A Warning

...What has seen us through since time immemorial, what will see us through in the future, are the indestructible bonds of suffering, remembrance and renewal that bind together all those who cherish freedom, all those who place their confidence in the courage, the decency and the intelligence of man...

...Who could have guessed that they were transporting perishable cargo...

...Those who at first did not feel directly endangered— until it was too late—retreated into silence and indifference, while an entire people was being put to death...

...To us, the Holocaust is not only an indelible memory of horror...

...We know that the unthinkable is indeed possible...

...In spite of their religious divergence...

...We are proud of the remarkable military capability, repeatedly demonstrated by Israel's officers and men, the courage and skill of its jet pilots and tank crews—the same Jews who, a short time ago, had been led to the massacre of Babi Yar...

...Jews and Arabs have coexisted in productive harmony for thousands of years, from the great era of Alexandria to the golden age of Spain—coexistence that has yielded fertile innovations in mathematics, astronomy, science, medicine and commerce...

...This unprecedented transformation of the national character, streaked with Prussian-like virtues, came about within the span of a single generation...

...The calvary we have lived cannot remain a perpetual lament...

...We must transmit the true meaning of the dangers that are thrusting mankind toward new disasters, their dreadful immediacy for our people, our world, and what it takes—the attitude of mind, the effort of will—to understand, to adapt, to endure and to overcome...

...And as we do so we must learn from its poison to draw insights into why our world once collapsed, how our children's world can be preserved...

...above all, coexistence between Arabs and Jews...

...Who would have thought that so long after the Bolshevik revolution, a vibrant, noble and courageous Jewish community would arise again in the Soviet Union, a community we feared had been lost to another faith—communism—a community we will never abandon...

...We have a duty to reaffirm, in this place and at this time, the primordial importance of the great ethical values of Judaism in the continued quest for survival and peace...

...Who would have thought, two thousand years ago, after the destruction of the Second Temple, that the center of gravity of Jewish life would gradually shift to Spain, and then to Western Europe and Eastern Europe, and Russia and America, before returning to a reborn state of Israel...

...From where, if not , from the bloodiest killing ground of all time, will come the hope that coexistence between so called "hereditary enemies" is possible— between Germans and Frenchmen, Chinese and Japanese, Americans and Russians...

...it is a permanent warning...

...When evil times return— unemployment, inflation, unrest and fear—it is always the fault of "others...

...But the memory of what I had lived through, of what an entire people have lived through for millenia, had broken the emotional dam before this ageless symbol of sorrow and of hope...

...the hundreds of cattle trains from all parts of Europe— from Warsaw and Paris, from Budapest and Oslo, from Saloniki and Amsterdam, which converged at the gates of the death camps...

...Who could have imagined that in the last hours of their agony, the parched, anguished, extinguished human beings behind the sliding steel doors of their rolling coffins were preparing a radiant posthumous victory...

...None of us will ever forget the long, slow, packed cattle trains that carried us off from towns, homes, families we would never see again, to the greatest infernos of this century...

...Then come the other "others"—immigrants, minorities, dissidents, intellectuals, artists—until an entire society is engulfed by gangrene...

...Jews would have to be crazy not to be psychotic about security, after the bloodbaths that have darkened our history so recently and so often in the past...

...From Jerusalem we will carry this torch of hope to a world that is sinking once again into helplessness and despair...

...This is how Europe collapsed forty years ago...

...After that, to lay our heads defenselessly on the chopping block of history, and hope that some international organization or foreign power, governed by the calculus of oil, money or other national self-interest, will come With the authority of the numbers engraved on our arms: never again...

...For we have seen the end of creation...

...about the future, a future that belongs to them...

...of the incomparable Jewish saga of learning, creation, invention, of the generosity of the human spirit and the victory of the human intellect over the forces of darkness and hate, which are part of our long heritage...

...But we are equally, and even more, proud of the outstanding achievements of Israel's agronomists, chemists, physicists, engineers and technicians who are in the forefront of peaceful economic development...

...For when history swallowed us up and spat us out in bits and pieces, we experienced events of Biblical, of Homeric proportions—events still too fresh and too potent for others to comprehend...

...In the popular cliches, we have always been viewed as a people of shopkeepers, moneylenders and bookworms devoted to the study of the scriptures...

...The new resurgence of anti-Semitism, whether against Israel or in the Diaspora, whether in France, which has a large Jewish community, or in Poland, which has none left, is an ominous symptom of the fever that is once again gripping the world...

...It is not true that Arabs and Jews are sworn enemies unto eternity, and president Anwar El Sadat has exposed that falsehood for the benefit of all...

...It was a metamorphosis that went against the grain, but which had been made inevitable by the martyrdom of the ghettos and the camps...

...In Jerusalem we speak to friend and to foe, to generations, to nations, to creeds, to black and white, to rich and poor, to young and old...

...From where, if not from the slaughterhouses of World War II, will come the lesson that true security cannot lie much longer in defendable borders and powerful arms alone...

...He is the author of Of Blood and Hope...

...And we are particularly proud of the high moral principles on which the state of Israel was founded...

