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

 

Contribution of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger

Krakow, 4th May 2005

 

 

When I started secondary school I started to learn German. In 1936 and again in 1937 my father sent me to spend a month of the summer holidays with a German family he knew were anti-Nazi. That is how I discovered Nazi Germany, through the eyes and with the intelligence of a ten-year-old boy. I played with the German family’s children, who were a few years older than I. Like most young Germans, they were enrolled in the Hitlerian Youth. Their parents were teachers, so they were dependent on the authorities. I soon realised that the parents avoided talking in front of the children about anything to do with the National Socialist Party. The parents knew I was Jewish, but the children didn’t. My father had strongly recommended me to keep quiet about it.

 

So I saw the anti-Jewish propaganda, horrible and cruel, that was displayed everywhere on posters, in newspapers and by any other available means. One day the younger of the boys, very proud of his Hitlerian Youth uniform, said to me, showing me the knife on his belt: “We will kill all the Jews”. From that moment on I knew what they intended to do, and I was sure that if they could, they would.

 

At school in Paris, our German teacher taught us to love the humanism of the German culture, while clearly putting us on our guard against the lies of Nazi propaganda. My teachers and my family instilled in me the ideal of the highest respect for man, particularly the poor and suffering. I had the utmost faith in France, the land of freedom and human rights, and in its military superiority over Germany, so I was not too alarmed about this mass murder scheme. But it did raise a question I couldn’t answer: how could a cultivated people like the Germans descend into such depths of barbarity? For when the anti-Jewish propaganda of the Nazis hit me full in the face, I knew full well that they were lying. So how could civilised men want to exterminate a group of their own kind for no reason? It was one of my unanswered questions about suffering and evil and the fate of the Jewish people.

 

* * *

 

Two years later, war broke out. In August 1940 France capitulated. I knew that the Nazis would now execute the plan I had learnt of 4 years earlier. Few people around me wanted to believe me, not even my parents, such was their faith in France. Then came the terrible years when we had to hide, find forged papers, the years of shame, humiliation and misery.  The arrests, the camp at Drancy, the deportation, when my mother disappeared, the going into hiding. Public order now lay in the distinction between two classes of people, Aryans and Jews, the latter having no rights, for they were inferior beings, condemned to death by the race of supermen.

 

During these years of Nazi occupation, I discovered courage and cowardice, generosity and selfishness, unconditional friendship and the unspeakable hate that encouraged denunciation, revenge, stealing and so on. The same question that haunted me when I was 10 years old came back with a new twist: why the Jews?

Deep down I already suspected I knew the answer. This was how I saw it: the Jewish people, whatever the qualities and shortcomings of each of its members, is the bearer of a message that concerns the essence of human dignity. The Jewish people owes its existence to this mission of prophesy, whatever its weaknesses and its sins, however much it might like to rid itself of such a burden. Its task is to spread the great light of God’s Commandments, received on Mount Sinai, on which human respect and dignity are founded and whose light we can see shining brightly in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed in Paris in 1948. For Nazi totalitarianism, to exterminate the Jews was to destroy the message by killing the messenger. In that sense the anti-Christianity of the Nazis was consistent with their anti-Semitism.

 

* * *

 

Only after the war, and much later, did I, like so many others, find out what had really happened in the camps, the scientific, planned extermination, that horrible and perverse delirium of the human mind the recollection of which is today focused on Auschwitz. For in the post-war years it was impossible to talk about it, for any number of reasons. It would take a whole new chapter to explain the silence, the silence of the survivors and the silence of those who escaped arrest, including myself. For what we felt, what we knew, could not be heard; anything we might have uttered, or stammered, was not receivable; it would have been taken badly and turned against us. Our silence was in response to society’s deafness.

 

We had to wait almost a quarter of a century for the silence to be broken. It was in the early ‘70s, a period marked by the American television series “Holocaust” and later Claude Lanzman’s major film “Shoah”. As revisionism set in and tried to deny or diminish the horror of what had happened, the scientific work of the historians brought to light the systematic inhumanity of the Nazis’ enterprise. To the bitter end they tried to cover up their crimes, going as far as to execute potential eye-witnesses. The historians also disproved the cynical interpretation of the war years by the Soviet regime, which was meant to condition Polish opinion, the Poles having suffered more than most at the hands of the Nazis.

