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$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter XIII: Conclusion}
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$Author{Various}
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$Subject{world
suffering
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human
holocaust
remember
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humanity
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$Date{1987}
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Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter XIII: Conclusion

Chairman:  Miles Lerman (USA):  Businessman; Holocaust survivor; chairman,
International Relations Committee, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Eli Zborowski (USA):  Businessman; Holocaust survivor; honorary president,
American Federation of Jewish Fighters, Camp Inmates and Nazi Victims; member,
Executive Committee, Yad Vashem; member, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Mark E. Talisman (USA): director, Washington Action Program, Council of Jewish
Federations; Vice Chairman, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Dr. Leo Eitinger (Norway):  Professor of Psychiatry, University of Oslo;
survivor of Auschwitz.

Elie Wiesel (USA):  Author; Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities,
Boston University; Chairman, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Institutional identifications are those at the time of the Conference.

Miles Lerman

     Thirty-six years ago, you and your comrades-in-arms liberated the world
from the greatest evil that mankind has ever designed.  Today, before we
formally proceed with honoring you, the living liberators, we must take a
moment to pay tribute to those who died on the battlefields against this
terrible oppression.  We recall and honor the brave soldiers and officers of
all Allied nations who fell in the battle from the shores of Normandy to the
snows of Stalingrad.  In their struggle to drive the invaders from their
homelands, they died courageously so their children could grow up and live as
free men.  We honor their memory.

     We remember with sadness the unfortunate prisoners of war who were
subjected to the most cruel hardships, starvation, and infectious diseases.
Their German captors, in total defiance of all international military
understanding and laws, treated them as slaves and not as prisoners of war,
and killed them by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands.  We remember them
in sadness.

     We render special honor to the valiant heroes and heroines of the
partisan units who with meager weapons but with enormous courage stood up to
the mighty enemy, disrupted their supply lines, and caused them heavy losses
in every possible way.  Their bravery and heroism is the great inspiring
legend for generations to come.

     With deep respect and reverence, we recall the national patriots,
political opponents, and spiritual leaders whose undaunted patriotism and love
for their national freedom secured their eternal place in the memory of their
respective nations.  Many of them were torn away from their families never to
return; they were beaten and brutally tortured by their Gestapo interrogators,
but they chose to die rather than to betray their comrades.  They went to the
gallows with patriotic songs on their lips.  It was their struggle that gave
the power of endurance to their people.  These acts of courage will long be
remembered.

     We will forever remember the Righteous Gentiles who at the risk of their
own lives reached out with brotherly hands to offer desperately needed food
and shelter to some of their Jewish neighbors and friends. Their noble
behavior served as a beacon of light in the world of total darkness.  By their
actions, those Righteous Gentiles preserved the sense of godliness in a world
bereft of human compassion.  Their acts of mercy will be hallowed in the
annals of history of mankind.

     With an abiding sense of loss, we mourn the innocent victims of the
Holocaust - the six million men, women, and children who were systematically
annihilated not for what they had done or intended to do, but for one reason
only - because they were born Jews.  These we will remember and vow never to
forget.  May the memory of their tragic deaths serve as a lesson and warning
to us and the generations that will follow.

Eli Zborowski

     We, the survivors of the Holocaust, are grateful to the soldiers of the
Allied forces who liberated us from Nazi tyranny.  We owe our entire lives to
you.

     As members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, we are
privileged to greet you as our guests at this historic meeting of the
liberators together with the survivors.  We welcome you, who have come from
near and far, to share with us a few days of recollection.

     We, who witnessed man's inhumanity to man, also bear witness to the
finest in man.  We have seen both faces of humanity.  We witnessed the German
atrocities committed against innocent civilians, the murder of six million
Jews, the destruction of hundreds of villages and the complete destruction of
the Jewish communities and their culture in Europe.

     We then lived to see the other face of humanity, the entire world united
in dedication to a common aim of the defeat of Nazism.  We have seen the
courageous soldiers who displayed heroism in saving us, the remnants of
European Jewry.  The Allied armies crushed the Nazi beast and restored peace
and freedom to a suffering, occupied Europe.

     We heard our Chairman, the renowned author Elie Wiesel, recall in a way
only possible to Wiesel a glimpse of the survivors' feelings at the moment of
liberation.

     We heard a most moving eyewitness account of Colonel Dr. Chilczuk, who
recalled what he had seen when he and his Polish unit as part of the Soviet
army liberated the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen.

