JUSTICE - No. 66

10 No. 66 JUSTICE am speaking from the hallowed ground of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I helped create with President Jimmy Carter. Since it opened in 1993, almost 50 million people have visited it, around 90 percent of whom were non-Jews. I speak to you at a troubling time of a rising tide of hatred against minorities and antisemitism, and an appalling decline in knowledge about the Holocaust and its contemporary lessons, particularly among young people, as more and more of the 350,000 survivors — eyewitnesses — are leaving us. But it is also a time when there are genocides and potential genocides taking place around the world. If we are to take seriously the pledge “never again,” we must apply the lessons of the Holocaust to contemporary 21 st century challenges. There was nothing inevitable about the Holocaust, nor is there anything inevitable about the genocides in the world today. The Shoah is a tragic example of what happens when people are ill-informed, indifferent, and inactive in the face of evil, when neighbor turns on neighbor because of their religion, and when the western world refuses to act because of prevailing antisemitism. Jews were expendable then, just as other religious minorities are in 21 st century genocides today, although none is of the magnitude of the Holocaust. Hitler’s initial goal was to make Germany judenrein , free of Jews. Hitler proceeded carefully, waiting to judge German public and world reaction, and seeing none, he took one step after another: first passing racial laws isolating Jews; barring them from professions; destroying synagogues and businesses in Kristallnacht; expropriating their property and possessions; then deporting them to concentration camps; and finally murdering 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children (two thirds of European Jewry, the flower of Jewish culture, religion, scholarship and enterprise making up one third of the world Jewish population). At the outbreak of the war in 1939, there were 17 million Jews in a world of 2 billion; today there are only 14.7 million Jews in a world of 7 billion. The German people acquiesced to or even supported their neighbors being dispossessed and deported. And the world failed to act, including the United States. Hitler got a clear signal, and said so publicly, that the world did not care about protecting the Jews, and he had a free hand to commit the worst genocide in world history. Some examples depicting the failure of, for example, the U.S. to act are as follows: n At the Evian conference in July 1938, initiated by President Roosevelt to deal with the plight of German Jewish refugees, he sent only low-level representatives and failed to take the lead in lifting rigid immigration quotas as an example to the rest of the world, while the State Department did all it could to restrict immigration. n In May 1939, the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying over nine hundred German Jewish refugees, sat for days outside Miami and was not allowed to dock. Imperfect Ju st ice for Holocau st Survivors and Families of Victims: Compensation, Re st itution, and Lessons for the Future* I Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat * Keynote lecture (“A Remembrance Ceremony and a Second General Holocaust Survivor’s Ceremony”) at The Hague on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2021, sponsored by the Municipality of The Hague, the Embassy of Israel in the Netherlands, and the Jewish cultural organization CHAJ (Centrum voor Haagse Jiddesjkeit). The author thanks Rabbi Shmuel Katzman of the Rabbinaat den Haag who invited him to deliver these remarks. The author is indebted to his colleagues Greg Schneider and Karen Heilig for their assistance in providing the most up-to-date information on restitution and compensation and for the polling data on the paucity of knowledge about the Holocaust by younger Americans.