Steven Spielberg: [The UN] is one of the most
important institutions that humanity has created.
Not only because of our shared hope that it
will accomplish what set out in its Charter
but because the United Nations provides a
place for representatives of all the peoples
of the world listen to witnesses tell of their
experiences, and after listening, policy is
made.
This is a place where testimony forms the
basis for action.
When I began to consider what I would say
about this year's theme: "Journeys Through
The Holocaust,"
I was confronted with with two questions.
The first was whether I could speak meaningfully
since I'm not a Holocaust survivor.
I'm a Jewish American man born a year after
World War II.
My initial awareness of what had happened
to the Jews of Europe under Fascism came from
my grandmother and grandfather telling me
horrifying accounts of fates of their relatives
and their friends.
And when I was 3 or 4 years old, I remember
sitting with my grandmother, and she taught
English to Hungarian survivors and they showed
me the concentration camp tattoos on their
arms.
And I've been told that this is where I started
to learn to read numbers.
Like a lot of Jewish kids, I encountered versions
of anti-Semitism growing up, and I examined
those encounters in the light of the history
that I absorbed of pogroms and death camps.
Anti-Semitism led to the construction of Auschwitz.
And while I sensed a connection between bigoted
slurs and genocide, I wondered how the American
version of anti-Semitism that I'd experienced
had been rendered so infinitely less destructive.
And the effort to answer this question shaped
my politics, as did learning that in addition
to 6 million Jewish lives claimed during the
Holocaust and the Genocide of the Roma, Nazi
persecution victimized many other groups,
such as homosexuals, the disabled and political
dissidents; all vulnerable to prejudice and
oppression of the Fascist killing machine.
I became a filmmaker because it became important
to me to communicate my concerns and preoccupations
to my audience, and when I became a father
to my children.
And it took me approximately 20 years of directing
sharks, aliens and dinosaurs (LAUGHTER) before
I believed I might be ready to make a film
about the Holocaust.
And once I started directing 'Schindler's
List,' I realized that I felt anything but
ready for the task that lay before me.
During the filming, survivors visiting the
set told me their histories, and many said,
"please tell my story after you tell Oscar
Schindlder's.'
Now, they weren't asking to have a movie made
about them.
They were asking me to help ensure the existence
of an indelible record of what had befallen
them, what had befallen their loved ones,
their cities, their entire cultures and their
civilization.
So I believe that given the opportunity, they
could become the world's teachers.
We needed only to give them the platform.
We built that platform when we began the Shoah
Foundation in 1994.
It was the first... in the first four years,
our videographers and interviewers traveled
the world recording approximately 250 interviews
with Holocaust survivors each and every week.
Rena Finder's journey is recorded in her Shoah
Foundation testimony, along with the journeys
of 51,413 other survivors living in 56 countries,
speaking in 32 languages.
Directing 'Schindler's List,'interviewing
survivors - this was my way of trying to understand
the Holocaust.
Breaking down the phenomenon of overwhelming
horror into individual moments was the only
way I knew how to approach and better understand
it.
Those who lived through it know what we will
never know.
But we can learn because they want to teach
us.
Survivors and witnesses often say that there
dearest hope, the hope that helped keep them
alive was to be heard, and to be believed,
and to be understood.
So although, I have no personal journey through
the Holocaust to account, I offer my journey
to the journey of survivors.
My Holocaust journey, and that of everyone
not a survivor, is a journey toward understanding.
My second question regarding our theme, 'Journeys
Through the Holocaust' pertains to the preposition,
"through."
That word made me pause.
In this context, it strikes me as being a
tremendously optimistic word.
It suggests that it was possible, and remains
possible to enter and then exit the Holocaust:
That for those who experienced it, and for
the world in which it occurred, there was
a beginning and end.
And of course, there were historically speaking
a very small minority did survive the camps
and went on to live productive and long lives,
extraordinary lives, and many felt that they
decisively triumphed over the evil that tried
and failed to devour them.
Survivors of horror often express an undaunted,
undamaged optimism, and there's nothing I
know about human beings more marvelous and
beautiful than this capacity to transform
rage and grief into a wellspring of wisdom,
progress and justice.
But the survivors' powerful determination
to contribute to a future without genocides
doesn't come from leaving the Holocaust behind,
from escaping history.
Their determined demand is that we engage
fully with history -that the Holocaust remain
with us in memory.
Theirs were journeys into the Holocaust.
They cannot emerge from it and neither can
the world until there are no more genocides,
until the unthinkable becomes impossible.
[APPLAUSE].
Tragically, we are all aware that the Holocaust
is still with us today, in ongoing attempts
of genocide, all around our planet.
In response to this reality, we've expanded
the Shoah Foundation 's collection to include
testimony from the genocides in Armenia, Cambodia,
Rwanda, the Nanking massacre, and eventually
we'll include testimony from Srebrenica and
Sudan.
