"And to them I will give my house and with my walls a memorial and a name, an everlasting
name that shall not be cut off. Pres. Peres. PM Netanyahu, Chairman Shalev,
Rabbi Lau, thank you for sharing this house, this memorial with me today. Thank you the
people of Israel for preserving the names of the millions taken from us, of blessed
memory, names that shall never be forgotten. This is my second visit to this living memorial.
Since then I've walked among the barbed wire, the guard towers, of Buchenwald. Rabbi Lau,
told me of his time there, and we reminisced about our good friend Eli Wiesel and the memories
that he shared with me. I've stood in the old Warsaw ghetto with survivors who would
not go quietly. But nothing equals the wrenching power of
this sacred place where the totality of the Shoah is told. We could come here a thousand
times and each time our hearts would break. For here we see the depravity to which man
can sink, the barbarism that unfolds when we begin to see our fellow human beings as
somehow less than us, less worthy of dignity, and of life.
We see how evil can for a moment in time triumph; when good people do nothing, how silence abetting
a crime unique in human history. Here we see their faces and we hear their
voices. We look upon the objects of their lives, the art that they created, the prayer
books that they carried. We see that even as they had hate etched into
their arms, they were not numbers, they were men, and women and children, so many children,
sent to their deaths because of who they were, how they prayed or who they loved. And yet
here alongside man's capacity for evil we also are reminded of man's capacity for good.
The rescuers, the Righteous Among Nations who refused to be bystanders, and in their
noble acts of courage, we see how this place, this accounting of horror, is in the end a
source of hope , for here we learn that we are never powerless, in our lives we always
have choices. To succumb to our worst instincts, or to summon the better angels of our nature,
to be indifferent to suffering wherever it may be, whoever it may be visited upon, or
to display empathy that is at the core of our humanity, we have a choice to acquiesce
to evil or to make real our solemn vow never again. We have a choice to ignore what happens
to others or to act on behalf of others and to continually examine in ourselves, whatever
dark places there may be that might lead to such actions or inactions. This is our obligation,
not simply to bear witness, but to act. For us in our time, this means confronting bigotry
and hatred in all its forms, racism, especially antisemitism. None of that has a place in
the civilized world, not in the classrooms of children, not in the corridors of power,
and let us never forget the link between the two. For our sons and daughters are not born
to hate. They are taught to hate. So let us fill their young hearts with the same understanding
and compassion that we hope others have for them. Here we hope, because after we walk
through these halls, after you pass through the darkness there is light. The glorious
view of the Jerusalem forest, with the sun shining over the historic homeland of the
Jewish people, a fulfillment of the prophecy: You shall live again, upon your own soil.
Here on your ancient land let
it
be
said