Your Majesties, your Royal Highness, dear Elie, Excellencies, Friends.

An amazing thing has happened in the last decade – in fact, during the last few years: a tragedy that befell a certain people, at a certain time and certain places, has become the symbol of radical evil as such, the world over. With a museum on Auschwitz near Hiroshima, and a department to teach the Holocaust at Shanghai university, this has become a matter of universal concern. Major politicians, wrongly but characteristically, compare Saddam Hussein to Hitler, or the tragedy in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The number of books, theatrical and film productions, artistic and musical creations related to the event, the attention given to the Holocaust in the periodical, even the daily press, is snow-balling, fifty-five years after the end of World War II. Some of this is undoubtedly worthless, popular kitsch, or misleading; but some of it is very important, and valuable.

Whichever the case, how do we explain this growing preoccupation with the Holocaust? There have been other genocides, after all; and the number of the other victims of Nazism in World War II is much larger than that of the Jews. No one suffered more than the other; we must not compare suffering with suffering – it would be immoral to do so. But there is something unprecedented, frightening about the Holocaust of the Jewish people that should be taught: for the first time in the bloodstained history of the human race, a decision developed, in a modern state in the midst of a civilized continent, to track down, register, mark, isolate from their surroundings, dispossess, humiliate, concentrate, transport and murder every single person of an ethnic group as defined not by them, but by the perpetrators; not just in the country where the monster arose, not just on the continent the monster first wished to control, but ultimately everywhere on earth, and for purely ideological reasons. There is no precedent for that. And it happened to a people whose legacy is an important component of human civilization, whose traditions have influenced major religious and social movements, whose culture is thousands of years old. A people, too, who have borne the brunt of enmity towards them, basically because they dared to be different, and dared to insist on their difference. In times of crisis people sometimes – by no means always - develop hatred to those who are different. T

he Jews have been around a very long time, and the animosity towards them as the quintessential others became part of a long anti-Jewish tradition, especially but not exclusively in what is known as Christendom. That was the background, and the Holocaust sprang from a combination between that background and the crises of societies and states in the last century or so, culminating in National Socialism. National Socialism was a truly revolutionary creed that tried to reorder the world according to a new principle: not, as in the past, by religion, or class, or even nation, but by so-called race, a pseudo-scientific concept that aimed at a new world hierarchy of superior and inferior peoples. According to that ideology, the Jews were not a race at all, but an anti-race, the translation into secular language of the image of the devil. But that ideology, my friends, did and does not endanger the Jews only. The concept of race and racial hierarchy endangers all peoples, endangers world peace, endangers decent relations between all humans. And what happened to the Jews can and does happen, though not in the same way, to others. The Holocaust happened because it could happen; if it could not have happened, it would not have done so; and because it happened once, it can happen again, not in the same form, not necessarily to the same people, not by the same people, but to anyone by anyone. It was unprecedented, but now the precedent is there. It depends on all of us, especially on you, the politicians of this world, to turn this from a precedent into a warning.

In our present context, the Holocaust means two things, I believe: the event itself, its causes and its moral, psychological, social and political dimensions, as a specific history; and its universal aspects, because increasingly it serves today as a symbol for things we ought to oppose – racism, genocide, mass murder, ethnic hatred, ethnic cleansing, antisemitism, group hatred. In order to deal with the universal implications, we must deal with the Holocaust’s particular history. We don’t live in abstractions. All historical events are concrete, specific, particular. It is precisely the fact that it happened to a particular group of people that makes it of universal importance, because all group hatred is always directed against specific groups, for specific reasons, in specific circumstances. Do you want to begin the good fight against these evils? Don’t go out into the streets with placards saying ‘we are against evil’; if you do, you will, quite rightly, be laughed out of court. Evil is always concrete, specific. If you want to teach about it, teach specifics, with actual cases of real people.

The Holocaust is an extreme example of the context of despair. It was motivated by a murderous ideology, not by social structures, not by pragmatic considerations. Consider this: they forced Berlin Jews to work in armament factories in and around the city. On February 27, 1943, they took these Jewish workers, put them on trucks, brought them to the railway station with their families, and sent them to be murdered at Auschwitz. They did that after Stalingrad, when they needed every pair of hands in armament factories. They murdered Jews whom they forced to build their roads while they were building them, they murdered scientists and experts, just because they were Jews. Was that cost-effective, pragmatic? Most people around looked on and let it happen. The Allies who fought Nazi Germany saw in the murder of the Jews a minor side effect of National Socialism, not worth spending too much energy on. The Churches did not react – individuals in the Churches did, and the same theologies served those who tried to rescue and those who averted their face, as well as those who actively supported the murderers. Nineteen hundred years after the appearance of the Christian Messiah, who came from the Jews, his people were murdered by baptized heathen.

But, you see, on the thin margins of the horror, there were the rescuers: too few of them, too isolated, but their very existence gives us the justification to teach about the Holocaust. They showed that people had choices, that they could act differently from the multitude. Within the context of despair, they form the context of hope. In some cases, whole communities acted as rescuers – villages, areas, whole nations, such as the Danes, and to a considerable extent also the Italians. Yad Vashem has recognized, according to very strict criteria, some 17.000 such people, and there certainly were many more than that – still a tiny minority, and yet a large group of people. There were non-Jews who saved Jews, there were Jews who saved Jews.

A historian is a person who has to tell stories, so let me tell you a story that justifies our teaching the context of despair, and the context of hope within it. There was a righteous Jew, Yoshko Indig, a boy of eighteen in 1941, from Zagreb. When the German armies occupied Yugoslavia, he took a group of refugee girls into the Bosnian mountains. Desperate parents gave him more children, and he got them into Italian-occupied Slovenia. They survived on help sent to them by Jewish rescue organizations. After a year there, Italian troops moved his children’s home to the village of Nonantola in the Appenine hills in central Italy. By that time he had 147 children, ages four to sixteen. With the help of a few adults, he organized their life, taught them, occupied their time, encouraged them, because of course they realized in due course that they were, most of them, orphans. And then, in September 1943, the Germans occupied Italy, and the children had to be hidden. So Yoshko went to the monastery in the village, and he turned to the Abbot there, and said – please take my children. And the good padre said – bring in the boys. And Yoshko said – and what about the girls? And the padre said – this is difficult; no woman has been inside this monastery for hundreds of years; my superior in Modena will not like it at all, how can I do it? And Yoshko said – but, monsignor, the girls also want to live. And so the Righteous non-Jew, Monsignor Ottaviano Pellati, looked at the Righteous Jew, Yoshko Indig, and said – bring them in. Bring all of them in! Now - is not that what we are here for? Bring in the children, the adults, the communities, all those who you can reach, and tell them – yes, we live in a terrible world, a world of suffering, of mass murders, of genocides, a world in which this extreme form of genocide could have happened and if we are not careful, might happen again, and we want you to know about it so you can teach about it and fight against it; but we also want you to know that you have a choice, a choice between evil and good, that you not only can but must choose which side you are on, the murderers and the hunters, the indifferent bystanders, the collaborators, or Yoshko Indig and Father Ottaviano Pellati, the righteous Jew and the righteous non-Jew, two righteous human beings.

Permit me, then, my friends, to repeat here what I said two years ago in the German Bundestag. I come from a people who gave the ten commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: Thou shall not be a perpetrator; Thou shall not be a victim; and Thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.