Statement on Presenting 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 succeeded 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— r 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 |