     We heard Rabbi Herschel Schacter, who as a young chaplain of the American
army was confronted with the indescribable reality of the concentration camp
of Buchenwald.  Rabbi Schacter moved to tears the generals and other
participants when he described the eyes of the skeletons looking at him in
disbelief when he said to them in Yiddish, "Jews, Jews, you are free.  I am an
American, an American Jew.  You are free, Jews."

     We toast the brave and heroic armies of the East and the West, the sons
of those countries who laid down their lives in their fight against Nazism and
who gave us life once more.

     We, Jews, the only people destined by the Nazis for a "Final Solution,"
were saved and fascism was defeated thanks to the Allied forces. Thanks to
your bravery.

     We are alive, yes, we are here, although only remnants of the once-
flourishing European Jewish communities, and we are here thanks to you, our
liberators.

     The happy moments of liberation are beyond description and are cherished
by all survivors.  I recall January 17, 1945, as the day when I was liberated
by the Soviet forces led by General Petrenko, who came from Moscow to
participate in this conference, and whose soldiers entered the death camp of
Auschwitz.

     There were other heroic people during the Holocaust.  We recall the
partisans and organized resistance throughout Europe that fought the Germans
behind the front lines.  We remember the lonely battle of the Warsaw Ghetto
and the uprisings in other ghettos.  We recall the brave soldiers of the
Jewish Brigade.  And we remember with special gratitude and recognition those
Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews.

     My family was saved by such heroic individuals in western Poland, and my
wife, a child of I 3 all alone, was saved by a Polish woman in eastern Poland.
We recall with overflowing joy the liberation, but unfortunately liberation
came too late for many suffering people, too late for my father. So was the
liberation too late for six million Jews and millions of other victims.

     Our meetings at the State Department are symbolic.  Today, they are our
hosts, while during the years of the Holocaust, we were denied entry visas to
the free world.

     Today, we are grateful to all those countries who received us after the
war and gave us a place to live so that we could rebuild our lives and our
families and become, once more, contributing members of society and, in
countless instances, leaders and influential citizens.  We, former camp
inmates and Nazi victims, together with you, our liberators, have a duty to
bear witness, to leave a legacy behind for mankind that transcends all
political, social, or economic boundaries, so that the lives of our dear ones
and the lives of all those soldiers fallen in action will not have been in
vain.

     You, who opened the gates of the death camps and the concentration camps
as our liberators, have an obligation to remind the world of what you saw
there.

     We, as survivors, who saw both faces of humanity, the darkest hour of
human history, and the most noble deeds of man, want the generations to come
to draw a lesson from our experiences as to what racism, anti-Semitism, and
hatred can lead to.

     And we want our children to retell it to their children that after all
our sufferings, we have not lost our faith in humanity.  Just the opposite.
While we call on all decent people never to forget and not to let the world
forget the horrors of the past, we want to stress our belief in humanity and
our hope that a world of friendship, freedom, and coexistence can be built,
must be built.

Mark E. Talisman

     As these days' events have amply demonstrated to all of us and to the
world, it is vital to remember, even when remembering is excruciatingly
painful; even as our minds are willingly dulled to the levels of pain and
suffering which can be consciously inflicted upon humankind in the name of
government and law; even when morality is suborned in the name of so-called
civilization to eradicate a people from this earth and raise the horrors of
war efficiently to break, maim, and murder millions of others, assuming such
infamous, incomparably despicable behavior would go unchallenged and
undaunted.

     You, the liberators, have taken the enormous step to be present together
these days individually and collectively to recount, to jog memory of nearly
four decades of debris, ashes, and what must be unwittingly natural acts of
suppression, and by so doing, you have served your children and their children
so very well.  It is your eyes and your acts and those whom you represent, who
brought this unprecedented period of the darkest history to a close.

     Yet it is with your presence here together and individually that you
continue to bear witness to the future of humankind which must never allow
such calumny again to occur.  Your voices and your words must be indelibly
etched in the moral memory of each generation, far into the future, long past
your last breath, your last ounce of strength, and your physical presence.

     Uniquely, you each have served magnificently, nearly 40 years ago.  You
have again been asked and have willingly, once again, acted affirmatively to
serve at this conference, and you must continue, as long as you can, to be an
eyewitness.

