Going Forward
We pledge to never let the world forget how brutally Nazi Germany annihilated six million of our people, including one and a half million innocent children. We look back and see how we emerged a strong and victorious people. We can proudly say, coming from unprecedented persecution, we still retain a strong devotion and love of Judaism and our heritage.
We gave birth to a new generation, witnessed the establishment of the State of Israel and contributed to the further development of our nation.
We hope and pray that bigotry, anti-Semitism, and terrorism will cease against our people and that our brethren in the State of Israel will be able to live in peace with their neighbors and be prosperous together forever and ever.
– Charles Lipshitz, z”l – Last Survivor President
of Sheerit Hapleitah of Metropolitan Chicago
The Legacy of Holocaust Survivors and the Pledge of Acceptance Of the Second Generation
Originally read in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, French, Russian and Ladino At the Western Wall In Jerusalem on June 18, 1981 during the Closing Ceremony of the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, precursor to the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
The Legacy was written in Yiddish by Elie Wiesel
Going Forward
The Legacy
We Take This Oath! We take it in the shadows of flames whose tongues scar the soul of our people. We vow in the name of dead parents and children, with our sadness hidden, our faith renewed; we shall never let the sacred memory of our perished Six Million be scorned or erased.
We Saw Them! They were hungry and in fear. We saw them rush to battle. We saw them in the loneliness of night- true to their faith. At the threshold of death, we saw them. We received their silence in silence and merged their tears with ours.
Deportations, executions, mass graves, death camps; mute prayers, cries of revolt, desperation, torn scrolls; cities and towns, villages and hamlets; the young, the old, the rich, the poor; ghetto fighters and partisans, scholars and messianic dreamers, ravaged faces, fists raised. Like clouds of fire, all have vanished.
We Take This Oath! Vision becomes word, to be handed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, from generation to generation.
REMEMBER what the Nazi killers and their accomplices did to our people. Remember them with rage and contempt. Remember what an indifferent world did to us and to itself. Remember the victims with pride and with sorrow. Remember also the deeds of the Righteous Gentiles.
We SHALL ALSO REMEMBER the miracle of the Jewish rebirth in the land of our ancestors, in the independent State of Israel. Let our legacy endure as a stone of the Temple Wall.
The Acceptance
We ACCEPT the obligation of this legacy.
We Are the generations born after the darkness. Through our parents and grandparents memories, words and silence, we are linked to that annihilated Jewish existence whose echoes permeate our consciousness.
We Dedicate this pledge to you, our parents and grandparents, to all Six Million whose unyielding spiritual and physical resistance, even in the camps and ghettos, exemplifies our people’s commitment to life: We Pledge To Remember.
We Shall Teach our children to preserve forever that uprooted Jewish spirit which could not be destroyed. We Shall Tell the world of the depths to which humanity can sink, and the heights which we attained, even in hell itself.
We Shall Fight anti-Semitism and all forms of racial hatred by our dedication to freedom throughout the world. We Affirm our commitment to the State of Israel and to the furtherance of Jewish life in our homeland.
We are your children, your grandchildren and your great grandchildren – we are here!
The Burning Questions of the Holocaust
Why were they silent?
When informed, responsible citizens and political leaders knew of the plan to exterminate the Jews as early as 1941. Why were they silent?
Why did the civilized world close its gates?
With death pursuing them, Jews from all over Europe sought safe haven in the Free World. Why did the civilized world close its gates?
Why did the world close its eyes?
While the Jews risked and lost their lives getting information to the world press and media about the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators, the stories were belittled or ignored. Why did the world close its eyes?
Where were the humanitarians?
When a respected humanitarian organization such as the International Red Cross saw the deprivation suffered by masses of innocent Jewish men, women and children, it failed to live up to even its own charter.
It denied its own moral obligations when Jews were concerned.
Why did our own Allies do so little, so late?
While Allied Forces possessed extensive information about the Death Camps and scores of Jewish soldiers volunteered to fly bombing missions over them, the Nazi death machines were unharmed.
Even the railroad tracks leading to the infernos were left intact.
Why did our own Allies do so little, so late?
Where was conscience? Holiness? Morality?
And, when the Jews cried out in anguish, the Vatican and other churches heard and responded with a deafening silence.
Their moral force would have been a powerful opposition to the Nazi insanity that was sweeping Europe.
Where was conscience? Holiness? Morality?
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