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The human heart, at times, can be a mystery.
It was important for me to demystify 'Never Again' and also make it a multicultural cast
of characters that contribute to saving lives
The Holocaust is mankind's, modern man's, single greatest unfathomable crime. We don't
draw a line under it, we never come to terms with it, we never understand it.
So I would hope that we would educate, motivate, inspire everyone, not just to talk about it
and speak out about it, but protest and do whatever we can to save lives. I always cite
then, 1946 to 1948 we drafted the convention of genocide. It took 40 years to ratify it.
So where was the will?
Clearly there were diplomats in many places that confronted exactly the same situation,
the same people knocking on their doors or asking for some help. And in some cases there
were those who were rescued, and in too many other cases there were those that turned away
and went about their other business.
I was talking to somebody here tonight about the collaboration that happened in Budapest
- and Martin Gilbert talks about it on the film - that was so unique and so extraordinary,
and you think: "Wow, that was 70 years ago. What have we learned?" So, I don't know. What
have we learned? I think that we learned that - again, a simple comment, Rabbi, I don't
know, you may want to comment on it, somebody says about Sugihara: well, good men do good
things.
I hope it reaches a young audience. We are planning for it to reach a young audience,
so they can learn about the past and create a voice for the future.
I'm particulary proud, if that's the word, that when they developed the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, a good piece of that exhibit is devoted to what the United
States did NOT do during the Holocaust; turning away the St. Louis, rejecting pleas to bomb
the rail lines to Auschwitz. These are significant parts of that museum. It's taken a long time,
I think, for various countries to come to terms with the respective roles that their
citizens, if not their wartime governments, played. There could have been no Holocaust
without Germany and without the Nazis, but clearly what they were able to depended a
great deal on the assistance of others.
Maybe we could create a more proactive community than one that just sits around and talks.