Remarks at the Holocaust Museum's Day of Remembrance Luncheon

UNDER SECRETARY BURNS: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Howard, thank you so much for that nice introduction and welcome to all of you. Welcome to the Ben Franklin Room here at the State Department. I'm here to represent our Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and to welcome all of you on a very important day for all Americans.

There are a number of people here I want to recognize. Howard, I want to thank you for your extraordinary leadership and for presiding today. I certainly want to thank Fred Zeidman to the chair of the Holocaust Museum, who's done such a wonderful job in that capacity. Joel Geiderman, the Vice Chair of the Council; Sara Bloomfield, whom I've gotten to know who does such an extraordinary job as Director of the museum and who keeps this museum -- and Sara is here, I know, right here -- Sara. (Applause.) Jay Stein, J. Christian Kennedy, I want to welcome Susan Eisenhower. What an extraordinary commitment her family has made to her country and we in this building remember that it was President Eisenhower who dedicated this building and who led us through the Second World War and then into the Cold War with such great historic distinctions. So, Susan, thank you for being here with us today. And I want to recognize, finally, my very close friend Rabbi Arthur Schneier of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, who reminds us every day of the year of what we've got to do to make this a better and more peaceful world. Rabbi Schneier. (Applause)

I don't want to bore you with a long speech. I know many of you have been in Washington for a few days. I hope you had the chance to hear President Bush yesterday at the museum when he spoke about Darfur. And you've been at the Capitol with our congressional leadership and I know that Congressman Tom Lantos was here just a minute ago. He had to leave. I was going to introduce him to speak; he was our major speaker. He had to leave to vote. He's now a committee chair, so he's one of the Democratic leaders of the Congress.

I wanted to a say a few words just to thank you all for coming here and I wanted to thank the museum. And Sara, I mean this very sincerely, I think the Holocaust Museum is unique in the world today. When I drive by sometimes at night I see the images from Darfur that you've projected onto the building. I see what you represent in the world. You're the most powerful indictment of the Nazis that is concrete here in the nation's capital that we have. And you're the most powerful and permanent reminder of the lessons of the Holocaust. And thank goodness that people like you had the foresight to create it; to create the museum, and then to sustain it. And all of you have been so wonderful to give your time and commitment and your resources to sustain the museum.

There aren't many societies that would build a memorial to honor those who perished in another place and at another time. But then again, our society is so special because we are the society made up of all others and because so many members of our country, so many families were wounded by what happened 60 years ago during the Second World War in the greatest massacre in modern history. And so I think your museum is extraordinarily important. And I've taken each of my daughters there and I take my youngest daughter back; she's 16 and she's studying the history right now in her history class of the Second World War and I've taken her back. And may you always succeed in the mission of never letting all of us forget, never letting us forget what happened.

And I said last year when I spoke to many of you that I'm a little bit humbled to speak to your group because I don't have a blood relative who was involved in the Holocaust. I'm an Irish Catholic kid from Boston, Massachusetts. My grandparents were persecuted by the British colonialists, as my grandmother would tell you, and she told us frequently. But I don't have the direct connection that many of you have. And so I really honor and respect the fact that many of you are my generation, you are the sons and daughters of Holocaust victims or the nieces and nephews or the friends. But thank you for doing what you are doing to honor your family members caught up in that horrible conflagration.

I will tell you I have an indirect connection in two respects. My wife's Uncle Bernie Rosner was a 12-year-old kid in a small town in Hungary in March of 1944 when he was studying for his Bar Mitzvah when the Nazis came and took he and his family away. And Bernie, I will just hasten to tell you, is now in very good health, in his late 70s in California, outside of San Francisco. But Bernie lost -- Bernie was transported to Auschwitz at the age of 12. He lost his mother and younger brother on the first day. He lost his father after several months. He survived a year in Auschwitz and then he was transported to Mauthausen at the end of the war and was found by General Eisenhower's troops, as so many other victims were, nearly dead of typhus and was saved by General Eisenhower's troops.

