
			    THE WHITE HOUSE

		     Office of the Vice President 
		   

________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                                      April 6, 1994
		     
		   REMARKS BY VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE
				AT
		   DAYS OF REMEMBRANCE CEREMONY

			   U.S. CAPITOL

     Eva Heyman kept a diary during those last weeks before the 
Nazis rounded up the Jews of  Nagyvarad, then inside Hungary, 
near its Romanian border.  It was during the days when Jews could 
still live in their homes but things were awful.  In May, 1944, 
Eva wrote: "Everytime I think, this is the end: things couldn't 
possibly get worse, and then I find out that it's always possible 
for everything to get worse."
     Sometimes she couldn't sleep.  Lying awake in her bed, she 
would hear the adults talking. "They said that the people aren't 
only beaten but also get electric shocks," she wrote.  "People 
are brought to the hospital bleeding at the mouth and ears 
...some of them also with teeth missing and the soles of their 
feet swollen so they can't stand ... in the ghetto pharmacy there 
is enough poison and Grandpa gives poison to the older people who 
ask for it.  Grandpa also said it would be better if he took 
cyanide and also gave some to Grandma."
     On this Spring day here in Washington, we think of Eva 
Heyman, listening in her bed, and wish we could somehow go back 
in time and rescue her.
     But she wrote during the last Spring she would ever know.  
The gendarmes came for her family three weeks later -- and 
marched her into the gas chamber at Auschwitz on October 17.   
She was thirteen years old.
     To read what happened to the Jews of Hungary is to read of 
the most unspeakably barbaric acts: of Arrow Cross members, in 
black boots and green shirts, herding Jewish women, children and 
old men through the streets of Budapest, prodding them with rifle 
butts,  shooting those who could not keep up the pace. 
     Or the ritual executions.  Arrow Cross guards would line up 
three Jewish victims,  and wire their wrists together.  The 
rifleman would fire into the back of one.  The dead person would 
slump forward and pull others into the Danube where the freezing 
river and weight of the corpse finished the others.  That saved 
two bullets.
     What is the lesson of these acts for us, fifty years later?
     Certainly on this week after Passover, a commemoration of  
freedom from slavery three thousand years old, there is this 
lesson: tell the story.   The purpose of this memorial   -- of 
this day -- is to tell the story to each generation.


	  We tell the story, in part, to remember those who died.  
We also tell it to remember the need for vigilance.  And for the 
Jewish people there is a need for vigilance.  Is there any people 
who have been persecuted for so long and in so many places, 
driven from nation to nation, whether from Babylon or Rome,  
England or Spain, or by the programs throughout Eastern Europe?  
	  There are those who argue that Jews were victims, going 
passively to their death.  This is a lie.  Jews fought back.  
They fought back in Warsaw.  They fought back throughout eastern 
Europe.       They even recorded accounts of their fighting back; 
a merchant and aspiring writer, Zalman Gradowski, who fell in a 
revolt at Auschwitz he spearheaded, buried four manuscript 
accounts of life in death, on which he had inscribed these words, 
"take heed of this document, for it contains valuable material 
for the historian."   Because of what he and others did, we can 
refute the liars with a wealth of detail that is unassailable.   
     To a Christian, reading about the Resistance, it is natural 
to ask: what did others do? The past twelve months have brought 
America stories of heroism by Gentiles in some powerful new ways. 
One was the portrayal by Steven Spielberg of a hero of the Nazi 
occupation,  Oscar Schindler.  
     And of course, those walking through the Holocaust Museum 
are reminded of another hero,  Raul Wallenberg, who saved 
hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.  
     Their heroism is beyond dispute.  
     The images in  Spielberg's film of Schindler and Yitzchak 
Stern, together pecking out on the typewriter the names of those 
who could be saved ... the images  of Wallenberg in Hungary, 
mounting trains bound for Auschwitz and ordering guards to 
release people with "Swedish" passports -- give the lie to the 
myth that everyone was indifferent..
     But we must be careful not to exaggerate either their 
numbers or their impact.  The fact is, that in most cases, 
nothing was done.  And we must confront that, as well.
     Why was so little done?  For a Christian, this is an 
agonizing question as a confront it.  For if we believe, as I do, 
that religion is a powerful force for good, why did so many 
believers and church-goers remain silent in the face of such 
analloyed evil?
     One lesson learned from such massive failure is expressed by 
the famous words attributed to  Pastor Niemoller: "When Hitler 
attacked the Jews ... I was not a Jew therefore I was not 
concerned.  And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a 
Catholic, and therefore I was not concerned ...then Hitler 
attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody 
left to be concerned."
     Powerful words.  
     But for some there is an implication in that paragraph that 
makes it seem insufficient.  For one way to read it is as a 
morality play with self interest at its core: we must defend 
others,  so others will defend us.

