George W. Bush proclaimed today the "60th anniversary of the Liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp" and Dick Cheney traveled to Krakow, Poland to give an eloquent address. From President Bush’s proclamation:
At the Auschwitz concentration camp, evil found willing servants and innocent victims.
For almost 5 years, Auschwitz was a factory for murder where more than a million lives were taken. It is a sobering reminder of the power of evil and the need for people to oppose evil wherever it exists.
The 60th anniversary . . . is an opportunity to pass on the stories and lessons of the Holocaust to future generations. The history of the Holocaust demonstrates that evil is real, but hope endures.
Samuel Pisar’s story of evil and hope appeared in today’s Ha’aretz. Pisar is a distinguished international lawyer in Paris, New York and London, and the author of "Of Blood and Hope."
On January 27, 1945, he was a 15-year old boy in Auschwitz, his father executed by the Gestapo, his mother and little sister herded into a cattle car in front of him, never to be seen again.
He saw evil that "eclipsed Dante’s imaginary inferno" and "an extraordinary act of heroism" that makes his story one to be preserved for future generations. But he is telling it for us, for now:
In the autumn of their lives, the remaining survivors of Auschwitz feel a visceral need to transmit to new generations the memory of what we have experienced in our flesh and our souls, to warn our children that today’s spreading intolerance, hatred, fanaticism and violence can destroy their world as they once destroyed ours . . . .
Because we know from bitter experience that the human animal is capable of the worst, as of the best, of madness as of genius, that the unthinkable, the unimaginable, remains possible. . . .
Mankind, divided and confused, still hesitates, vacillates, like a sleepwalker on the edge of an abyss. But the irrevocable has not yet happened, our chances are still intact. Pray that we learn how to seize them.
Read his story, and then seize this chance.