Avner Shalev
Dear Mr President, Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
The Czech novelist Jan Otcenasek in his novel Romeo, Juliet, and the Darkness (that, by the way, was translated into Hebrew by ??? Bondy, a survivor of Terezin and Aschwitz, a former citizen, as a youngster, of the Czechoslovak republic; it was translated only three years ago) tells us a story of a Czech boy that goes through a public garden and there he meets a Jewish girl, Ester - he doesn' t know that she is Jewish at the moment - who ran away from one of those groups well on the way for the deportation to Terezin and afterwards to Auschwitz. In a spell of a moment, as a very human way of expression, this boy has made a decision to take away this girl, to hide her and to try to protect her in his private small room. They love each other but it seems that she was doomed to have the same destiny as her parents, family members and many other members of her nation. She was murdered.
I assume that the father, a simple tailor, of this boy entered this century with a deep hope of a new kind of state - the Republic of Czechoslovakia - of living in freedom and all the virtues and the values. But I may think what kind of fault this young boy who have matured, and is coming to the final end of this century, carries with him, what kind of a message he would deliver and convey to his children and to his grandchildren. Would he deliver a sense of despair, indifference between good and bad, evil within the human nature? Or would he convey some hope for the new century? This question is very relevant to all of us, human beings, at the close of this century. Because after the era of the post-modernism, of the post-human, I do believe that we shall hope together to create a new era of neo-humanism. Humanism that creates that basis of our co-existence as human beings. And this is one of the reasons that I am standing here, bringing and gratifying the initiative of the Czech President and Government to have this unique conference about the phenomenon of the holocaust. I must add that after the elections in Austria, I frightened there is another political reason. We have gone through other genocides at the end of this century, ethnic cleansing, and know the election is another warning.
I am standing here and wish to bring warm and most collegial greetings of Yad Vashem, the central memorial, authority of holocaust remembrance, research and education of the Jewish people, to your initiative, Mr. President to explore the phenomenon of the holocaust. Today in the free Czech Republic, the struggle for humanistic future of your and other peoples can be continued in the sprit and the tradition of some of your great leaders, as Jan Amos Komensky, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Charta 77.
We at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, have created through the many years a huge database that consists of more than tens of millions of document, and pursue to bring every piece of a document to Jerusalem to be kept there for eternity. We established an international institute for research. By now we have published maybe a whole library of works at academic, educational and literary levels. But we have decided to give the highest priority to the field of education, to teach the holocaust to anyone who is open and sensitive enough. For us, members of the Jews people, it comes only natural that we are studying and confronting the history of the holocaust every day. It has become part of our self-identity. But as a human being I think that it is more that legitimate to put the history of the holocaust an integral part of the human culture, a milestone of the history of the 20th century.
I may tell you, Mr. President, that yesterday my colleagues and myself have experienced I think a unique experience - attending a concert where they played a part of the songs On the Death of the Infants, famous songs by Gustav Mahler, to commemorate the remembrance of 1196 kids from Bialystok. Every one was a whole human being and the loss is a great loss among many others. We felt that it was a very sensitive and emotional playing of the concert. It was a bit not usual for us to listen to the concert in the church. We discussed the matter among ourselves and we thought that maybe it is good that those youngsters played the songs so sensitively, taking a step forward to establish the remembrance of the holocaust as a legitimate and relevant part of their own human culture. As I said before, we established an international school for holocaust studies in Jerusalem. We going to the new school in December this year. Next year we are about to organize the second international conference on the question of how to teach the history and the story of the holocaust, and many are attending all over the world. We are to praise you for you initiative and to tell you that Yad Vashem offers partnership not only with the many world centers, but with you, ministries, educators. We have good contacts and close relationship with the sight and the museum in Terezin, the Jewish community, and we are here to share the experience of many years as well as to learn from you. I hope that immediately after this conference, which is a great step forward, all the practical measures will be taken, as my colleague mentioned here, to start implementing some of the great ideas to establish a systematic system of teaching the history of the holocaust and opening a fruitful dialogue among the many who do care. Thank you so much and good luck.