     But we all know self-interest isn't enough.  It is essential 
that those who feel in no danger at all rise in defense of the 
persecuted.  The passion for justice and tolerance must be so 
ingrained in society that even those feeling most  secure  will 
take action to preserve it.  
     And we must  put in place safeguards -- of law, of values --
that make it impossible for the human race to give vent to its 
most  barbaric impulses during those times when the individual 
conscience -- or even the sum of those consciences -- is too 
weak, or cowed, or terrorized to resist.
     Elie Weisel, talking about how Christians should react to 
the Holocaust,  quotes the Hasidic story about a great person who 
said, "Look, I know how to bring about a change that would 
benefit the whole world.  But the whole world is a huge place, so 
I'll begin with my country.  I don't know my whole country, 
though; so I'll begin with my town.  My town has so many streets; 
I'll begin on my own street.  There are so many houses on my 
street; I'll begin in mine.  There are so many people in my 
house; I'll begin with myself." 
     "You begin with yourself," Weisel says. 
     He is certainly right.  
     But of course, while we begin with ourselves, we cannot end 
there.  Not in a world where there are those who argue the 
Holocaust never happened; that cyanide was used for fumigation 
and that the pictures of gas chambers are fabrications.  
     There are people who organize themselves as the enemy of 
truth.  We must confront their lies. 
     We must also confront the temptation to acknowledge 
intellectually -- but only intellectually -- that the Holocaust 
happened, and accept it numbly, without the outrage that can 
prevent another one. 
     It is too easy for Americans, shielded for over 130 years 
from warfare inside our own borders, to say it can't happen here; 
that the Holocaust happened fifty years ago and in countries 
without the safeguards that make it impossible to happen in 
America.
     But remember: the Holocaust originated in the country of 
Goethe and Beethoven,  a country that prided itself on its 
refinement.   We can never give in to complacency.  No country is 
exempt from hatred or from demagogues.
     And yet, when we look at America, we are certain in our 
hearts that if a Holocaust happened here it would not be in the 
America we know.  It would not be in the America that has 
carefully separated and balanced the powers of the state and 
protected the freedom of its citizens.  It would not be in the 
America whose Declaration of Independence calling for the 
"inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness" is venerated not simply within our National Archives, 
but lives and breathes in our national character.  
     
     It would not be the America whose courts have time and again 
affirmed the separation of Church and state that has been one of 
our most sacred traditions.  It would not be the America whose 
liberating forces entered the death camps in 1945, to free the 
survivors,  and  provide witness that the worst stories we had 
heard were true.
     And it would not be the America that has placed a Holocaust 
Museum in its National Capitol.
     It was a controversial step.  There were those who argued 
this was not an American experience.  Who will want to see it? 
they asked.  Who, surrounded by places like the Air & Space 
Museum, would subject themselves to images of death?  
     Those questions have been answered.  They have been answered 
by those who crowd in to the Holocaust Museum every weekend.  Who 
stand patiently in line, people of every national origin, every 
color and every religion to expose their children to exhibits of 
the most savage things done to children in history.
     The Holocaust is not an event to be remembered just by those 
who survived -- or just by Jews or by gypsies.  Its memorial 
should continue to be part of the American experience for 
everyone. 
     And there is no better place for it than Washington, to 
remind those who make the agonizing decisions of foreign policy 
of the consequences of their decisions.
     One remembers, of course, not just to ward off dire 
consequences.  We remember also so we can be inspired.   And that 
is the meaning of Raul Wallenberg.
     As opposed to Schindler, who seems to have gradually become 
aware of his responsibility, Wallenberg knew right from the 
beginning.
     In Kati Marton's book about Wallenberg, she tells of the 
night he got a terrified call from Tibor Vandor, one his office 
workers.  Agnes Vandor was having a baby.  They were afraid to go 
to the hospital.
     Wallenberg brought the pregnant woman into his own bedroom, 
found a Jewish doctor, then paced the corridor outside all night, 
standing guard, while she gave birth.
     The grateful parents insisted Wallenberg help name the baby, 
and he did: Yvonne.
     Years later, this story appeared in the newspapers, and 
Yvonne recognized the details, came forward, and identified 
herself.
     But, she said, there was one detail that was wrong.  She 
wasn't Jewish.
     She had nothing against Jews -- in fact, she had married one 
herself.  But she was sure her parents were Catholic.
     It was only then, that she learned how terrified her parents 
had been -- in postwar Hungary -- to admit that they were Jewish.  
They didn't even dare tell her.
     The effects of the Holocaust did not end when the killing 
ended.  It scarred those who survived.  It caused a generation of 
Jews to feel they could never again trust the countries in which 
they lived.  Some didn't even dare admit their own heritage to 
their children.

     The value of a Raul Wallenberg is to inspire us so we never 
again fail those who need our trust.  Looking back with the 
perspective of half a century we remember him and others in order 
to strengthen us when we need strength.
     Because the need for heros is not dead.  You see it in 
Sarajevo.  You see it in Somalia.  You see it in the Middle East 
where the courageous leaders of Israel and its Arab neighbors are 
taking bold risks for peace.
     For much of the world the ideals of America -- though not 
always its practices -- have stood as its polar opposite.  In the 
long, upward journey of the human experiment, our ideals --
freedom, equality, tolerance, justice for all -- represent a 
destiny.
     To reach that destiny we must never forget where human 
beings have failed.  So, on this day, we allow -- even force -- 
ourselves to again remember the Holocaust in all its barbaric 
detail.  We should not shrink from it.  We remember Eva Heyman 
and mourn the barbarism inflicted on her because only then will 
we know the terrible capabilities that can lie coiled in the 
human soul.  
     But we also remember the acts of heroism like those of Raul 
Wallenberg.  Because that teaches us what we are capable of 
doing.  And that means when the need occurs we won't  flinch from 
our moral responsibility.  We will meet our obligations, in our 
daily lives or in the business that takes place under the marble 
dome of this building, and  make ourselves in the words of 
Isaiah, "as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the 
tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great 
rock in a weary land."
