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 Address
by Silvan Shalom
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State
of Israel
Special
Session of the UN General Assembly to mark the
60th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Concentration Camps
January 24, 2005
"Shall
these bones live?"
 "For
six million Jews, the State of Israel came too late. For them, and
for countless others, the United Nations also came too late. But
it is not too late, to renew our commitment, to the purposes for
which the United Nations was founded. And it is not too late, to
work for an international community that will reflect these values
fully; that will be uncompromising in combating intolerance against
people of all faiths and ethnicities; that will reject moral equivalence;
that will call evil by its name."
Mr.
Secretary-General,
Mr. President,
Fellow Foreign Ministers,
Survivors of the Holocaust,
Distinguished Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Sixty
years ago, allied soldiers arrived at the gates of the Auschwitz
concentration camp. Nothing could prepare them for what they would
witness there, and at the other camps they liberated. The stench
of the bodies, the piles of clothes, of teeth, of children's shoes.
But in the accounts of the liberators, more than the smell, more
even than the piles of bodies, the story of the horror was told
in the faces of the survivors.
The
account of Harold Herbst, an American liberator in Buchenwald, is
typical of many, and I quote:
"As
I walked through the barracks I heard a voice, and I turned around,
and I saw a living skeleton talk to me. He said, "thank God
you've come." And that was a funny feeling. Did you ever talk
to a skeleton that talked back? And that's what I was doing. And
later on I saw mounds of these living skeletons that the Germans
left behind them".
Thousands
of years ago the prophet Ezekiel had a similar vision. In one of
the most famous passages of the Bible, the prophet describes how
he came to a valley full of bones. The bones, says Ezekiel, are
the House of Israel. And the bones are dry, and their hope is lost.
Faced with this scene, he asks the question: Shall these bones live?
Shall these bones live?
Ezekiel
asked the question that every liberator of the camps asked himself:
Can any hope or humanity emerge from such horror? Shall these bones
live?
Here
with me today, are those who have given life to dry bones, both
survivors and liberators. Men like Dov Shilansky who fought in the
ghetto and later became speaker of Israel's parliament, the Knesset;
Like Yossi Peled, who after being evacuated from the terrors of
the Nazis, eventually became a Major-General in the Israel Defence
Forces, to protect his people from the horrors of another calamity;
and like David Grinstein, who survived the labour camps, and now
heads an organization for restitution, for the forced labourers
under Nazi rule; and women like Gila Almagor - today the first lady
of Israeli stage and screen - who has translated her experiences
as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, into art that has touched
millions.
When
we see what the survivors have managed to create, and build, and
contribute to humanity - families, careers, literature, music, even
countries - we can only marvel at their strength and courage.
At
the same time, when we see what the survivors have given to humankind,
we can only begin to appreciate, what might have been given to the
world, by the millions who did not survive. We mourn their loss,
to this day. Every fibre of our people, feels their lack. Every
family knows the pain, including my own - my wife's grandparents
and seven of their eight children, were taken and killed.
Mr.
President,
Israel
and the Jewish people owe a debt to the liberators of the death
camps, and so does all of humankind. In the face of unspeakable
evil, these liberators, from many nations represented here today,
showed the human capacity for good. In the face of overwhelming
indifference to the suffering of others, they showed compassion.
And in the face of cowardice, they showed bravery and resolve.
We
recognize, too, the courage and humanity of Righteous Among the
Nations, who refused to look away. People such as Raoul Wallenberg,
who saved thousands of Jewish lives, and whose niece, Nane, is here
with us today. These heroes helped our dry bones live again.
Mr.
President,
The
dry bones have lived again not only in the lives of the survivors,
but also in two entities established on the ashes of the Holocaust:
the United Nations and the modern State of Israel.
The
tragedy of the Holocaust was a major impetus in the reestablishment
of the Jewish people's home, in its ancient land. As Israel declared
in its Declaration of Independence:
The
Holocaust, which engulfed millions of Jews in Europe, proved anew
the urgency of the re-establishment of the Jewish state. A state
which would solve the problem of Jewish homelessness, by opening
the gates to all Jews, and lifting the Jewish people to equality
in the family of nations.
And
indeed, since its establishment, Israel has provided a haven for
Jews facing persecution anywhere in the world. At the same time,
it has built a society, based on the values of democracy and freedom
for all its citizens, where Jewish life and culture and literature
and religion and learning - all those things which the Nazis sought
to destroy - can flourish and thrive.
The
fact that so many survivors came and played their part in the building
of the State of Israel, was itself a remarkable fulfillment of Ezekiel's
prophecy. As the prophet said:
Thus
says the Lord: Behold, O my people, I will take you from the graves.
