Obama Video Clips > 2009-04-23 -
US Holocaust Museum -Washington DC
Transcript of the President’s Remarks
Days of Remembrance Address
The Museum’s national Days of Remembrance ceremony, featuring President Obama
and Museum Founding Chairman Elie Wiesel, was webcast live from the U.S. Capitol
Rotunda on Thursday, April 23, 2009, at 11:00 a.m
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Please, be seated. Thank you very
much.
To Sara Bloomfield, for the wonderful introduction and the outstanding work that
she’s doing; to Fred Zeidman; Joel Geiderman; Mr. Wiesel -- thank you for your
wisdom and your witness -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Senator Dick Durbin; members of
Congress; our good friend, the ambassador of Israel; members of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Council and, most importantly, the survivors and
rescuers and their families who are here today: It is a great honor for me to be
here, and I am grateful that I have the opportunity to address you briefly.
We gather today to mourn the loss of so many lives, and celebrate those who
saved them; honor those who survived, and contemplate the obligations of the
living.
It is the grimmest of ironies that one of the most savage, barbaric acts of evil
in history began in one of the most modernized societies of its time, where so
many markers of human progress became tools of human depravity: science that can
heal, used to kill; education that can enlighten, used to rationalize away basic
moral impulses; the bureaucracy that sustains modern life, used as the machinery
of mass death, a ruthless, chillingly efficient system where many were
responsible for the killing, but few got actual blood on their hands.
While the uniqueness of the Holocaust in scope and in method is truly
astounding, the Holocaust was driven by many of the same forces that have fueled
atrocities throughout history: the scapegoating that leads to hatred and blinds
us to our common humanity; the justifications that replace conscience and allow
cruelty to spread; the willingness of those who are neither perpetrators nor
victims to accept the assigned role of bystander, believing the lie that good
people are ever powerless or alone, the fiction that we do not have a choice.
While we are here today to bear witness to the human capacity to destroy, we are
also here to pay tribute to the human impulse to save. In the moral accounting
of the Holocaust, as we reckon with numbers like 6 million, as we recall the
horror of numbers etched into arms, we also factor in numbers like these: 7,200,
the number of Danish Jews ferried to safety, many of whom later returned home to
find the neighbors who rescued them had also faithfully tended their homes and
businesses and belongings while they were gone.
We remember the number five, the five righteous men and women who join us today
from Poland. We are awed by your acts of courage and conscience. And your
presence today compels each of us to ask ourselves whether we would have done
what you did. We can only hope that the answer is yes.
We also remember the number 5,000, the number of Jews rescued by the villages of
Le Chambon, France, one life saved for each of its 5,000 residents. Not a single
Jew who came there was turned away or turned in. But it was not until decades
later that the villagers spoke of what they had done, and even then only
reluctantly. The author of a book on the rescue found that those he interviewed
were baffled by his interest. “How could you call us good?” they said. “We were
doing what had to be done.”
That is the question of the righteous, those who would do extraordinary good at
extraordinary risk not for affirmation or acclaim or to advance their own
interests, but because it is what must be done. They remind us that no one is
born a savior or a murderer. These are choices we each have the power to make.
They teach us that no one can make us into bystanders without our consent, and
that we are never truly alone. That if we have the courage to heed that still,
small voice within us, we can form a minyan for righteousness that can span a
village, even a nation.
Their legacy is our inheritance. And the question is, how do we honor and
preserve it? How do we ensure that “never again” isn’t an empty slogan or merely
an aspiration, but also a call to action? I believe we start by doing what we
are doing today -- by bearing witness, by fighting the silence that is evil’s
greatest co- conspirator.
In the face of horrors that defy comprehension, the impulse to silence is
understandable. My own great uncle returned from his service in World War II in
a state of shock, saying little, alone with painful memories that would not
leave his head. He went up into the attic, according to the stories that I’ve
heard, and wouldn’t come down for six months. He was one of the liberators,
someone who at a very tender age had seen the unimaginable.