     I was four years old at the time.  My wife, Jill, was two.  We face the
challenging tasks of bringing up two very small children, Jessica and Raphael.
We are deeply grateful to you.  For with your help it is conceivable that the
leadership of this planet will remember and its citizens will not forget.
With your help, and that of millions of others, such remembering will not be
denigrated in any way but instead will be seized upon as the ultimate
challenge and opportunity which you surely have provided in your original
deeds and in these days of witness to our children and theirs, who will be
able to remember through your eyes.

Dr. Leo Eitinger

     It is an unexpected and undeserved privilege, and, may I say, one of the
greatest honors ever bestowed upon me, to be allowed on behalf of all
delegates present, to address this unique meeting.  Please forgive me for
feeling overwhelmed, not only by the memories of the past that were recalled
in so many ways during our meetings of the last days, but also - or rather
first of all - by my feelings of gratitude which I share with all the
delegates who have been invited to be at this conference.

     Our thanks go first of all to the creators of the conference.  It took
the imagination and ingenuity of Elie Wiesel to conceive an idea that seems so
simple and obvious: that we the the survivors, scattered throughout the world,
should at least once in our lifetimes meet with some of the men to whom we owe
our liberation.  We all know that the most obvious things are very often the
most difficult to realize.  But it also required the resources of the United
States to establish a Holocaust Memorial Council, and the resources of the
United States Department of State to organize and convene such a conference,
providing resources, but first and foremost, moral and humanitarian support.

     Our thanks go to the liberators.  Not only did they free us by liberating
the concentration camps while hurrying through Europe to victory.  No, while
the decisive battles were taking place, they used manpower and material with
an organizing effort and effectiveness we never experienced before to rescue
human beings, the weak and the sick, the seemingly hopeless cases.

     The English Dr. Collins, who came to Bergen-Belsen together with his
troops immediately after the liberation, wrote an extremely dramatic account
of his experience, and he himself called the description a gross
understatement.  He concluded his article in the following way: "The problem
of what to do with these forsaken, almost lost souls is immense, but one which
if not tackled and solved will make all our efforts a mere waste of time, for
then it were kinder to let them die than to have brought them back to mere
existence and more sufferings in a hostile world, where they no longer have
even a hope of being able to compete in the struggle of the survival of the
fittest - and must inevitably go down."

     Well, the American troops surely did not tarry in trying to tackle and
solve the problem.  Never shall I forget my admiration and my incredulity when
seeing in Buchenwald, US soldiers carrying with their own hands sick and
helpless prisoners.  They transported them from the desolate barracks, to
so-called sick bays, a travesty of language, to hospitals established by the
US army immediately after its arrival.  In this very practical and prosaic
way, hundreds of human beings were saved.

     What could give me more satisfaction than having the opportunity to say
finally and here in Washington:  Thank you for what you have done for my
comrades and for us all in rescuing them and us from certain death, because,
unlike the other Norwegian prisoners, the remnants of the deported Norwegian
Jews, numbering 22, were not rescued by the Swedish Red Cross before the end
of the war.

     But, first of all, thank you for having restored our belief in humanity
and mankind.  Because what Dr. Collins did not know, and did not take into
consideration, was the fact that many concentration camp inmates made the most
heroic efforts to remain human beings in spite of everything, in spite of all
the Nazis' efforts to kill them psychologically before the final somatic
annihilation.

     It has been stated that identification with the aggressor was the most
general coping mechanism in the camps.  In reality it was seldom the case and
nearly always led to the destruction of those involved.  It was also true, as
Collins correctly surmised, that the suffering in the camps would lead to
disastrous lifelong consequences.  Much work - medical, psychiatric, and
social - was needed to alleviate these pathological states and to reintroduce
a more or less normal life to the traumatized victims.

     On the other hand, those people inside the camps who were able to
liberate themselves internally from the yoke of slavery; who retained their
humanity, their self-respect, their human values; people who, like the young
Elie Wiesel, were ready to undergo additional suffering voluntarily in order
to spare others from being humiliated - people who were concerned not only
with themselves, but with the fate of others, were those who were able to
survive with less psychological damage than people who abandoned themselves
and their innermost values, people who were completely overwhelmed by the
notion that they had nobody and nothing to struggle or live for.  The inner
liberation from slavery and from the ideology of fascism proved to be of
importance not because it gave one a capacity for immediate physical survival,
but also it enabled one to survive without too many psychological
disturbances, and with one's personality intact - as far as this was possible
at all.

