International Holocaust Remembrance Day: The imperative to remember and to act
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a painful and poignant moment of remembrance and reminder, of witness and warning, of learning and acting upon the universal lessons of the Holocaust.
Lesson one: ‘Zachor’ – the danger of forgetting and the imperative of remembrance
The first lesson is the danger of forgetting – the killing of the victims a second time – and the imperative of remembrance, zachor/le devoir de mémoire. As Professor Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor put it: “The Holocaust was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were targeted victims.”
As we remember the victims of the Shoah – defamed, demonized and dehumanized as prologue and justification for genocide – we must understand that the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of non-Jews is not a matter of abstract statistics.
As we say at these moments of remembrance, “Unto each person there is a name, each person is an identity, each person is a universe.” As the Talmud reminds us, “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.”
Just as if you kill a single person, it is as if you have killed an entire universe. Thus, the abiding universal imperative: we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other’s destiny.
Lesson two: The Holocaust as a paradigm for radical evil, and antisemitism as a paradigm for radical hate – learning and acting upon these intersections
The second lesson is the danger of antisemitism – the oldest and most enduring of hatreds – and the most lethal. If the Holocaust is a metaphor for radical evil, antisemitism is a metaphor for radical hate. 1.3 million people were deported to the death camp Auschwitz, 1.1 million of them were Jews.
Let there be no mistake about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism itself did not die. It remains the bloody canary in the mineshaft of global evil today. And as we have learned only too painfully and too well, while antisemitism begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews – the unprecedented global explosion of antisemitism is a standing threat to our democracy, to our individual and collective security, to our common humanity.
Lesson three: The danger of state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide – the responsibility to prevent
The third enduring lesson is that the genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the machinery of death, but because of a state-sanctioned ideology of hate.
For example, the Jew was seen as the personification of the devil – as the enemy of humankind – and humanity could only be redeemed by the death of the Jew. As the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed – and as echoed by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.”
These, as the Court put it, are the catastrophic effects of racism. These, as the Court put it, are the chilling facts of history. Indeed, in another important principle and precedent, the Supreme Court held that the very incitement to genocide constitutes the crime in and of itself, whether or not acts of genocide follow.
Lesson four: Holocaust denial – from assaultive speech to criminal conspiracy, the responsibility to unmask the bearers of false witness
The fourth enduring lesson concerns the Holocaust denial movement – the cutting edge of antisemitism old and new – which is not just an assault on Jewish memory and human dignity in its accusation that the Holocaust is a hoax. Rather, it constitutes an international criminal conspiracy to cover up the worst crimes in history.
It not only holds that the Holocaust was a hoax, but maligns the Jews for fabricating the hoax.
Lesson five: The proliferation of Holocaust distortion, trivialization, minimization, revisionism and inversion – the responsibility to combat
The fifth enduring lesson concerns the horrifying rise of Holocaust distortion, particularly weaponized by social media. It is a phenomenon that threatens not only our relationship to the truth, but to our collective relationship with history.
Similarly, a related phenomenon is that of Holocaust trivialization and minimization, where the symbols and imagery of the Holocaust are also weaponized. In Holocaust revisionism, extremist collaborators with the Nazis are glorified as heroes; and in Holocaust inversion, Jews/Israel are compared to Nazis and accused of Nazi-like crimes.
Lesson six: The danger of silence in the face of evil – the responsibility to protest injustice
The sixth lesson is the danger of complicity by way of silence or inaction. As Professor Wiesel put it in his famed 1986 Nobel Prize address: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim; silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented… wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
He added: “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time where we fail to protest against injustice.”
It is our responsibility, as Wiesel taught us, to speak truth to power and to hold power accountable to truth, as he did so memorably upon receiving the Congressional Medal of Freedom for his efforts.
Lesson seven: Indifference and inaction in the face of mass atrocity and genocide – the responsibility to protect
The seventh painful and poignant lesson is that Holocaust crimes (and genocides such as that of the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the current geocide foretold, but ignored, in Sudan) resulted not only from state-sanctioned incitement to hatred and genocide, but from crimes of indifference and conspiracies of silence, with the international community as a bystander.
What makes the Holocaust and the genocide of the Tutsis, and the current unfolding in Sudan, so unspeakable are not only the horror of the crimes, but that these crimes were preventable. No one can say that we did not know. We knew, but we did not act.
Today we know, but we have also yet to combat the mass atrocities targeting the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of China; or Putin’s genocidal atrocities in Ukraine; or the horrific mass atrocities now taking place in Iran. This ignores the lessons of history and mocks the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine.
Let there be no mistake about it: indifference and inaction always mean coming down on the side of the aggressor, never the victim. In the face of evil, indifference is acquiescence to, if not complicity with, evil itself.
Lesson eight: Combating mass atrocity and the culture of impunity – the responsibility to bring war criminals to justice
The eighth lesson calls on us to combat mass atrocity and the culture of impunity that underpins it.
If the last century, symbolized by the Holocaust and such mass atrocities as the genocide in Rwanda, and the 21st century is the age of Mass Atrocities, they are both also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice. Just as there must be no sanctuary for hate, no refuge for bigotry, there must be no base or sanctuary for these enemies of humankind.
Let there be no mistake about it – indulging impunity only incentivizes mass atrocity.
Lesson nine: Speaking truth to power
The ninth lesson is that the Holocaust was made possible not only because of the “bureaucratization of genocide,” as Robert Lifton put it – and as the Wannsee Conference and the Nazi desk murderer Adolf Eichmann personified – but because of the betrayal of the elites, including scientists and doctors, judges and lawyers, church leaders and educators, engineers and architects.
The Nuremberg crimes were also the crimes of Nuremberg’s elites. It is our responsibility, then, to speak truth to power, to hold power accountable to truth.
The “double entendre” of Nuremberg – of Nuremberg racism and Nuremberg principles – must be part of our learning as it is part of our legacy.
Lesson 10: The assault on the vulnerable and powerless – the responsibility to give voice to the voiceless
The tenth lesson concerns the vulnerability of the powerless and the powerlessness of the vulnerable, as dramatized at Auschwitz by the remnants of shoes and suitcases, crutches and hair of the murdered. Indeed, it is revealing, as Professor Henry Friedlander points out in his work “The Origins of Nazi Genocide,” among the first groups targeted for killing were the Jewish disabled.
It is our responsibility to give voice to the voiceless and to empower the powerless, be they the disabled, poor, elderly, women victimized by violence, or children – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. The test of a just society is how it treats its most vulnerable among them.
May I say a closing word to the survivors, and what I have learned from you. For you have endured the worst of inhumanity, but somehow found in the resources of your own humanity the will to go on, the resilience to build families and relationships, and to make enduring contributions to every community and country you inhabit. We are all your beneficiaries and we will continue to be inspired by your teachings and your example.
And so, together with you, we must remember – and pledge – that never again will we be indifferent to incitement and hate; never again will we be silent in the face of evil; never again will we indulge racism and antisemitism, the most dangerous of hatreds; never again will we ignore the plight of the vulnerable; and never again will we be indifferent in the face of mass atrocity and impunity.
We will speak up and act against racism, against hate, against antisemitism, against mass atrocity, against injustice, and against the crime of crimes whose name we should even shudder to mention – genocide – which you singularly and painfully experienced, and from which we draw the existential lessons of Jewish history and human history.
At times such as these, qui s’excuse, s’accuse. Whoever remains indifferent, indicts herself or himself. We will be judged not by what we say, but by what we do.