And by a stroke of good fortune, he was considering Aliyah to Israel. He was in a resettlement camp in Italy. He was shagging bags at the local airport to make some money as a 13-year-old and he met a young American GI who took a liking to him. And the American GI went back home after his service in Italy, but then sent for Bernie and said, I want to adopt you and bring you to New York City. And he did, and Bernie showed up and there was a limousine waiting -- a limousine for this young refugee from the Holocaust. And the young GI who adopted him was Charlie Merrill of Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner, and Smith fame.

And so Bernie Rosner went from a happy young kid in Hungary and his family to having his family utterly destroyed by the Holocaust; he was the only survivor. And then in his worst hour, when he felt alone as a young refugee, he was adopted by one of our citizens and given the privilege of a secondary private school education and Cornell and Harvard Law School and a successful business career. And Bernie never looked back after the Holocaust because he was a survivor and he wanted to survive in this country. He put it behind him, he will tell you now. And he didn't think about those days and actually wanted to deny some of it, he'll say. He's written a book about it.

But when your museum opened in 1993, he visited my wife and I and we said, Bernie, you really ought to go down to the Holocaust Museum. He said, nope, I've looked forward for the last 50 years. But we prevailed upon him; he went down. And your people -- your staff was good enough to take Bernie under their wing and to show him the Nazi lists of the transport of his family from their village to Budapest to Auschwitz. And he told us that night, I saw my name on that list and I realized it did happen; I am a survivor and I have to remember and I have to now start talking about it. And he spent the last ten years of his life -- he retired -- talking about the Holocaust and educating kids about it and writing a book about it. And I have your -- we have, our family has your museum to thank for that, Sara.

He's one survivor, my wife's uncle, but what a profound impact that story has on our family. And I won't belabor the point, but I didn't know anything about the Holocaust, growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Nothing. We weren't taught about it in the grammar schools. We weren't taught about it in our middle school. But my barber, I noticed one day, had some blue numbers on his arm. And I was 14 or 15 and I said, Jack, you know, may I ask why do you have these numbers on your arm? He said, don't you know what this means? I said, no, I don't. He said, I'm a concentration camp survivor. I was in Buchenwald.

And I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn't know anything about that period of history. Can you imagine growing up and not having anyone talk about the Holocaust? But of course my friendship with him, which really blossomed, led me to think that I needed to learn something. And I think I've learned a little. So I'm someone who's not from the community who lost direct relatives, but I think I'm an average American who now understands it's so important to know these lessons and to remember. And the Holocaust Museum is a living embodiment of that lesson for all of us.

I wanted to say that -- I was thinking this morning what can I say to you because you know so much more and what could I possibly say that might contribute to what you're trying to do collectively. I think you've made extraordinary progress in ten years. I remember when the Swiss banking scandal broke out ten years ago and how that really did begin to enlighten people about the fact that 50 years after the war at that time, justice had not been done for the families of the Holocaust survivors and for some of the living survivors themselves. And in the last ten years what you have been able to do, I hope you feel with support from our government, is to achieve justice on the restitution issue to achieve a much greater collective remembrance in the United States as a nation of what the Holocaust represents for our democratic society; to see the International Tracing Service Archives now see us begin to make progress. And Sara reminded me just now that the German Government has come forward with money to try to accelerate the work that must be done at the tracing services so that the full story of the Holocaust will be unfolded for all the world to see and to see the fight against anti-Semitism proceed in our own country. Rabbi Schneier's foundation is dedicated to that and to human rights and to see education -- mass education about the Holocaust throughout every level of our school system, the type of access we did not have in the 1960s and '70s when I was a young ignorant teenager about this issue.

So I congratulate all of you for this progress, this extraordinary decade of progress that you have made. The final thing I'd like to say is this: May we think of the Holocaust in our time as a warning light out at sea for those of us who now have responsibility for our world in 2007. It's there and it has to remind us of our responsibilities now to prevent future genocides or to deal with current genocides.