     So my final thanks to all of you who have shown not by words, but by
deeds, not under luxurious circumstances, but under the most extreme
restrictions, that human values are real values.  Our thanks go to you who are
bearers of the torch which brings light and hope to thousands and hundreds of
thousands of human beings working for a better life in a better world without
persecution of any minorities, where minority groups are allowed to live in
peace, a world with less suffering.

     Our thanks go to you who have honored us as delegates and have invited us
to be together with you; it makes us proud and at the same time very humble
indeed, and brings all of us a deep debt of gratitude to all of you.

Elie Wiesel

     May I tell you a story?  I wrote a book many, many years ago, and that
book was my first.  It was a memoir about the war, the only autobiographical
work that I have written.  It's about suffering, evil, inhumanity.  Here and
there are a few sparks of humanity.  One of those moments, one of those
sparks, tries to describe a scene in the hospital in Buna which is Auschwitz.

     I was very young, and suddenly my left foot was injured.  I was taken to
the hospital.  My father was still alive, and I felt the end had come for me.
In the hospital, I found one of the most beautiful human beings in the world;
in the camp, inside the kingdom of darkness and night, there was a man who was
total humanity in his expressions, in his words, in his caring, in the way he
looked at people.  After surgery, I remember, when I came to, I was in
terrible pain.  This doctor stood near my bed, and he began consoling me, and
he began speaking to me about good things that will happen, because they are
bound to happen one day.  He told me one day I would walk again and one day
man would be free again, and one day maybe God would listen again, and one day
we would smile again.  Do you know who that man is? [The reference is to the
previous speaker, Dr. Leo Eitinger.]

     In a way, we have gathered here under the sign and the seal of gratitude.
I cannot begin to tell you the depths of gratitude that I feel now for you,
not only because of the past, but now because of what happened in the last
three days.

     I hope you will believe me that I was afraid.  We did not know.  My
colleagues and I worked for months, and months, and months, but yet deep down
there was a fear in me.  What if it failed?  It would have been a catastrophe.
After all, we come from different countries, from different systems, from
different places.  We are Jews and non-Jews; religious Jews and less-religious
Jews, and good Christians, and liberators, and victims, and children of the
survivors.

     Yet, in spite of the fears, we pulled it off. 1 was a journalist once
upon a time, and I have covered a lot of conferences and I do not remember a
conference where there has been such a harmony.  Why?  I was wondering why.
Because we all felt this should not fail.  This is a historic event, which has
metaphysical implications.  The Holocaust has metaphysical implications. It
brings out either the worst in the bad as it was with the killers or the best
in the good - as it was with the liberators, the partisans, the victims. It is
either way.  Anyone who is in touch with that period, with that pain, with
that event, suddenly feels that he or she lives on a different planet.

     So for the last three days we lived a moment in time which was outside
time.  On one hand, you have the feeling that we've just begun, and on the
other, you have the feeling it lasted so long, so long.  I do not really
believe that I heard one dissonant sound.  After all, you represent different
systems and countries and governments, ideologies.  There are tensions.  There
must be.  It's not normal not to have tensions.  But there were none here.
None.  Somehow we all spoke the same language.  We became what we area
fraternity, a human community dedicated to the ideal that after all there must
be more in man to be admired than to be despised.  In spite of everything, we
must go on believing in that and in each other.

     There was another fear in me.  It may become morbid.  After all, you have
seen and we have lived in the darkest, the ugliest chapter in history. It was
not only the death; it was the ugly face of death.  My God, do you know what
was difficult for us after the war?  Not to adjust to life, but to adjust to
death, to the fact that death is something individual, that death is not a
normal phenomenon, that death is a scandal, and death is an injustice, and
that we cannot accept death as a day-to-day phenomenon.  But then it was.
People disappeared, they vanished.  My God, when you looked at those people
whom the killers have degraded, in their rags, when you look at those children
- I always remember the children.  I could live my entire life and only speak
of those children, of those million Jewish children. Yet, how could we go on?
How could we laugh?

     I remember two books.  One of them was written by a man named Yankel
Wiernik, a carpenter.  He participated in the uprising of Treblinka, and he
wrote a book in 1944.  He said, among other things, Will I be able to laugh
again one day?  And I saw this as the end.  Nothing could be more tragic.  But
then I read two diaries written by members of the Sonderkommando.  I'm sure
you spoke about it at the uprising session.  They had written for history, and
the documents were buried under the ashes, and they were discovered years
later.  In one of these books is a sentence which breaks me up.  The author
asks, Will I ever be able to cry again?  So I was afraid maybe we will cry.

