I want to begin with a word of respectful gratitude to the distinguished heads of state who have addressed us this morning and to those who have spoken to us over the course of the past several days. For the scholars who are gathered for this international, I express our immense appreciation, both for your presence and your forthright commentaries on the tragic moment in history that brings us together. Those of us who have devoted our professional careers to probing the record of the great calamity of the century which has just drawn to a close take heart in the commitment of leaders of the world’s nation-states not to let the lessons of that catastrophe be lost on the minds and hearts of the peoples of their countries. There is every temptation to do so - to feel that a new century - indeed a new millennium - provides an opportunity to turn our minds and attention away from the horrors and tragedies of the past and to begin with a clean slate - one that is focused on development and progress in the future.

Should this happen, it would only increase the possibility that the world will see more deliberate genocides in the years ahead, for it remains true that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Therefore, your resolve to see that, in your countries and especially in the education of the young people of your nations, the story of the virtual annihilation of a people solely because they were believed to present a "racial problem" in one of the great societies and cultures of the modern world - your resolve to insure that this story and its implications are never forgotten serves as an inspiration and a source of renewed resolve for all of us.

Please permit me now to turn our attention to the work before us today. One hundred years ago, as the world stood poised on the threshold of the century which has just drawn to a close, the novelist and futurist, H.G. Wells warned that humankind was engaged in a race between "education and catastrophe." According to the historian Paul Kennedy it was clear to Wells and to later writers like George Orwell that industrial society had "the unprecedented capacity to create prosperity and comfort but [that it] also contained undeniable new powers to harm, to victimize and to control" [New York Times Book Review, 2 January 2000, p. 4]. By mid-century, the world had learned to its horror just how catastrophic the power and impulses of the human species could be. Ever since, the warning of Wells has become the watchword of our time - we continue to be engaged in a race to determine whether knowledge, education and the possibilities of human enlightenment can win out over the impulse toward human destructiveness.

For those who believe that coming to grips with the catastrophe which enveloped Europe in 1939 - which drew the entire globe into armed conflict for six fateful years, and which saw the virtual annihilation of the European Jews populace - those who believe confronting that catastrophe is one of the most important obligations of our and future generations, our work becomes more difficult with each passing year. We carry it as an obligation because we believe if there is to be any hope for the world, it lies in recognizing and acknowledging our capacity as human creatures to wreak havoc and destruction on one another, and because the Holocaust or the Shoah remains history’s most graphic example of how deep and how barbaric that capacity can be. But many of us who carry this sense of obligation recognize that we are a rapidly ageing generation. Those who remember the war years are grown old; those who were eye-witnesses to the annihilation - either as its intended victims or those who were rescuers or who merely watched from afar - all these, as has been frequently observed, will soon no longer be able to personally recount their experiences. We stand of the threshold of that era in which the processes and resources of education will be the only means we have to try and instill in present and future generations a sense of what occurred and why it has such significance for all of humankind.

Perhaps most difficult of all, we must try to convey the message of the Shoah to what may be termed the "e-mail generation" - to young people in Europe, Asia and the Americas who are intent on taking full advantage of the marvels and benefits of a technological revolution which appears to have neither limits in its creations nor in its extent. How do we capture the attention - not to mention the interest - of a generation so wedded to its cell phones and its personal computers and especially to the wealth-creating possibilities that these instruments seem to symbolize - how are we to try and convey to these young creatures the importance we attach to the fact that two generations ago, the government of one of the world’s most scientifically advanced, technological proficient, culturally sophisticated, God-fearing nations decided to solve what it perceived as its racial problem by annihilating the putative racial minority in its midst?

We face two, major tasks with respect to education, the Holocaust and the future. In the long term, we must deal with the prospect of raw ignorance - of successive generations who are more and more removed from the traumas of the mid-twentieth century and for whom all its defining moments - the Great Depression, the War, The Holocaust - will become artifacts of ancient history, as remote in time and in memory as the Black Plague or the Thirty Years War was for the twentieth century. If education is the only antidote to ignorance, then we must look to the museums and the memorials, the courses in schools and the conferences, the oral histories and the survivors’ testimonies to carry the major burden of witness and remembrance.

But in the short term, the problem we face is not ignorance but acknowledgment and ownership. With each passing year, the number of persons who deny that they have any personal obligation regarding the Holocaust increases - post-war Germans who consider the Holocaust to be the problem of their parents’ generation, young Europeans for whom the Holocaust is a tragic but a past history, young North Americans who are ostensibly bewildered by the very idea that the Holocaust should have any importance for them.
To each of these, our pedagogical task is to lead them toward the recognition that the world continues to be haunted by the same false patriotism, the same nationalistic self-deceptions, the same racial and ethnic arrogances that brought about the Shoah and that unless we rid our societies of such dangerous presumptions and such lethal sentiments, the world of the 21st century and the new millennium will be a perilous as the century which preceded it.

Our primary task as educators is that of teaching present and future generations to respond to the Holocaust rather than react to it - to act responsibly in the face of knowledge about the catastrophe that overran European Jewry. For it is clear, when anyone close to the issues of the Shoah is approached, that the aim of nearly everyone is to create a social and political climate in our societies in which the reoccurrence of such a catastrophe would be unthinkable. It is not merely remembrance for remembrance’s sake or even memory as a monument to the victims of the Holocaust that primarily drives the concern and commitment of countless individuals but rather memory and the imparting of that memory so that the events which gave rise to it will never be repeated. From the strident cry of ‘Never Again’ to the more subdued but no less insistent call for teaching the Holocaust as part of the never-ending battle against racism and antisemitism, the fundamental hope and expectation is that people - especially young people - will learn to live and behave more responsibly toward one another. Leading and guiding young people toward living lives of responsibility - the obligation to take account of conditions and circumstances in society and to consider themselves answerable for whether those conditions persist or are changed - becomes one of the crucial challenges before us.

To teach about the Holocaust is to examine the enormous gulf between a society’s ideals and its harsh realities. It is a way of looking deeply not only at Germany in the era of National Socialism but also into our respective national histories and of forcing us to look at our societal flaws and failures, as well as our achievements, as this Forum has so courageously initiated. Societies are not prone to engage in this kind of collective introspection. Societies treasure an perpetuate the legends about themselves; they wish to be acknowledged as a "superpower" or "the cradle of civilization" or the "font of culture" - Eastern or Western. The history they impart to their young is saturated with myths and myth-making - national leaders from the past take on heroic qualities and god-like proportions. Past wars become victorious conquests fought in the name of national honour. Religion is used to give a spiritual gloss and divine approval to the whole enterprise, so that national history becomes a grandiose exercise in collective self-delusion and a rationale for assaults on lesser collectivities.

It is against this constant lurch toward national hubris that the Holocaust stands as an eternal reminder of the enormous chasm that occurred, in one Western society, between a nation’s ideals and the grim reality that was its day-to-day existence. As long as we continue to stare into that chasm, to inquire about the values of human life and the ideals of equality and justice that became so perverted therein, and then to ask about those same values and ideals versus the realities of life in our own societies today, we take small but positive steps toward a more decent and just world. No greater memorialization of those who perished in the annihilation could be offered than this.