Seminar of the European Ministers of Education “Teaching remembrance through cultural heritage”. Cracow and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland. 4 - 6 May 2005.

 

Opening address by Gabriele Mazza, Director of  school, out-of-school and higher education, Council of Europe

 

Sixty years ago the defeat of Nazi Germany left Europe badly scarred, in its flesh and in its soul. The Europe of the Enlightenment and the ideals of tolerance, freedom and equality had become a charnel house. The atrocities of the First World War had been followed by the ignominy of the extermination camps: all the evil man can do to man was done there, in a European geography of horror that bears the names Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka and so on. The shining names of Vienna, Paris, Dresden, Prague or St-Petersburg disappeared from the horizon; some were even physically wiped off the map. This barbaric Europe had its capital: Auschwitz. Not until the camp was liberated did people begin to perceive the unthinkable magnitude of the murders perpetrated there on an industrial scale.

 

Henceforth our world would have to learn to live with these names. Mankind had been indelibly branded, well beyond the millions of victims. Our language and vision had been forever changed, words like "gas", "goods train", "traditional Jewish life in East Europe ", "ghetto", now had a taste of ashes we would never be able to wash away.

 

Scars and slashes are the heritage we can neither ignore nor refuse. A European heritage we must assume resolutely, prefer as we might never to have known that Europe of fire and blood.

 

All men of peace and goodwill wish never to experience it again, but wishing is not enough. The future belongs not to men who wish but to men of action and determination. We must strive to understand what happened, ask the question why and how, closely scrutinise the complex chain of small humiliations and insults, the outrages and vexations that laid the bed for the planned destruction of millions of human beings and laid waste a thriving culture with its poets, its theatre, its language.

 

To focus on the heritage dimension of the disaster by no means relegates the disappearance of so many millions of men and women to a negligible or secondary place. It surpasses their disappearance, giving them a new voice, a new existence. It shows that they bore within them something indestructible, the thread the executioner cannot cut, the thread we will not let him cut. We want to show this cultural heritage, music and language, not as in a museum but through its close interaction with other cultures which are alive and thriving today. The past which does not pass is the past that slots in with the present and opens up to the future. Over the next few days we will be discussing how to pass on the memory and how to teach the younger generations more and better about the Shoah, and how to prevent the nightmare from ever happening again.

The heritage certainly has a role to play in this undertaking and the Council of Europe has played a pioneering role in the field for over 15 years, closely allying culture and education.

Numerous countries of Europe have understood this and are supporting the Convention on the value of heritage for society.

Beyond the white or grey stones and the writings, the heritage is the silent witness, the succinct expression of our values, knowledge, creation, traditions and the like. What we need to do is to draw this witness out of its silence, make it speak again as it accompanies us in our daily round in the form of the tune we hum or that house in the street we cross every day.

This increased attention to all those things that are so easily forgotten in our everyday lives is an essential contribution to progress in the interreligious and intercultural dialogue in which the future of our world lies.

The Council of Europe has made this its quest, from one meeting to the next, closely knitting a relationship between our countries on this crucial issue. That is how the idea was born of a day devoted in every country to teaching about the Shoah, and we are pleased to see that every year more countries take up this fine and necessary idea. Each of our colloquies (Paris, Vilnius, Donaueschingen, Brussels and Budapest) is another step forward, aimed at enriching our forms of education in the face of different audiences. It is an immense and difficult task: the events are already disappearing over the horizon with the last eye witnesses, so we need to be even more vigilant against the poison of revisionism. We know it well, and it is the very meaning of our presence here in Cracow today: the passing of the torch from eye witnesses to historians is a crucial moment. What transpired is thick and heavy with suffering, not just immediate, but long-term suffering. For all those who survived (and how few they were) the mark will never wash off. And now, under their very eyes, their story is disputed, portrayed as a myth, and soon Hitler will join Attila and Nero, just another figure in a bestiary of horror.

 

Our ambition is to make the link: not so that everyone, at every moment, relives the pain and torture of the extermination. That would be impossible, and somewhat morbid and perverse. No. It is a matter of making people understand how important it is to pay attention to any form of intolerance, to crush and wipe it out immediately. There is no innocent, harmless vexation or humiliation. Evil must always be nipped in the bud, for later, as the Cardinal of Munich said, is already too late

 

It only remains for me, on behalf of our Secretary General, Terry Davis, to thank you all for being willing and ready for this effort, and in particular our Polish hosts. Allow me to welcome the presence of two personalities in particular: Marek Edelmann, the last surviving leader of the Ghetto uprising, a Polish Jew whose ideas are not always in line with institutional thinking, and a kingpin of the museum of the Shoah which the Polish authorities are building today, and Cardinal Lustiger, who is doing us the honour of opening our colloquy: a Cardinal and, until recently Archbishop of Paris, of Polish and Jewish origin, who in childhood experienced persecution and the loss of those dear to him in the camps: who better to spread the word of the last century on the kerygma of evil that is Auschwitz? You were here on 27 January, bearing the message of the Church and the Pope; this time you will be speaking in your own name, with a spiritual message which can only be the same, but also with a more personal, more private message.

 

Our colloquy is neither a culmination nor a conclusion. It is but a step on the road we are tracing with patience and conviction, a road that leads to a more caring, more united world. And the Council of Europe has no other ambition than to be a modest ally of all those nations, all those men of good will, who are convinced of the need for and the urgency of this enterprise.