FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Let me begin by thanking the March of the Living and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights for giving me the honor of speaking with you today, and – more importantly – for organizing this really important conference and the deeply impactful ritual of the annual March of the Living. I wish I had been able to join you in person. I wish I could have marched by your side.
I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to the survivors who are present. To simply have survived what you did – as we say around this time of year – would have been enough. Yet to retrace the horrors that you and your loved ones were forced to endure – and to share them with others, so that future generations will be inspired to prevent people from experiencing what you did – it is truly awe-inspiring, and we are hugely grateful.
On February 27, 1946 – the 69th day of the Nuremberg Tribunal – prosecutors called Abraham Sutzkever to the witness stand. A 33-year-old poet who had lived in Vilna throughout the Nazi occupation, Sutzkever was the first Jew and survivor to testify at Nuremberg.
Twice, the presiding judge asked Sutskever to sit as he spoke before the tribunal; and twice Sutskever refused, instead choosing to stand throughout his testimony. As Sutskever would later write, “I spoke standing up, as if I were reciting the Kaddish for those who had died.” He had many to mourn. In December 1941, only weeks after the Nazi authorities in Vilna had issued orders that, “Jewish women must not bear children,” Sutskever’s wife had just given birth to a boy. The baby was hidden, along with others, in a side room in a hospital. But when the SS conducted a surprise inspection, the sound of crying led them to the newborns, and they killed the babies on the spot. When Sutskever arrived at the hospital hours later, he would later tell the judge at Nuremberg, he found the body of his baby boy, “still warm.”
His mother was also killed – but unlike his baby boy, Sutskever never saw her body. One day when he went to visit her in the ghetto, she was simply gone. He would not learn her fate until the day the Nazis dropped off a carload of old shoes in the ghetto, what they saw as “a present” to the residents. The shoes, they were told, belonged to Jews who had been executed. Sutskever found his mother’s shoes in that pile.
Of course, it was not only Sutskever’s family who suffered. In Nuremberg, he told of other horrors he had witnessed, such as the time on July 17, 1941, when he saw the sonderkommandos round up a large group of Jewish men, telling them to remove their belts and walk single-file toward the prison, with their hands above their heads. When men went to pull up their pants so that they could walk, the Nazis shot them. He saw at least a hundred bodies along the road that day. “Blood streamed through the street as if a red rain had fallen,” Sutskever told the tribunal. Of the estimated 80,000 Jews who had lived in Vilna at the beginning of the occupation, Sutskever estimated, less than a thousand survived.
As we reflect on the legacy of Nuremberg 70 years after Sutskever gave his epic testimony, it is as important as ever to recommit ourselves to the lessons learned – both from the historic tribunal itself, and from the hateful ideology and atrocities that made Nuremberg’s creation necessary.
The first lesson is the critical importance of preserving – and retelling – accounts like Sutskever’s, particularly for younger generations removed from the Holocaust. Individual testimonies like his – and the ones shared every year by the survivors who join the March of the Living – have the power to puncture the layer of abstraction that can surround the Shoah – a crime so massive as to, at times, feel unknowable. By giving us a window into the overwhelming anguish experienced by a single individual, these accounts make more tangible the immeasurable suffering and evil that the Holocaust represents.
The second lesson is the absolute imperative of seeking justice for mass atrocities. The idea behind the Nuremberg Tribunal – that the international community has a stake in holding accountable those who commit such unthinkable crimes – undergirds many of the norms and institutions that we have helped create since the Second World War. But those norms and institutions have value only if they are put into practice – which means continuing to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of gross violations of human rights. Not only the Radovan Karadzics and Hissene Habres of the world, whose crimes were committed in decades past, crucial as justice is in those instances – but also the Assads and Kim Jong Uns of the world, who are overseeing as we speak the massacring and forced starvation of their own people, in real time.
The third lesson is that we can’t allow ourselves to be bystanders when we see early warning signs of mass atrocities. Genocides don’t arise spontaneously – their masterminds telegraph them, systematically laying the foundation for their murderous ends. That is the lesson of the deplorable race laws adopted in Nuremberg in 1935, of Kristallnacht in 1938, and of so many of the other steps the Nazis took that signaled their horrific intent. Yet the world looked on. We must not allow ourselves to do the same. Because we know all too well the consequences of inaction – which Sutskever captured in a haunting poem he wrote in 1942, while living under the Nazi occupation. The poem is about a wagon, as he wrote, “filled with throbbing shoes,” clattering through the streets of the ghetto, not unlike the one that brought Sutskever the devastating news of his mother’s killing. Let me just read a few lines from that poem:
The shoes — familiar, spreading,
I recognize them all…
Tell me the truth, oh shoes,
Where the disappeared feet?
The feet of pumps so shoddy,
With buttondrops like dew –
Where is the little body?
Where is the woman, too?
All children’s shoes – but where
Are the children’s feet?
By hearing the accounts of survivors and retracing their steps – as the March of the Living does – we feel, for just a moment, the infinite loss represented by all of those empty shoes. We, like Suskever, “recognize them all.” We feel what it would be like if those shoes belonged to our own sons and daughters, our sisters and brothers, our mothers and fathers. And we are more determined than ever to helping ensure that no one should have to ask, “Where the disappeared feet?”
I thank you.
Source: U.S. Department of State
By
Robert Williams
Editor in Chief
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