Panel II: Remembering the Holocaust - The Challenges of Memory
Professor Hubert G. Locke, University of Washington, USA
"We face two, major tasks with respect to education, the Holocaust and the future. In the long term, we must deal with the prospect of raw ignorance of successive generations who are more and more removed from the traumas of the mid¥twentieth century and for whom all its defining moments - the Great Depression, the War, The Holocaust - will become artifacts of ancient history, as remote in time and in memory as the Black Plague or the Thirty Years War was for the twentieth century. If education is the only antidote to ignorance, then we must look to the museums and the memorials, the courses in schools and the conferences, the oral histories and the survivors' testimonies to carry the major burden of witness and remembrance.
But in the short term, the problem we face is not ignorance but acknowledgment and ownership. With each passing year, the number of persons who deny that they have any personal obligation regarding the Holocaust increases post-war Germans who consider the Holocaust to be the problem of their parents' generation, young Europeans for whom the Holocaust is a tragic but a past history, about the catastrophe that overran young North Americans who are ostensibly bewildered by the very idea that the Holocaust should have any importance for them.
To each of these, our pedagogical task is to lead them toward the recognition that the world continues to be haunted by the same false patriotism, the same nationalistic self-deceptions, the same racial and ethnic arrogances that brought about the Shoah and that unless we rid our societies of such dangerous presumptions and such lethal sentiments, the world of the 21st century and the new millennium will be a perilous as the century which preceded it.
Our primary task as educators is that of teaching present and future generations to respond to the Holocaust rather than react to it - to act responsibly in the face of knowledge about the catastrophe that overran European Jewry."
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Mr. Rudolf Shuster, President of the Slovak Republic
"In conclusion, may I assure you once again that Slovakia will never permit anything like the Holocaust to happen in the life of our nation and our state. Slovakia is taking all the necessary steps so that nationalism and racism phenomena against which no state is completely immune - can never be rekindled in our country. It is both our duty and commitment to secure that future generations can only learn about the Holocaust from history, and never, never ever, through their own experience."
Professor Anita Shapira, Tel Aviv University, Israel
"I discern two major phases in remembering the Holocaust: the 'public memory' and the 'private memory'. The 'public memory' phase lasted from the end of the second world war until the early seventies. The 'private memory' started at about that time and is still going strong. The first phase was characterized by the 'nationalization' of the memory of the Holocaust: the Holocaust was incorporated within the founding myths of the state of Israel. The state was perceived as the guardian of the people, making sure that they would not find themselves again in a situation of complete helplessness, as had happened in the world war."
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"At the second stage, the memory of the Holocaust moved from the public sphere to the private sphere. The survivors' memories came to the fore. The Holocaust stopped being enormous, anonymous, inconceivable, and was translated to the human and inhuman experiences of people. In this way it became much closer, more intimate, more personal. It became part of Israeli collective memory."
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"Today, the memory of the Holocaust has become part and parcel of the western civilization. It is part of the 20th century experience, a constant reminder of the dangers inherent in human nature, of the bestiality lurking in the darkness of our soul. Will the memory of the Holocaust lead to a more humane society, or will it teach that man is a wolf to his fellowmen?"
Mr. Serge Klarsfeld, France
"I still remember well my father, murdered in Auschwitz and several former deportees are my friends. All of them are more than 73 years old and soon I will be sixty five.
I say that because one day all of the survivors of the deportation, those who were in Auschwitz, will disappear and all the survivors who, like me, were children during the Holocaust and the targets of the Nazis will be gone and will also disappear, all those who lost somebody they loved, a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a friend, killed in the Holocaust.
This is the reason why this international Forum on the Holocaust has such a great importance for all of us. Not only by the fact that so many political leaders gathered here, but because the lines of action of the Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research will be traced in that conference and will receive, we hope, the support of the governments."