mr. President, I know and I understand, we all do, that you seek
reconciliation. So do I. So do we. And I, too, wish to attain true reconciliation
with the German people. I do not believe in collective guilt, nor in
collective responsibility; only the killers were guilty. Their sons
and daughters are not. And I believe, Mr. President, that we can and
we must work together with them and with all people. And we must work
to bring peace and understanding to a tormented world that, as you know,
is still awaiting redemption.
I thank you, Mr. President.
Sources: Public Papers of the President |