Stop thinking that the horrors of the world will simply work themselves out. By Charles M. Blow Sept. 13, 2020

Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors from around the world discuss how they are carrying the memory of the Holocaust into the future.

Rachael Cerrotti (USA) is a 3rd generation descendant, an award-winning multidisciplinary storyteller and educator. Her work explores the intergenerational impact of migration and memory.

Rachael has been published and featured by NPR, PRI’s The World, Kind World, WBUR, WGBH, The Boston Globe, Images & Voices of Hope, The Times of Israel and various other publications throughout Israel, Europe and the United States. In 2019, she released her first podcast — We Share The Same Sky — which was produced for USC Shoah Foundation and tells the story of her decade-long journey to retrace her grandmother’s war story. Her forthcoming memoir will be published in Fall of 2021.

Rachael holds a degree in Communications from Temple University and is an alumni of The Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rachael has completed educator’s seminars with Yad Vashem and Facing History & Ourselves, and has worked in over a dozen countries.

Ricki Gurwitz (Canada) is a former producer at CTV News Channel. She started her career in New York, where she was a producer at WABC News Talk Radio. She moved back to Toronto in 2009, and took over the production of The Bill Carroll Show and The Jerry Agar Show on Newstalk 1010. In 2011, Ricki made the switch to television, joining CTV News Channel as a segment and associate producer.

In 2015, Ricki left CTV to produce The Accountant of Auschwitz, her first feature documentary. In 2015, 94-year-old former German SS officer Oskar Gröning, nicknamed “the accountant of Auschwitz” was charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz in 1944. The trial made headlines around the world as a frail old man took the stand to face his former victims. Gröning’s trial reflects not only one frail bookkeeper’s penitence, but the world’s responsibility to hold the worst of human horrors forever to public view.

Currently, Ricki is a producer at the Munk Debates, the world’s largest public debate forum.

Dr. Liat Steir-Livny (Israel) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Culture at Sapir Academic College, and a tutor and course coordinator for the Open University of Israel’s Cultural Studies MA program and the Department of Literature, Language, and the Arts. Liat’s research focuses on Holocaust commemoration in Israel.

Liat is the recipient of the 2019 Young Scholar Award given jointly by the Association for Israel Studies (AIS) and the Israel Institute. She is also the author of five books:Two Faces in the Mirror analyzes the representation of Holocaust survivors in Israeli cinema; Let the Memorial Hill Remember discusses the changing memory of the Holocaust in contemporary Israeli culture; Is it O.K to Laugh about it? analyzes Holocaust humor, satire and parody in Israeli culture; Three Years, Two Perspectives, One Trauma analyses the media of prominent Jewish organizations in the USA and Eretz-Israel after WWII; and Remaking Holocaust Memory analyses documentary Cinema by 3G descendants in Israel.​

Cayle White (USA) of 3GNY will moderate this webinar. Cayle is the granddaughter of two Holocaust Survivors from Poland. She grew up in Toronto, Canada, and moved to New York City to pursue her Liberal Arts degree at New York University.

Cayle is a board member of 3G New York, committee member of the Holocaust Committee of the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, Moth storyteller, stage performer, public speaker for NYC middle and high school students, and educational consultant and admissions coach for special needs and Jewish Day schools. Cayle and her network of experts, therapists, evaluators and educators work with students from preschool through high school.

Cayle was also the associate-producer of Kensington: A Past Without a Future, a documentary about the Jewish immigrant quarter of Toronto, and the writer, director and narrator of the documentary Poor but Stupid, which earned her a National Film Board of Canada honorable mention in 2002.

Speech Delivered April 12, 1999, Washington, D.C.

Audio of address:

Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends:

Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.

And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people. “Gratitude” is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary, or Mrs. Clinton, for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.

We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations (Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin), bloodbaths in Cambodia and Algeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifference.

What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?

Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.

Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were — strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.

Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.

And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.

And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945. So he is very much present to me and to us. No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.

The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — nearly 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already in the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help.

Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, the great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?

But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we call the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war? Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?

And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.

And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man, whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity.

But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.

Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents, be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?

What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.

Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.

And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.

The Ten Stages of Genocide By Dr. Gregory H. Stanton

The Legacy and Response by Elie Wiesel
 
The Legacy of Holocaust Survivors
 And the Pledge of Acceptance Of the Second Generation
 
Read in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, French, Russian and Ladino At the Western Wall In Jerusalem on June 18, 1981 during the Closing Ceremony of the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
 
THE LEGACY
 Written in Yiddish by Elie Wiesel
 
We take this oath: We take this oath in the shadow of the flames whose tongues scar the soul of our people. We vow in the name of dead parents and children; we vow, with our sadness hidden, our faith renewed; we vow we shall never let the sacred memory of our perished Six Million be scorned or erased.
 
We saw them hungry, in fear, we saw them rush to battle; we saw them in the loneliness of night – true to their faith. At the threshold of death, we saw them. We received their silence in silence, merged their tears with ours.
 
Deportations, executions, mass graves, death camps, mute prayers. Cries of revolt, desperation, torn scrolls; cities and towns, villages and hamlets, the young, the old, the rich, the poor, ghetto fighters and partisans., scholars and messianic dreamers, ravaged faces, fists raised. Like cloud of fire, all have vanished.
 
We take this oath! Vision becomes word; to be handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, from generation to generation.
 
Remember what the German killers and their accomplices to our people. Remember them with rage and contempt. Remember what an indifferent world did to us and itself. Remember the victims with pride and with sorrow. Remember also the deeds of the righteous gentiles.
 
We shall also remember the miracle of the Jewish rebirth in the land of our ancestors, in the independent State of Israel. Here, pioneers and fighters returned to our people the dignity and majesty of nationhood. From the ruins of their lives, orphans and widows built homes and old-new fortresses on our redeemed land. To the end of our days we shall remember all those who realized and raised their dream – our dream – of redemption to the loftiest heights.
 
We take this oath here in Jerusalem, our eternal spiritual sanctuary. Let out legacy endure as a stone of the Temple Wall. For here prayers and memories burn. They burn and burn and will not be consumed.
 
THE ACCEPTANCE
 
We accept the obligation of this legacy.
 
We are the first generation born after the darkness. Throughout parents’ memories, words and silence, we are linked to that annihilated Jewish existence whose echoes permeate our consciousness.
 
We dedicate this pledge to you, our parents, who suffered and survived.
 
To our grandparents, who perished in the flames
 
To our vanished brothers and sisters, more than one million Jewish children, so brutally murdered
 
To all Six million whose unyielding spiritual and physical resistance, even in the camps and ghettos, exemplifies our people’s commitment to life.
 
We pledge to remember!
 
We shall teach our children to preserve forever that uprooted Jewish spirit which could not be destroyed
 
We shall tell the world of the depths to which humanity can sink and the heights which were attained, even in hell itself.
 
>>>We shall fight antisemitism >>>>and all forms of racial hatred by our dedication to freedom throughout the world.<<<<<<<<<<
 
We affirm our commitment to the State of Israel and to the furtherance of Jewish life in our homeland.
 
We pledge ourselves to the oneness of the Jewish people.
 
We are your children.
 
We are here.