The answer I have found for myself (and which need not necessarily be the answer for every survivor) is: I want to be their mouthpiece, I want to keep their memory alive, to make sure the dead live on in that memory. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived. Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. (from a meeting with President Jimmy Carter reported in The Washington Post, August 6, 1980)įrom Justice not Vengeance (London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989): There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today.they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters. (from an interview in the Baltimore Jewish Times, April 3, 1981) We can win them by telling them their history, by talking about the others, the millions of people other than the Jews, that the Nazis killed. We cannot fight against the neo-Nazis alone. Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations. (Baltimore Jewish Times, February 24, 1989) Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition. The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. (Quoted in an interview in Penthouse Magazine, 1983) When I started this work, I said to myself, 'I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only the Jewish victims. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered.
It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. (Quoted in an interview in The Jerusalem Post International Edition, February 5, 1994)įor your benefit, learn from our tragedy. The only value of nearly five decades of my work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it. The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. (Quoted in the introduction to The Sunflower) Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals.
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