And so some of the liberators who are here today honor us with their presence,
all of whom we honor for their extraordinary service. My great uncle was part of
the 89th Infantry Division, the first Americans to reach a Nazi concentration
camp. And they liberated Ordruf, part of Buchenwald, where tens of thousands had
perished.
The story goes that when the Americans marched in, they discovered the starving
survivors and the piles of dead bodies, and General Eisenhower made a decision.
He ordered Germans from the nearby town to tour the camp so they could see what
had been done in their name. And he ordered American troops to tour the camp so
they could see the evil they were fighting against.
Then he invited congressmen and journalists to bear witness, and he ordered that
photographs and films be made. Some of us have seen those same images, whether
in the Holocaust Museum, or when I visited Yad Vashem. They never leave you.
Eisenhower said that he wanted to be in a position to give first- hand evidence
of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these
allegations merely to propaganda. Eisenhower understood the danger of silence.
He understood that if no one knew what had happened, that would be yet another
atrocity and it would be the perpetrators’ ultimate triumph.
What Eisenhower did to record these crimes for history is what we are doing here
today. That’s what Elie Wiesel and the survivors we honor here do by fighting to
make their memories part of our collective memory. That’s what the Holocaust
Museum does every day on our National Mall, the place where we display for the
world our triumphs and failures and the lessons we’ve learned from our history.
It’s the very opposite of silence.
But we must also remember that bearing
witness is not the end of our obligation, it’s just the beginning. We know that
evil has yet to run its course on Earth. We’ve seen it in this century, in the
mass graves, in the ashes of villages burned to the ground, and children used as
soldiers, of rape used as a weapon of war.
To this day, there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened, who
perpetrate every form of intolerance -- racism and anti- Semitism, homophobia,
xenophobia, sexism and more -- hatred that degrades its victim and diminishes us
all.
Today and every day, we have an opportunity as well as an obligation to confront
these scourges, to fight the impulse to turn the channel when we see images that
disturb us or wrap ourselves in the false comfort that others’ sufferings are
not our own. Instead, we have the opportunity to make a habit of
empathy,
to recognize ourselves in each other, to commit ourselves to resisting injustice
and intolerance and indifference, in whatever forms they may take, whether
confronting those who tell lies about history, or doing everything we can to
prevent and end atrocities like those that took place in Rwanda, those taking
place in Darfur.
That is my commitment as president. I hope that is yours as well.
It will not be easy. At times, fulfilling these obligations require
self-reflection. But in the final analysis, I believe history gives us cause for
hope rather than despair: the hope of a chosen people who have overcome
oppression since the days of Exodus, of the nation of Israel rising from the
destruction of the Holocaust, of the strong and enduring bonds between our
nations. It is the hope, too, of those who not only survived but chose to live,
teaching us the meaning of courage and resilience and dignity.
I’m thinking today of a study conducted after the war that found that Holocaust
survivors living in America actually had a higher birth rate than American Jews.
What a stunning act of faith, to bring a child in a world that has shown you so
much cruelty, to believe that no matter what you have endured or how much you
have lost, in the end, you have a duty to life.
We find cause for hope as well in Protestant and Catholic children attending
school together in Northern Ireland; in Hutus and Tutsis living side-by-side,
forgiving neighbors who have done the unforgivable; in a movement to save
Darfur
that has thousands of high school and college chapters in 25 countries and
brought 70,000 people to the Washington Mall, people of every age and faith and
background and race united in common cause with suffering brothers and sisters
halfway around the world.
Those numbers can be our future, our fellow citizens of the world showing us how
to make the journey from oppression to survival, from witness to resistance and
ultimately to reconciliation. That is what we mean when we say “never again.”
So today, during this season when we celebrate liberation, resurrection and the
possibility of redemption, may each of us renew our resolve to do what must be
done, and may we strive each day, both individually and as a nation, to be among
the righteous.
Thank you. God bless you and God bless the United States of America.
(Applause)
Facebook
Youtube
Newsletter
What's New?
Discussion List
Conference
Contact
