Never Again Education Act
Floor Speech
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Ms. PELOSI. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his leadership in bringing this important bipartisan legislation to the floor. I thank Congresswoman Maloney for her relentless advocacy in this regard.
Madam Speaker, I rise to join my colleagues on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day in support of the Never Again Education Act, strong, bipartisan legislation to ensure that ``never again'' are simply not words but a solemn, sacred pledge to be fulfilled with action.
Madam Speaker, I salute Carolyn Maloney, a longstanding leader in this effort to educate the next generation about the Holocaust. I also thank Chairman Bobby Scott for his leadership in this regard and for his cooperation in bringing this to the floor.
I thank all of our Members who have worked on this overwhelmingly bipartisan effort reflecting the strong bipartisan commitment of this entire Congress to standing with the Jewish community and allies to ensure Holocaust education remains front and center in our schools.
Last week, I had the great and solemn honor of leading a bipartisan congressional delegation to Poland and Israel to mark the 75th anniversary since the liberation of Auschwitz. I see two of our colleagues who were on the trip, Mr. Deutch and Mr. Schneider, who brought so much to that delegation. Both of them serve on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
At Auschwitz, we walked on grounds scarred by an almost unspeakable evil, where more than 1 million innocents were murdered. I was especially affected because--as my colleagues have heard me say--of what my father said on the House floor on March 2, 1943.
Madam Speaker, I am quoting from the Congressional Record.
On that day, my father said: ``Action not pity can save millions now--extinction or hope for the remnants of European Jewry?--it is for us to give the answer.'' He was pleading for Soviet Jews in the midst of the Holocaust.
He said: ``Daily, hourly, the greatest crime of all time is being committed. A defenseless and innocent people is being slaughtered in a wholesale massacre of millions. What is more tragic--they are dying for no reason or purpose.''
He went on to say: ``It is a satanic program beyond the grasp of the decent human mind. Yet, it is being carried out. Already 2 million of the Jews in German-occupied Europe have been murdered. The evidence is in the files of our own State Department.''
He went on to say, toward the end of his remarks--by the way, my father is Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., a Member of Congress from Baltimore, Maryland, a strong advocate for calling to public attention the plight of Jews in Europe, as well as advocating for the State of Israel to be established in Palestine earlier on than our country had gone forth.
He did say, though, that: ``We will spare no efforts and have no rest until the American public will be fully informed of the facts and aroused to its responsibilities.''
He then said: ``We believe in the overwhelming power of public opinion as the greatest, if not the only, power in democracy.''
He went on to say: ``If people knew, then something would be different.''
Madam Speaker, I ask that my father's full statement be included in the Record because this is what he said on the floor of the House all those many years ago.
[Rep. Thomas D'Alesandro: Speech in Congressional Record on Israel, Tuesday, March 2, 1943] Establishment of a Jewish Army
Hon. Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr. of Maryland in the House of Representatives
Mr. D'Alesandro: Mr. Speaker, on February 8, 1943, there appeared a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, placed by the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, of which I have the privilege of being a member. This ad calls for action, not pity, toward stopping the wholesale slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe. I am in total agreement with my fellow members of the committee that too much has been said and too little done.
Under leave to extend my remarks in the Record, I include the text of the advertisement so that it may become part of the permanent record:
Action, not pity, can save millions now--extinction or hope for the remnants of European Jewry?--it is for us to give the answer.
Daily, hourly, the greatest crime of all time is being committed. A defenseless and innocent people is being slaughtered in a wholesale massacre of millions. What is more tragic--they are dying for no reason or purpose.
The Jewish people in Europe is not just another victim in the array of other peoples that fell prey to Hitler's aggression. The Jews have been singled out not to be conquered, but to be exterminated. To them Hitler has promised--and is bringing--death.
It is a satanic program beyond the grasp of the decent human mind. Yet it is being carried out. Already 2,000,000 of the Jews in German-occupied Europe have been murdered. The evidence is in the files of our own State Department.
The Germans dared to undertake this process of annihilation because they know that the Jews are defenseless; that the Jews are forgotten and deserted even by the democratic powers.
The Germans believe that the United Nations, indoctrinated by 20 years of anti-Jewish propaganda are to a great extent apathetic and indifferent to the sufferings of the Jews. They believe that for crimes committed against the Jews no retaliation on behalf of the governments or armed forces of the United Nations will be carried out. They know that there is no instrument of power and force on this earth with which the Jews can fight back to avenge their dead and save the remaining millions.