I will put my spirit in you, and you shall live in your own land,
in the land of Israel.
Mr.
President,
If
Israel represents one heroic attempt, to find a positive response
to the atrocities of the Second World War, the United Nations represents
another. The very first clauses of the UN Charter bear witness to
the understanding of the founders, that this new international organization
must serve as the world's answer to evil, that it comes, and I quote:
"to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,"
to "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights" and "the
dignity and worth of the human person".
By
convening here today in this historic special session, we honour
the victims, we pay respect to the survivors, and we pay tribute
to the liberators. We convene here today for those who remember,
for those who have forgotten, and for those who do not know. But
we also convene to remember that the Charter of this United Nations,
like Israel's Declaration of Independence, is written in the blood
of the victims of the Holocaust. And we convene today to recommit
ourselves to the noble principles, on which this organization was
founded.
Such
an affirmation is needed today, more than ever. The past decade
has witnessed a chilling increase in attempts to deny the very fact
of the Holocaust. Unbelievable as it seems, there are those who
would delete from history, six million murders.
Could
anything be worse than to systematically destroy a people, to take
the proud Jewish citizens of Vienna, Frankfurt and Vilna and even
Tunisia and Libya, to burn their holy books, to steal their dignity,
their hair, their teeth; to turn them into numbers, to soap, to
the ashes of Treblinka and Dachau? The answer is yes, there is something
worse: To do all this and then deny it. To do all this and then
take from the victims - and their children and grandchildren - the
legitimacy of their grief.
To
deny the Holocaust is not only to desecrate the victims and abuse
the survivors. It is also to deprive the world of its lessons -
lessons which are as crucial today, as they were 60 years ago.
These
lessons are crucial today for three urgent reasons.
First,
because today, once again, the plague of anti-Semitism is raising
its head. Who could have imagined, that less than 60 years after
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the Jewish people and Israel would
be the targets of anti-Semitic attacks, even in the countries that
witnessed the Nazi atrocities. Yet this is exactly what is happening.
The Holocaust teaches us that while Jews may be the first to suffer
from anti-Semitism's destructive hate, they have rarely been the
last.
The
lessons of the Holocaust are crucial today for a second reason:
because today once again we are witnessing, against Jews and other
minorities, that same process of delegitimization and dehumanization,
that paved the way to destruction. Let us not forget. The brutal
extermination of a people, began, not with guns or tanks, but with
words, systematically portraying the Jew - the other - as less than
legitimate, less than human. Let us not forget this, when we find
current newspapers and schoolbooks borrowing caricatures and themes
from the Nazi paper Der Sturmer, to portray Jews and Israelis.
And
finally these lessons are crucial today, because once again, we
are witnessing a violent assault on the fundamental principle of
the sanctity of human life. Perhaps the greatest single idea that
the Bible has given to humanity, is the simple truth that every
man, woman and child, is created in the divine image, and so, is
of infinite value. For the Nazis, the value of a man was finite,
even pitiful. How much work could he do? How much hair did she have?
How many gold teeth? For the Nazis, the destruction of one human
being, or of a hundred, a thousand, six million, was of no consequence.
It was just a means to an evil end.
Today,
again, we are pitted against the forces of evil, those for whom
human life - whether the civilians they target, or their own youth
who they use as weapons - are of no value, nothing but a means to
their goals. Our sages teach us that "He who takes a single
life, it is as if he has taken an entire world". No human life
is less than a world. No ideology, no political agenda, can justify
or excuse the deliberate taking of an innocent life.
Mr.
President,
For
six million Jews, the State of Israel came too late. For them, and
for countless others, the United Nations also came too late. But
it is not too late, to renew our commitment, to the purposes for
which the United Nations was founded. And it is not too late, to
work for an international community that will reflect these values
fully; that will be uncompromising in combating intolerance against
people of all faiths and ethnicities; that will reject moral equivalence;
that will call evil by its name.
We
will never know whether, if the United Nations had existed then,
the Holocaust could have been prevented. But this Special Session
today confirms the need for the United Nations, as well as each
individual member state, to rededicate ourselves to ensuring that
it will never happen again. In this context, I wish to commend the
Secretary General for his moral voice and leadership in bringing
this Special Session to fruition, and my colleague foreign ministers,
for their presence here today.
As
the number of survivors shrinks all the time, we are on the brink
of that moment, when this terrible event will change - from memory,
to history. Let all of us gathered here pledge, never to forget
the victims, never to abandon the survivors, and never to allow
such an event ever to be repeated.
As
the Foreign Minister of Israel, the sovereign state of the Jewish
people, I stand before you, to swear, in the name of the victims,
the survivors, and all the Jewish people: Never again.
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