Ladies and gentlemen,
honored guests,
there are voices in my head,
and there are voices my heart, and at times they're
the same voice times, and at times they're separate. In George Steiner's remarkable book
The Reader, George indeed
writes, When we attempt
to describe the Holocaust, the language breaks."
What intellectual vigor,
discipline, stamina, determination,
let alone days of painful
research must Saul Friedlander have
mined in order to write his massive
tome The Years of Extermination:
1933-1945. One of the great voices in my heart
is Simon Wiesenthal, whom I
first met in Vienna, of all places,
in 1988.
I visited his office where he
gestured to his mass of
files and said "Blood
turned to ink." Later over
lunch at the Schwarzenberg
Hotel, he told me of the
liberation by Americans
of Mauthausen. He said, "All the
liberated prisoners had a flag of their home nation,
but we did not have a Jewish flag.
Some of the prisoners tore
up their blue and white striped shirts,
and somehow they fashioned a
Jewish flag, which they were able to wave
for a few precious moments, after which they collapsed in
exhaustion. It was their final act." He paused
in telling the story and wiped
openly wept tears with his hand thus.
He in his own grief helped the rest of us to grieve.
Grief is an essential part of healing, and to this day,
I personally do not believe Europe
allowed herself to grieve. I first met
Elie Wiesel in Berlin
in the wings of a great theater.
Both of us were invited to speak. As he walked on stage to address the
Berlin audience, I felt their
collective heartbeat stop, their breath
hold. These were
Elie Wiesel's opening words,and I was
on stage with him when he uttered them. "My dear young Germans,
I know it is very difficult
being you. An English poet of
the Victorian era took it upon himself
to write of forgiveness with, I suspect, a glass of
one hand and a pen in the other, "If we could read the secret history of our
enemies, we should find in each others persons
life, sorrow, and suffering enough
to disarm all hostility." Let me counter
Mr. Longfellow with a simple statement
from a young German philosopher: "We
measure everything by Auschwitz." A voice
I listened to repeatedly is General
Axel vom dem Bussche: "We Germans,"
and this could be universal, but he said, "We Germans will move
into the twenty-first century with an indigestible lump
of history that must not be forgotten,
may never be forgiven,
and will never be understood."
So Thomas Keneally leaves his book signing
in Beverly Hills, and he goes in search of a new briefcase.
He walks into Poldek Pfefferberg's store
in Beverly Hills to purchase one. Poldek,
a Schindler survivor, Poldek and Mila,
with whom I spend a lot of time. He was naturally curious and
he asked Thomas what he did for a living. "I'm a writer,"
answered Thomas, and thus
began an extraordinary cooperation between Poldek Pfefferberg,
Thomas Keneally, Steven Zaillian,
and Steven Spielberg. Thomas Keneally, who said,
in my presence, "Europe committed suicide
in 1933." "This list
is an absolute good. The list
is life. All around its margins
lies the gulf." I've had this
brilliant couplet of
poetry quoted to me as far afield as the Canary Islands
by a young woman with tears in her eyes. Yes, the
language breaks but, that unique combination of
rage and poetry reached someone, reaches
millions. I arrived on dear
Steven's set one morning in a rage, having defended one of my Israeli colleagues
from a violently antisemitic attack, a German-speaking Pole
who attacked my friend publicly, in a bar,
in five-star hotel
in Cracow. I told Steven I
was in a rage. "Then we must use it.
We must use your rage," said Steven.
I carried a photograph of Anne Frank in my pocket,
which sustained me throughout the shoot
of Schindler's List along with my darling Steven
and my wonderful cast. I used to pull the photograph out of
my pocket. I used to say, "I'm doing this for you."
Later in Amsterdam
Miep Gies made me coffee
in her Amsterdam apartment, and as we chatted under the beautiful portrait
of Anne on her wall, she recounted to me,
to me, how she found the diary,
having sheltered and defended the Franks
for years. She told the story in the most
animated of terms. After the attic had
been evacuated by Silberbauer and his men,
Miep came up to the attic, and she saw the chaos,
the scattered pages on the floor, and I saw Miep do this.
She enacted it for me. She said, "Look, look! There is the diary of Anne!" There is the diary of Anne.
And that's how it began. And the world heard Anne.
The voices in my heart. I loved Miep.
I spent time with Jacqueline van Maarsen,
Anne's best friend at school.
But what remains with me is
a man who worked with Otto Frank after the war. He
waited outside my trailer. He wanted to meet me,
and I left my trailer costumed
and made up as Otto,
and the man opened his arms when he saw me and cried, "There is my friend!
There is my friend!" And
this, dear members of our profession,
is our task: That
unspeakably difficult though it seems,
when a yellow star appears on the screen,
we must make audiences make that connection,
make that realization: "There is my friend."
To the members my profession, Kate,
my wife, the actors, directors,
writers, producers,
agents, let me say this:
When your motives are pure,
the angels will come.
When you walk into that office with your precious manuscript
under your arm, your story from those years of
extermination, be empwered by this:
Think of millions of lost
stories, the silenced
stories.
Shakespeare's Hamlet's last words to his Horatio,
his friend: "And draw thy breath
in pain to tell my story."
Let me conclude with the words of
my two dear friends,
Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal.
Elie:
"Let us tell tales. All the rest can wait.
All the rest must wait. Let us tell tales. That is our
primary obligation. Commentaries
will have to come later lest they
replace or becloud what they mean to reveal. Let us
tell tales so as to remember
how vulnerable man is when faced with overwhelming
evil. Let us tell tales so as
not to allow the executioner
to have the last word. The last word
belongs to the victim. It is up to the witness
to capture it, shape it
transmit it."
And Simon Wiesenthal. Simon was a dad
to me, he was a dad, and it was Simon who told me this:
"When I pass to the other side
and meet all those who perished,
I will be able to say, 'I never forgot you.'"
I thank you
for giving me a mission,
to be a witness.
Thank you.