I'm a career diplomat; I'm non-partisan. I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I have served every administration since 1980, since President Carter's time. But I will say that in looking back with some degree of objectivity and that with a 20-20 hindsight that one can have, we should have acted sooner in Bosnia. We did a great thing in going into Bosnia in September, October, November of 1995 and stopping the Serb army’s assault on Bosnian Muslims, and then in that brilliant achievement of President Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, achieving the peace at Dayton, but could’ve gone in in 1992, or ‘3 or ‘4, and we would’ve saved thousands of lives. And I know that all of us who worked for President Clinton -- and I think he was a great president -- believe that we should have acted sooner in Rwanda than we did.

And that’s why I think President Bush’s speech at your museum -- at our museum, may I say -- yesterday was so important because we do believe there is a genocide occurring in Darfur. And we have tried to use traditional diplomacy over the last year to cope with it. We’ve tried to convince the Sudanese Government to acquiesce in the entry of the UN peacekeeping force into Darfur so that our soldiers, European soldiers, African soldiers can protect the women and the children who’ve been victimized, raped, and brutalized and killed by the Janjaweed militia. But it’s been difficult and frustrating because the government in Khartoum has been taking one step forward and five steps back, and two forward -- you can see the scenario, promising but never delivering.

So the President’s speech yesterday, I thought, was the most important that our government has made on Darfur because he said very clearly: if in a matter of a few, short weeks the United Nations cannot produce an agreement from the Government of Sudan to let a peacekeeping force come in, then we will declare a no-flight zone, an arms embargo and impose sanctions on Sudan. And we must consider a military -- international military response to put peacekeepers in. How can we, as a community that remembers the Holocaust, or lives it, not now be concerned about Darfur?

I’ll give you a second example. In Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1992, we believe the Iranian Government bombed the Israeli Embassy. And then two years later, we believe that the Iranian Government, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps command bombed the Argentine Jewish community center and killed an extraordinary number of people, hundreds of people, in the heart of Buenos Aires.

I was there in February. And I went to the ominous center and met with Jewish community leadership at Buenos Aires, and that community is still hurting so many years later. And that community wants justice. And so we have been working with the Argentine Government to have Interpol issue arrest notices for the leaders of the Iranian Secret Services and Revolutionary Guard Corps command, who we believe planned and executed that bombing that killed and wounded hundreds of peoples in Buenos Aires in 1994.

We are living with evil in the present world. We saw it in the face of Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler 60 years ago. We see it now in the face of al-Qaida and in people who had bombed a Jewish community center filled with women and kids and innocent people. And then people who had raped and brutalized and killed innocent African women in Darfur. And so we, of all societies, as the greatest democracy on earth, and as the most powerful nation on earth, have an absolute responsibility to act when we see threats to humanity and to human rights in our time.

And I thought I would just say these few words to you in honor of the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust and in respect for our collective memory of them and our collective duty to act and to represent democratic values in an often chaotic and violent world. And I really stand before you, on behalf of all my colleagues in the State Department, with great respect for the work that you do. You know, people can spend their time doing all sorts of things to do good things. But I can’t think of a better thing that you could do with your time, your money and your efforts than to build this museum further, to help Sara in what she is trying to do, and to continue to keep it as a beacon to all of us for this troubled world that we live in, and to represent our best values.

So thank you so much for being here. We want to host you every year that you’re here. You are always, always welcome. And a final thing I’ll say is this. There was an individual named Breckenridge Long, who was an Assistant Secretary of State, not in this building because this building succeeded the second world war, but in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House where the State Department used to be in. There once was a policy in the State Department to keep Jews out of America, when Jews most needed to come to America, when they were at risk all over the world. And it is to the great shame of our State Department and that generation that we did not act quickly enough in 1939 and ’40 and ’41 and ’42 and ’43 and ’44 to let the victims of Nazism to come to our shores. And the fact that many of you come from families who’ve made it is a testimony to their courage and ingenuity. And I just hope you know that our State Department of 2007 would never ever allow something like that to happen again. But I thought I should say that to your community.

Thank you.