...Today, we also recall our nightmare...

...But sometimes at moments of dark premonition, we see in the new images of religious fanaticism, racial hatred, terrorist violence and gathering mushroom clouds, a vision of doomsday...

...pulling him down through the hatch, into the womb of freedom...

...A huge Sherman tank with a white star lumbering across a clearing...

...the other part remains forever in the cinders of the Holocaust, where we have died six million times with our brothers and sisters...

...From where, if not from us, will come the warning that a new combination of technology and brutality can transform the planet into a crematorium...

...And a tall, black, helmeted G.I...

...At such times, against our profound commitment to calm reason, against our love of life, against our confidence in man, we feel as though in that indescribable period, when a burst of slogans and bombs shattered our homes, our families, our happiness and our minds, we experienced what is yet to come...

...My mind, my training, my experience told me that the sight was full of unfathomable complications, that the ageless passions and inalienable rights of others were also involved...

...Mine is as vivid as if it were yesterday...

...Who would have thought that through all the holocausts of our history, large and small—the slavery in Egypt, the Babylonian captivity, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms and the Nazi genocide, we would preserve our identity, our unity and our faith...

...The fear, the despair, the mounting anger at the root of simmering international issues that are debated so blood-lessly and impersonally by diplomats, economists and politicians, and that endanger what remains of liberty and of peace—we feel them in our bones...

...I draw this confidence from what we have endured, from what our people has endured across time and across space...

...I am serenely confident of our ability to meet these challenges...

...What other people has received such blows to its body and soul and yet lived on to stand at the graves of the tyrants who would destroy it...

...Now, in a homeland of their own, Jews have become a nation of farmers by choice and soldiers by necessity, in the biblical image of David, the shepherd and the warrior...

...Here, with the authority of the numbers engraved on our arms, we cry out the commandment of six million innocent souls, including one and a half million children, of whom I used to be one: never again...

...It is to hallow their martyrdom in a world whose memory has grown dim, and to celebrate our redemption, that we are gathered here today...

...A scared, skeletal kid jumping out of his hiding place, running through machine-gun fire toward the cannon pointed at his chest yelling at the top of his wasted lungs the few words of broken English his mother had taught him: "Heil Roosevelt—God bless America...

...In the shadow of permanently flaming gas chambers, where Eichmann's reality eclipsed Dante's vision of hell, we have witnessed a pilot project for the destruction of humanity, the death rattle of the entire species on the eve of the atomic age, of thermonuclear proliferation—the final solution...

...Israel—they have created you, they have populated you, they have defended you...

...In this sacred piece of land, reclaimed from a sterile desert, which ranks today among the greatest world powers in its agricultural, industrial, technological and scientific achievements, the dazzling proof is being furnished that the audacity of the mind can carry the struggle for survival to new dimensions, high above the rivalries and hatreds of the past...

...Today, when Israel sees any nuclear power plant in its region as a new gas chamber, any delivery of weapons to an adversary as a new enterprise of extermination, it displays an understandable psychosis about security...

...Herein lies the greatest hope of salvation today...

...And the first among the "others" are always the Jews...

...that it can only lie in a fundamental reassessment of the common perils and common needs of adversaries who must once and for all drown their passions in a joint enterprise of economic, cultural and human development, and ultimately, in the minds and school-books of children...

...We must help to arm them against the tragedies, the hypocrisies, the traps, the false gods of history...

...We have a unique legacy to hand down to our fellow-men, Jews and non-Jews alike, especially to the young, because our message is not about the past, but An international lawyer in New York and Paris and one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Dr...

...On that day, when we sobbed from the depths of our beings and from the wells of time, we knew that the cattle trains headed for Treblin-ka, Maidanek and Auschwitz had finally reached their destination...

...Nor will we ever forget the day, in 1967, when Jews worshipped again at the wailing wall of Jerusalem, battle helmets serving them as yarmulkas, prayer shawls draped over their machine guns...

...We know that man is capable of the worst as he is capable of the best, of madness as of genius...

...The rivers of blood and hope that have flooded our lives have renewed this sacred commitment to survival for centuries to come...

...Today, we recall our deliverance...

...In Jerusalem we speak to God and to man...

...We are gathered with heavy heart, mindful that we cannot fully rejoice in our own survival while others are dying nearby—Arabs, Christians and Jews—in a mounting sea of violence and hate...

...But we must also be aware that the psychosis can turn to suicidal paranoia if any danger or threat, whether real or imagined, in a region that is pregnant with both, becomes the automatic occasion for a military strike...

...Perhaps those who cheated death the way we did, and then learned to savor the intoxicating luxury of freedom, are fated to live out their days without an outer skin...

...mercifully to the rescue when extinction threatened again, would have been a form of deafness and blindness to the obvious lessons of the past...

...These shadows without graves, these victims of the greatest wound ever inflicted upon human civilization, cry out even today to all who betray the calling of man—tyrants through madness, democrats through blindness...

...It must become a source of inspiration and energy to face the challenges of survival that lie ahead...

...Pisar was liberated from the death camps by an American tank column in the spring of 1945...