LIGHTHOUSES IN AN OCEAN OF FORGETTING

MILITANTS REGARDING THE memory of the Holocaust, we—the Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France—have fought battles on every front. In 1981, we organized the first group pilgrimage by plane to Auschwitz-Birkenau in a single day; in Israel, we raised the monument that bears the names of the eighty thousand Holocaust victims from France; we took thousands of young French Jews to Cologne for the famous trial; we led a thousand Sons and Daughters to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1992 on the “memory train,” following the same itinerary taken by the deportation trains; in 1993, we went from Tallinn to Kaunas, to Sobibor, to Majdanek, and to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to all the places where the Jews of France were transported or put to death; the thousands of photographs of Jewish children we have found are exhibited at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, the Camp des Milles memorial, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Holocaust Memorial in New York, the French pavilion at Auschwitz, and the memorial to the Vél’ d’Hiv children in Orléans. We have provided countless original documents to the Mémorial de la Shoah, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. We have been responsible for the installation of plaques and other monuments at numerous sites of Jewish tragedies in France.

We have organized and presented major exhibitions about the Holocaust and, thanks to our friend Claude Bochurberg, have been able to make films, such as The Last Survivor, about Maurice Jablonski, who is today the sole survivor of his convoy, number 51, and The Impossible Witness, where the director and I were confronted with a 102-year-old Auschwitz survivor who stubbornly refused to answer our questions.

We have written or published so many reference works, including the Memorial of Deportation. I have also written more than a hundred prefaces and numerous articles published in Combat, Le Monde, Libération, Le Quotidien de Paris, and Le Matin and taken part in more radio and television programs than I can remember.

Our group has traveled by bus or train to so many German cities—Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Munich, Berlin, Miltenberg, Bergen-Belsen, Rostock, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Warstein, and others—to protest, as well as to Vienna, on several occasions, and even to New York, where we went to inaugurate the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in 1997.

The FMS (Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Foundation) was founded in 2000 by the French government on the recommendation of the Mattéoli committee, on which I served. I am now a member of the FMS’s board of directors and president of the Memory and Transmission Committee. I am on the board of directors for several memorials and a member of the committee for assisting victims of anti-Semitic despoliation in Monaco. I am a member of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s International Committee, and the only French person appointed by the Polish government in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. I have to go to all these places and often work there.

This takes a great deal of time, probably too much, and I plan to reduce this activity, which deprives me of a few of life’s simple pleasures.

*   *   *

IF THE HOLOCAUST had been concluded to the complete satisfaction of its initiators, all of Europe’s nine million Jews would have perished. In reality, three million survived and they have testified to the suffering endured by the Jewish people of that period. Without all those people who have written, spoken, drawn, composed music—in other words, the survivors of deportation, of extermination camps, those who escaped the roundups; the orphans and the hidden children; the few who emerged from the ghettos and mass graves—we would know nothing, or almost nothing, about that immense tragedy that ranged over an entire continent. An authentic account of the Holocaust would need the testimonies of all six million who died, but their words can be heard only through their private journals or letters, documents buried in the bloodstained earth by certain Jewish Sonderkommando members from the crematoria of Auschwitz or hidden, like those of Emanuel Ringelblum in Warsaw. They can also testify through the voices of those who saw them die. Every account by a victim or a survivor is a stone in an edifice that will always remain unfinished, a fragment of an incomplete fresco expressing what the Holocaust was. That work is our legacy. It constitutes an immense memorial, a gigantic library where every page, every image, every object, represents those millions of Jews who are sounding the alarm for humanity.

The Holocaust historians, and the Holocaust documentation centers—the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, others in Auschwitz, Milan, Warsaw, Washington, D.C., Berlin, Mechelen, Amsterdam, Oslo, and elsewhere—are like lighthouses in an ocean of forgetting, there to rescue the memory of the victims.