Thank you for inviting me and my family to be with you on this solemn
occasion.
Eighty years ago, no one would have dared to imagine a gathering
like this – under the auspices of the Mayor of Bialystok,
in the presence of the United States Ambassador to Poland,
a former Polish Ambassador to the U.S., and Samuel Pisar’s wife –
my mother – together with his children and grandchildren.
Survival simply was not in the cards when, on August 16, 1943,
hundreds of Jewish men and women in the Bialystok ghetto led an
uprising against the Nazis.
2 A rebellion,
as one leader put it, to determine how,
not whether, they would die.
After crushing the revolt, the Nazis put the last of Bialystok’s Jews
onto trains.
Among them was my stepfather, Samuel,
then just thirteen years old, who was sent to Majdanek.
His mother to Auschwitz.
His little sister likely to Theresienstadt.
How are we to understand this uprising, eight decades later?
I see it as one of countless acts of resistance by Jews in ghettos and Nazi
German concentration camps across Europe – to reject their dehumanization,
to reclaim their agency, to reaffirm their dignity.
3 Acts not of futility,
but of bravery.
Acts like those of Samuel’s father, David,
who smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto, and weapons into it –
for which he was eventually denounced to the Gestapo,
and then tortured, killed,
and thrown into a mass grave.
Acts like the decision Samuel’s mother, Helaina,
made on the day they were deported – forcing her son to wear long pants instead
of shorts, despite the blistering heat,
so he’d look more like a man than the boy he was…
and so the Nazis would send him to a forced labor camp,
rather than to a death camp.
He often said that, on that day,
4 his mother gave him life for a second time.
For Samuel himself, there were many acts of resistance.
Surviving in the ghetto.
Escaping twice after being sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz –
once by picking up a brush and pail, and pretending he’d been sent to clean the
floors.
And, at dawn on a spring day in 1945,
breaking away from a Nazi death march to Dachau, and into the arms of American GIs.
He never stopped resisting – by building a new life,
a storied career, a family.
And by relaying what he had endured, from town halls…
to halls of power.
When the Polish edition of his memoir was first published in the 1980s,
5 he made one of many returns to Bialystok.
After speaking at a local high school, students followed him out into the streets.
They wanted him to show them where the ghetto had once stood,
and to know what their parents and grandparents did when SS guards
herded Jews toward the railway station.
“Did they offer you a sip of water?”
the students asked.
“Did they shed a tear?”
Samuel kept telling his story, even though it was excruciating to re-live
it, because he felt an overwhelming responsibility
to ensure that people never forgot.
A responsibility made heavier by the fact that he was the only member
of his immediate family – and of hundreds of students in his school
– to survive.
As we lose more and more survivors, 6
the responsibility to relay and to grapple with that history passes to all
of us.
For that reason, I’m grateful to the City of Bialystok,
its leaders, and its citizens,
for recognizing this day, among other steps you have taken to ensure
coming generations know what happened here.
Like teaching the accurate history of the Holocaust in Bialystok’s
schools; and inviting survivors like Marian Turski
and Ben Midler to share their experience;
and placing a steppingstone outside Samuel’s childhood home,
inscribed with the names of his murdered family members.
The United States will always be your partner in keeping this history
alive.
We’re taking another step in that effort, 7
by working with our Congress to invest $1 million to help create a
virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau, so that more people can experience the indelible
impact of seeing that site.
So many more markers can and must be placed to educate people
about this chapter of human history.
For as my stepfather knew, “Never again” was not a guarantee.
It was a command, in his words,
“to do whatever I can in the struggle for a victory of hope over hate,
destruction, and death, forces that can yet again, if it does not take
care, drive humankind to madness.”
For Samuel, “Never again” was also a call for each of us to ask those
difficult questions.
Not only of our past, but of our present.
And not only of others, but of ourselves.
8 What are my acts of resistance?
What am I doing in the face of inhumanity?
Of all his efforts to resist the Nazis, the one that I believe made Samuel proudest
was the act of love.
Not only surviving himself, but building a new family –
and instilling the lives of those in it with a sense of hope,
of freedom, of justice.
That was his greatest revenge against Hitler.
So, on this day,
I know he would be especially moved to see not only his wife and two
of his children in Bialystok, but also three of his five grandchildren –
Arielle, David,
and Jeremiah.
All doing their part to fulfill the enduring responsibility that, together,
we inherit: to make real the command of “Never again.”