BEN FERENCZ: Being a lawyer and a Harvard lawyer,
I certainly believe in the rule of law.
The law is vital for a peaceful and successful--
any society, whether it be a town or village
or a country or a world.
You've got to have the rules which
will deter the behavior which is unacceptable and dangerous.
When I was 27 years old, I was the chief prosecutor
in the biggest murder trial in human history against 22
high-ranking and well-educated Nazi leaders
who were proved by their own evidence, their own reports,
to have murdered in cold blood over a million innocent men,
women, and children.
My problem as a prosecutor was to ask, what do I ask for?
Do I ask to sentence them all to death?
22 defendants against a million people murdered.
I said, there's no way of balancing enough, doing justice
there.
But if I could get them to create
a more humane world using this as an example
that would be worthwhile.
So I asked the court to affirm by international criminal law
the right of all people to live in peace and dignity
regardless of their race or creed,
because the victims were murdered simply
because they didn't share the race
or creed of the executioners.
I thought that was a horrible thing.
I still think it's a horrible thing.
And I have been trying to change it.
My parents were poor immigrants living in Transylvania
after the First World War.
The territory was ceded by Hungary to Romania
as part of the war settlement.
The one thing both had in common was they
were both equally anti-Semitic.
My parents were young people.
They had two young children.
They fled to the United States in order
to escape persecution and poverty.
When they got to the United States-- no money,
no language, two little kids on their hands.
My father was considered lucky to be offered a job to be
a janitor in a tenement house.
And we were allowed to live in the cellar.
The area in which we lived was known as Hell's Kitchen--
because it was a high density crime area I found out later.
I know a lot of criminals.
I didn't know any lawyers.
But I recognized that, at an early date,
that I would rather be a lawyer than a criminal.
I wanted to be on the right side of the law.
I don't know how it came about.
I was maybe six or seven years old.
I was not admitted to school until I was past eight,
because I didn't speak the language.
And I was too small.
But I don't recall ever wanting to be a fireman, or a cowboy,
or a policeman.
I wanted to be a guy who was chasing these crooks that I
saw all around me.
And because I was small, I suppose,
I felt that I had to be better than everybody else.
And I was fortunate that, when I was
in my eighth grade in elementary school, one of the teachers
said, this is an unusual child.
And they sent me to Townsend Harris High School,
which was a preparatory school for boys,
for gifted boys, which would admit me automatically
to college at the College of the City of New York.
I went to City College.
And I inquired then, which is the best law
school in the world?
I didn't know the difference between Brooklyn and Harvard.
And I was told the best law school is Harvard.
So I filed an application to only one school--
Harvard.
Lo and behold, they accepted me for reasons
which remain a mystery to me.
At Harvard, I was primarily concerned
with juvenile delinquency.
I wanted to stop juvenile crime, because that's
what I was raised in, the atmosphere of juvenile crime.
I had been doing interns, while I
was in college, at reform schools in different places,
in criminal court.
So at Harvard I tended toward the leading criminologist
at the time professor, Sheldon Glueck, who
had written many books on the subject,
following juvenile crime for many years.
And I selected the courses which went in that direction.
And it was interrupted by the war.
But I had already gotten my law degree
and been admitted to the bar by that time.
So then I had seen real crimes.
All I had seen as a child was nothing
compared to what I saw in war.
I'm concerned primarily now with trying
to do-- what I recognize is impossible in my lifetime-- is
to stop war-making.
War-making seems to me to be such a ridiculous thing.
That if two heads of state are unable to agree,
they send out young people like you
to kill other young people they don't even know,
who may have done them no harm, may never have harmed anybody.
And they kill each other, start killing
until they get tired of killing, and then they pause.
Each one declares victory.
They rest awhile, then they start again.
That's absolutely crazy.
And that is the current practice.
Not only is it the current practice, it is idolized.
This is patriotic.
This is heroic.
I was given five battle stars by the Pentagon
when I got out of the United States Army after World War II.
I didn't consider-- think it was heroic to be
involved in killing people you don't know.
And it may be heroic to be persistent in trying to create
a more peaceful world.
But the current practice seems to me totally irrational.
And of course, I realize that it will not change in my lifetime.
I've been working on it, I think, since the day
I left law school, maybe before.
But I have seen significant progress over the years.
There has really been an awakening
of the human conscience.
But it has a long, long way to go.
And that's the reason I'm talking to you.
Because I want young people to pick up this banner
and carry it forward.
One of the things of which I feel a sense of pride
is having played an important role
in obtaining compensation for the victims of crimes
against humanity.
It has never happened in human history.
And that the defeated nation was offering to pay compensation
to the individual survivors of a war of aggression,
we have to draw up complicated German laws.
Who is entitled to what?
What proof is necessary?
How much does he get?
How far down the line of inheritance can anything go?
What about the restoration of stolen properties?
I was involved up to here in all of that.
When I left Germany, after about 10 years there
of working on all these programs and setting up a legal aid
society to help the victims, about $50 billion
had been paid out.
And these programs continue to this day.
Every Nazi victim, Jew and non-Jew,
should be receiving a pension or some payment
from the German government for the illegal crimes
against humanity of which they were victims.
So I look back on that, and though there
has been very little publicity to that,
and I certainly have not made any publicity
in that direction, I feel quite proud that this was something
new, and it was something good.
And it was the enactment of something
simple I had learned in my first year
at the Harvard Law School--
if you harm somebody illegally, you have an obligation
to try to make amends.
The ability to see that in practice
and help to put it into practice,
I'm kind of proud about that.
I am now entering my 98th year.
It's up to you and the young people
to recognize that law is better than war, no matter what.
Even if you get a bad decision, the law is better than war.
And so I've had a slogan--
law not war.
And they say, well, how can you do it?
I'm going to give you three pieces of advice how
you can do it.
One, never give up.
Two, never give up.
Three, I hear you saying, never give up.
So the ball is now in your court.
I wish you the best of luck.
Good bye.