     My friends, the liberators, to whom we owe so much, look whom you
liberated.  Look at us.  We are not bitter, and we are not vengeful.  We are
not even morbid, and maybe this is the greatest anomaly in the world.
Normally, my friends, we should have all gone into an asylum.  After having
gone through what we have gone through, and after having seen what you have
seen, we should have ended up in a lunatic asylum, depressed forever.  But we
have not.  There are temptations.  For me, to be Jewish is to be human. Just
as for you to be human is to be Russian or to be French, and that is my
expression of humanity.  There are so many reasons in the world.  The cynicism
of so many, the forgetfulness of so many, the materialism of so many, and the
viciousness of so many.

     I was in Cambodia two years ago.  I saw what was happening there.  The
incredible murder, and the world didn't say anything.  Then I saw the boat
people.  Before that there were so many wars in the world.  How is it possible
to have wars in the world?

     That is why we speak.  That is the reason why.  It is not easy.  It is
not.  It took me l0 years to write my first book.  I did not want to write,
because suffering is something so personal, so private, that often parents do
not even talk to their children about it.  We only accept our suffering in our
nightmares.  But then if we had not decided to break out and to share with
you, I am afraid we would have caused humanity to be ashamed now, even more,
for what it had let be done then.  Therefore, we go on bearing witness for all
men, in spite of everything.

     We must prevent more violence.  We must prevent more wars.  We must
unmask hatred.  Unless we do that, mankind has no chance of survival.

     Of course, we speak on behalf of suffering.  That gives us a certain
authority, but I do not believe, I never have, that suffering confers any
privilege.  It is what you do with suffering that matters.  If you use
suffering to cause more suffering, then you betray your suffering.  But if you
live your suffering and you accept it to prevent other suffering, you have the
moral authority to speak.

     Therefore, we met here, and I am utterly convinced that these are the
ideas and thoughts that moved you as they moved me for the last two and three
days.  We had privileged moments here, such as my meetings with General
Petrenko and General Gudz, with an officer who liberated me in Buchenwald, and
the meetings that I had with friends I had not seen for 40 years. 1 am sure it
happened to you as well.  There were privileged moments when we heard certain
addresses, when we heard you, Mr. Hausner, speak so eloquently about the
failure of education in the Nazi system, or about the death marches that
Yehuda Bauer spoke of, or Karski's speech.  I would take his speech and print
it in The New York Times, at our expense - since they don't want to publish
anything else - I would buy two pages and print the entire speech of Karski.

     In conclusion, the French minister urged us a few times not to be only
bent to the past, but to look to the future.  We are looking for the future.
If it were not for our children, we would not do it.  It is too painful.  But
we are thinking of tomorrow's generation, and we do want to set an example. It
is possible for man and woman to be together and not to hate each other. It is
possible for men and women of all creeds, of all ages, to be together and
declare together that there is something about human dignity which we must
cherish.  There is something about human respect which we must espouse. There
is something about freedom, and something about the future, and something
about beauty - I use the word advisedly - that bind us together. Therefore, we
are looking to the future, Monsieur Laurain, as we spoke before.

     You may know already, we have decided to try and keep our group, our
community, together, which means whatever happened here should not be the end
of an anecdote.  It has to be part of history.  And it will be. Therefore, we
shall meet again.  The chairmen of all the delegations will meet in a few
weeks, or a few months - I think that we shall prevail upon Monsieur Laurain
to speak to Monsieur Mitterand about perhaps meeting in France in May - and
from time to time simply to meet to reassure ourselves that we can make a
difference.  If we speak with enough conviction and humanity, people will
listen.  They have to.

     My friends, we have met once 40 years ago.  We meet again now.  We gave
each other something.  We gave each other a lesson in gratitude.  The words
that came back in every speaker's words were gratitude.  I am sure our group
will confirm that there was one word that was, I think, officially stricken
from the SS vocabulary.  Do you know that?  The SS had no right to use the
expression "thank you, because they thought everything was coming to them,
that they could take everything.  We who survived and those who saw the
survivors know that there is in the world and in life and in man a reason to
justify gratitude.

     For us survivors, everything is an offering, everything is grace, every
minute is grace. 1 could have remained there.  By luck we came out. That is
why we are trying to use every minute that we have and every word at our
disposal to do something with our lives.  Yes, occasionally we are accused of
being prisoners of our memories.  True.  But we are prisoners who want to set
other people free.  That is our task.  I thank you and wish you farewell until
we meet again.