President Bush Remembers

By PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

Laura and I thank you for asking us to join you on this Day of Remembrance. Some days are set aside to recall the great and hopeful moments of human experience. Other days, like today, we turn our minds to painful events. In doing so, we honor the courage and suffering of martyrs and heroes. We also seek the wisdom and courage to prevent future tragedies and future evils.

World War II ended and camps were liberated before many of us were born. The events we recall today have the safe distance of history. And there will come a time when the eyewitnesses are gone, and that is why we are bound by conscience to remember what happened and to whom it happened. During the war, a Nazi guard told Simon Wiesenthal that in time no one would believe his account of what he saw. Evil on so grand a scale would seem to some incredible. Yet, we do not just believe, we know. We know because the evidence has been kept, the record has been preserved.
It is fitting to remember the Holocaust under the dome of our nation's capitol, with members of the United States Congress who are here. Some members had relatives among the victims.

Some of you played a part in the liberation of Europe. One congressman here today fought in the underground, and he himself was put into forced labor by the Nazis. We are honored by the presence of the gentleman from California, Tom Lantos.
We remember at the Capitol because the United States has accepted a special role. We strive to be a refuge for the persecuted. We are called by history and by conscience to defend the oppressed. Our country stands on watch for the rise of tyranny. And history's worst tyrants have always reserved a special hatred for the Jewish people.

Tyrants and dictators will accept no other gods before them. They require disobedience to the First Commandment. They seek absolute control and are threatened by faith in God. They fear only the power they cannot possess – the power of truth.

So they resent the living example of the devout, especially the devotion of a unique people chosen by God. Through centuries of struggle, Jews across the world have been witnesses not only against the crimes of men, but for faith in God and God alone.
This Day of Remembrance marks more than a single historic tragedy, but 6 million important lives – all the possibilities, all the dreams and all the innocence that died with them.

The Holocaust is defined as much by the courage of the lost as by the cruelty of the guilty. As Victor Frankel observed, “Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz. However, he is also the being who entered those chambers upright with the Lord's Prayer or Shima Yisrael on his lips.”
When all the crimes are finished, the fears realized and the cries silenced, that was the hope that remained, to be remembered by the living and raised up by the living God. God bless.