A presidential commission journeys into the nightmare of the past Fulfilling a pledge made on the 30th anniversary of Israel's founding,
Jimmy Carter last year appointed a 34-member presidential commission on
the Holocaust to develop a memorial in the U.S. to the 6 million
victims of the Nazis' “final solution.” Last week, as a first
step in that effort, the commission toured the sites in Eastern Europe
where the campaign of extermination of Jews took place in a search for
historical material that could be included in American archives on the
Holocaust. The only journalist to accompany the group was TIME Senior Editor Stefan Kanfer, author of The
Eighth Sin, a fictional account of the Nazi slaughter of European
gypsies. His report of the journey: There are almost as many vows made on the White House lawn as there are
blades of grass. But there were almost as many victims of the
Holocaust, and when Carter promised to create a living memorial to the
Jews killed by the Third Reich, he might as well have carved it in
marble. Within weeks the nucleus of a presidential commission was formed:
Senators Claiborne Pell, Frank Church and Henry M. Jackson signed on;
so did Congress men and scholars, fund raisers and survivors of
Hitler's death camps. The President named Novelist and Essayist Elie
Wiesel chairman of the commission. It was a natural choice. At 50, Wiesel has the bearing and diction of an
Old Testament prophet. His books and many articles are scrolls of
agony, depicting as pects of the Jewish tragedy of the '30s and '40s
that, in his view, “blighted and still blights civilization.” On the flight to Warsaw, Historian Raul Hilberg regarded the few survivors among the travelers. “They have three things in common,” he noted. “They're in all
in their 50s or early 60s, they all still have incredibly fast
reactions and, with the exception of Wiesel, they are not strong on
philosphy.” Soon after the plane arrived, the group was taken to
the site of the Warsaw ghetto. Every building, every person, had
literally gone up in smoke when German troops annihilated the last
holdout of Warsaw Jewry in 1943. At the steps of the monument, New York
Businessman Benjamin Meed, who had been smuggled out of the ghetto just
before its destruction, read his simple statement: “I hear once
again their very last command to us all: 'Pamietaj! Remember! Never
forget and never forgive!' ” Later, racked with sobs, he recalled the
years of hiding and flight. “On the last day I heard some Poles
shouting, 'Look at the Jews fry!' as the ghetto flamed. But I also owe
my life to Polish Christians who kept me and my father hidden in a
cemetery, where we lived for over a year.” He shrugged. “There is good
and bad in all.” New Jersey Petroleum Executive Miles Lerman, a survivor of Nazi slave
labor camps in Russia, agreed. “There is no way to measure what the
Germans did against the helpless. Still you can't allow it to kill your
own life. You must go on. And speak out: about Africa, the boat people,
anyone in trouble.”