 

Interestingly, the victims of the massacres and repeated human rights violations perpetrated in various countries throughout these decades lay claim to the vocabulary of the Jews’ misfortune to describe the injustices they suffer. Yet is it possible to compare the crimes and weigh the suffering? According to what criteria: the number of victims, the nature of the treatment endured…? The work done by lawyers on the notions of ‘genocide’ and ‘crime against humanity’, in determining which crimes are a matter for the international courts, does not answer this question.

 

The Hebrew word ‘Shoah’ replaced ‘holocaust’, which in the Bible meant an offering agreeable to God. This made plain the singularity of the crime committed by the Nazis against the Jews. But the generalisation of the concept of genocide and, sometimes, dare I say, its implicit justification, by silence or complicity out of economic or political interest, mitigates the horror of the Nazi crime and trivialises the annihilation of the Jews. Why, in this new century, focus world memory on a Nazi crime that is already receding into the past?  Is the Shoah perhaps just a Jewish affair and the Nazi crime just a German affair? Was the singularity of the Nazi enterprise and those who took part in it merely the consequence or, as it were, the echo of the particularity of the Jews? Or are these tragic events of the 20th century a capital event in the history of mankind, where mankind sunk as low as it could sink?

 

Can we forget this ‘bankruptcy’ of a civilisation as the great writer François Mauriac wrote later in a foreword to Elie Wiesel’s book “Night”?  Mauriac tells how his wife saw a trainload of Jewish children at Austerlitz station about to leave for an unknown destination. “At that time we knew nothing of Nazi methods of extermination. And who could have imagined them! But those lambs torn from their mothers in itself exceeded anything we had so far thought possible. I believe that on that day I touched for the first time upon the mystery of iniquity whose revelation was to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. The dream which Western man conceived in the 18th century, whose dawn he thought he saw in 1789 and which, until 2 August 1914, had grown stronger with the progress of enlightenment and the discoveries of science – this dream vanished finally for me before those trainloads of little children. And yet I was still thousands of miles away from thinking that they were to be fuel for the gas chamber and the crematory.”

 

We must strive to understand what happened and why it happened to the point of perverting the scientific and humanist ambition of such a refined civilisation. And here is my third question: What is man? What is it about him that is so special that the power of man cannot have its way with him as it can with the things of the world? It is the question asked in Primo Levi’s title “If This is a Man”.

 

All men are people, the image and likeness of God in the world, God transcendent, greater than all things in the world. This is why we are able to talk about the transcendence of the human being. Atheists and believers alike can recognise this transcendence of the human being without offending reason. Quite the contrary. For that is what Nazism, in its madness, wanted to destroy in announcing the reign of the Aryan race, the race of supermen who had every right over the sub-human Untermenschen, and even more over the “non-persons” or Unmenschen, ie the Jews. What characterises the Nazi system is not only its inexorable scientific cruelty but also its denial of the ‘transcendence’ of all human beings. The Nazi superman wants to be God and manifests it by his sadistic cruelty. Man can go no further in the denial of man and of God. The Shoah, in its particularity, lays bare a risk and a temptation to all mankind. The abyss of evil Mauriac mentions is the reverse of the hope we must rediscover. When Jews and Christians read in the first pages of the Bible that God created man in his own image and likeness, they know that all human beings are sacred.

 

* * *

 

To teach respect and love of human dignity and all men, we need to ask the three questions from my childhood and my youth and help the new generations to ask them. We must unmask the origin of the evil that can fascinate the fragile freedom of men. We must help young people recognise that some things that may entice them lead them away from this high ideal of humanity and respect for the freedom and rights of all. Or even more, show them that this ideal of humanity is essential to their happiness, and that this high ideal is always the fruit of a conquest, the conquest of intelligence seeking the truth, of freedom seeking and choosing what is good, placing the good of others before one’s own passions and satisfaction. In brief, the Shoah reveals the depths of the hell man is capable of creating by dehumanising his fellow men in spite of everything. Hell can be fascinating too. We must help the younger generations to recognise this infernal logic in social behaviours, not to make them wary and suspicious but so that they put all their energy into living.”