Wiesel: Mister President, Chancellor Merkel, Bertrand, Ladies and Gentlemen, as I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visit my father’s grave. But he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. It has become the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.
The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. I became sick, weak and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me. Although we were in the same block – he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there but I was not there.
And I thought: One day I will be able to come back and speak to him and tell him of the world that has become mine. I speak to him of times in which memory has become a sacred duty of all people of good will. In America, where I live, or in Europe or in Germany where you, Chancellor Merkel, are the leader with great courage and moral aspirations.
What can I tell him? That the world has learned? I am not so sure. Mister President, we have such high hopes on you because you with your moral vision of history will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place where people will stop making war - every war is absurd and meaningless - that people will stop hating one another, that people will hate the otherness of the other - other than expected.
But the world hasn’t learned.
I was liberated in 1945 April 11th by the American army. Somehow many of us where convinced that at least one lesson will have be learned: That never again will there be war, that hatred is not an option, that racism is stupid, and the will to conquer other peoples, minds or territories or aspirations. That will is meaningless. I was so hopeful. Paradoxically I was so hopeful then, many of us were. Although we had the right to give up on humanity, to give up on culture, to give up on education, to give up on the possibility of living one’s life with dignity in the world that has no place for dignity.
We rejected that possibility. And we said: "No, we must continue believing in the future because the world has learned”. But again, the world hasn’t. Had the world learned there would be no Cambodia and no Ruanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.
Will the world ever learn?
I think that is why Buchenwald is so important, as important, of course, but differently as Auschwitz. It is important because here, in the large, the big camp it was a kind of international community. People come here from all horizons – political, economic, cultural. The first globalization–, I say, experiment, was made in Buchenwald. And all that was meant to diminish the humanity of human beings.
I spoke of humanity, Mister President, to us in those times it was human to be inhuman. And now the world has learned – I hope. And of course this hope includes so many of what now will be your vision for the future, Mister President. A sense of security for Israel, a sense of security for his neighbors, to bring peace in that place. The time has come. It’s enough, enough to go to cemeteries, enough to weep for orphans. It’s enough! There must come a moment of bringing people together.
And therefore we say: Anyone who comes here should go back to the solution: Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart. Memory is here not to sow anger in our hearts, but on the contrary a sense of solidarity with all those who need us. What else can we do except invoke that memory so that people everywhere will say: The 21st century is a century of new beginnings, filled with promise and infinite hope and at times of fond gratitude to all those who believe in our task, wishes to improve the human condition.
A great man, Camus, wrote at the end of his marvelous novel "The plague”: "After all, he said, after the tragedy nevertheless there is more in the human being to celebrate than to denigrate”. Even that can be found as truth, painful as it is, in Buchenwald.
Thank you, Mister President, for allowing me to come back to my father’s grave which is still in my heart.
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Mitschrift Pressekonferenz
Statement of Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald
Fr, 05.06.2009
Statement of Elie Wiesel after visiting the National Buchenwald Memorial, a former Nazi concentration camp, with Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Barack Obama on Juni 5th 2009 in Buchenwald