Of what avail are the statements of sympathy and pity and promises of punishment after the war. Since the perpetrators of these slaughters are to be punished for the murders they have already committed then they can kill no more by further murder.
Such mere statements of sympathy and pity are to the Germans proof that their judgement of democracy's attitude toward the Jews is justified and in their criminal minds they understand them as ``carte blanche'' to go on with the slaughter.
What can be done?
What is necessary is to impress the Germans that the governments of the United Nations have decided to change their present policy of passive sympathy and pity to one of stern and immediate action; that they consider the cessation of atrocities against the Jews are an immediate aim of their military and political operations. Under this premise vigorous United Nations' intervention to save European Jewry would become a matter of course. Exactly as it would be if it were American or British civilians who were being killed in a systematic campaign by the Nazis, the whole of the forces of these great democracies would be utilized to find an immediate and effective solution.
The inauguration of such a new policy on behalf of the United Nations would logically result in enabling all those Jews who have managed to escape the European-German hell to fight back. The first dictate therefore, would be the immediate approval of the demand for a Jewish army of the stateless and Palestinian Jews--an army 200,000 strong.
Suicide squads of the Jewish army would engage in desperate commando raids deep into the heart of Germany. Jewish pilots would bomb German cities in reprisal.
A Jewish army would imply a call to arms of all stateless Jews living in North Africa so that they may participate in the imminent invasion of the European continent.
A Jewish army would immediately give a decisive moral relief to the agonized Jews of Europe. Their psychology of despair and helplessness would be transformed into one of hope for revenge and survival. A Jewish army will give a meaning to their sufferings--to their death.
They will then realize that they cease being helpless victims and become partners in the global struggle for a better world, in which their survivors will live in freedom and equality as all other human beings.
The Jews of Palestine and the stateless Jews want to fight as Jews. They want to prove to Hitler and to the world that the Jews can be more than ``the persecuted people''--that Jews can die in other ways than through murder. They want the right to fight for the world's freedom, under their own banner.
To die, if needs be, but to die fighting.
Of course, these are not all the practical proposals which the human mind is capable of conceiving. It is unfair to ask for a single solution to such a disastrous problem. What we must realize is that it is our duty not to resign ourselves to the idea that our brains are powerless to find any solution; not to resign ourselves to the idea that the forces of democracy are too weak to enforce such a solution.
Remember when a few thousand British soldiers were put in chains by the Germans? How swift the retaliation? And how practical.
The Germans chained no more British soldiers.
Remember when a tiny town in Czechoslovakia was horribly ``punished''? How swift the hurricane of world indignation that answered.
There have been no more Lidices.
Remember when small and encircled Sweden opposed vigorously and stubbornly the expulsion of Norwegian Jews. The Germans abandoned their plans.
The Jews of Norway are still there.
The American sense of justice and decency and American ingenuity must also find ways to overpower the diabolical plan to exterminate the Jewish people. It must find a way now, before millions more perish.
It is, therefore, our primordial demand that an intergovernmental commission of military experts be appointed with the task of elaborating ways and means to stop the wholesale slaughter of the Jews in Europe. This must be done now, before the greatest homicidal maniac extends his policy of extermination to other peoples; before he dares introducing poison gas and bacteriological warfare.
Remember that for years the Germans rehearsed on the Jews what they later practiced on other peoples. Therefore, we have decided to launch an all-out campaign to save European Jewry. We will spare no efforts and have no rest until the American public will be fully informed of the facts and aroused to its responsibilities.
We believe in the overwhelming power of public opinion as the greatest, if not the only, power in democracy. Governments in democratic countries like the United States and Great Britain can act only when they feel sure that they are backed by a powerful movement of public opinion. We plead with everyone to help and to cooperate in this sacred campaign we have launched. Join in this fight, write to your Congressmen, contribute to our work, so that this message may be carried to every city and hamlet in the United States as is being done in Great Britain. You are part of the collective conscience of America; this conscience has never been found wanting.
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Ms. PELOSI. Madam Speaker, after Auschwitz, our delegation then traveled to Yad Vashem where we mourned the loss of--believe this--1.5 million little children, killed in this most evil of atrocities.
Before we left Washington, in Krakow, Poland, and throughout the time in Israel, we were blessed to meet with and hear the testimony of survivors. