I'm Shalom Awraham Soetendorp.
I'm a rabbi from the Jewish tradition.
I was saved by a German woman in Holland in '43, a Catholic woman, married to a Dutchman,
and I am building and rebuilding everyday a Jewish community that has been decimated.
I also struggle with everything that was done to my people,
everything that was done to the family that did not survive.
All those children...
they speak through my mouth because they are not here.
And nevertheless, there is a hope that there is a change,
and that change is the capacity to love and be loved.
I was three months old in May '43,
and a Gestapo came to our house, because they were rounding up all the Jews around.
At that moment, the head of the Gestapo, looking at me,
while my parents already were holding the suitcases,
he said, " ... ... What a pity that this is a Jewish child."
At that moment, my father got up and said,
"How lucky is to be a Jewish child, because whatever will happen to him, he will never grow up to be a son of murderers."
The Gestapo man hit my father, shouted abuse, and said,
"You are so dirty, we are coming tomorrow to pick you up."
My father always told me, and brought me up with the words "There were tears in the eyes of the Gestapo man, and those tears saved our life."
This Gestapo man stopped. Other Gestapo men did not stop. Those who did not stop, I cannot forgive.
But I know that you should not give up hope that the change of heart will take place.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had with students of secondary school, years ago,
and I related that somebody called me the middle of the, well, very late at night, and said,
"I was a perpetrator. I was terrible in the war.
And I caused pain to your people, but now I can't sleep. Can you forgive me?"
And I immediately said, "The ones who could forgive you are not anymore alive. I cannot forgive you" and put the receiver down.
One of the students got up and said "Rabbi, you disappoint me." I said "Why?"
He said "You didn't meet him." I said "How could I? I'm a survivor of the war.
How could I face somebody who had perpetrated all those crimes?"
So he said "You don't even know his name. You should have been in the room together with him.
Maybe something would have changed." And I had to say "You are right."
Forgiveness is a movement of the heart, and it moves the other heart.
Now...in the moment of that movement of the heart, everything is possible.
And I think that is the moment where peace can be made. Suddenly, there's space.
There's space where hatred comes to the way of love, where desperation develops into hope,
and in my own life, as a rabbi in my community, it can happen that I stand in front of the open ark,
and pray for peace, and I cry, because when I say "Shalom"...wholeness...
the wholeness can only come from broken hearts who are healed,
and they can only be healed when they respond to each other.
If a man would call me now and say "I've perpetrated the most hideous crimes towards your people. Can you forgive me?"
I would invite him to sit with me...
...and we would cry.
You meet God in the eys of the other, but what happens if you look in the eyes of your enemy
or the ones who has done so many wrongs to you, do you still recognize the face of God in his eyes?
And I hope to live to be able to do that, and maybe that is a path towards peace in our time.