After Auschwitz
This is a speech delivered by Elie Wiesel in 1995, at the ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
“After Auschwitz, the human condition is not the same, nothing will be the same”
Here heaven and earth are on fire.
I speak to you as a man, who 50 years and nine days ago had no name, no hope, no future and was known only by his number, A70713.
I speak as a Jew who has seen what humanity has done to itself by trying to exterminate an entire people and inflict suffering and humiliation and death on so many others.
In this place of darkness and malediction we can but stand in awe and remember its stateless, faceless and nameless victims. Close your eyes and look: endless nocturnal processions are converging here, and here it is always night. Here heaven and earth are on fire.
Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children, Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they quietly walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.
All these men and women and children came from everywhere, a gathering of exiles drawn by death.
Yitgadal veyitkadash, Shmay Rabba.
In this kingdom of darkness there were many people. People who came from all the occupied lands of Europe. And then there were the Gypsies and the Poles and the Czechs … It is true that not all the victims were Jews. But all the Jews were victims.
Now, as then, we ask the question of all questions: what was the meaning of what was so routinely going on in this kingdom of eternal night. What kind of demented mind could have invented this system?
And it worked. The killers killed, the victims died and the world was the world and everything else was going on, life as usual. In the towns nearby, what happened? In the lands nearby, what happened? Life was going on where God’s creation was condemned to blasphemy by their killers and their accomplices.
Yitgadal veyitkadash, Shmay Rabba.
Turning point or watershed, Birkenau produced a mutation on a cosmic scale, affecting man’s dreams and endeavours. After Auschwitz, the human condition is no longer the same. After Auschwitz, nothing will ever be the same.
Yitgadal veyitkadash, Shmay Rabba.
As we remember the solitude and the pain of its victims, let us declare this day marks our commitment to commemorate their death, not to celebrate our own victory over death.
As we reflect upon the past, we must address ourselves to the present and the future. In the name of all that is sacred in memory, let us stop the bloodshed in Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnia; the vicious and ruthless terror attacks against Jews in the Holy Land. Let us reject and oppose more effectively religious fanaticism and racial hate.
Where else can we say to the world “Remember the morality of the human condition,” if not here?
For the sake of our children, we must remember Birkenau, so that it does not become their future.
Yitgadal veyitkadash, Shmay Rabba: Weep for Thy children whose death was not mourned then: weep for them, our Father in heaven, for they were deprived of their right to be buried, for heaven itself became their cemetery.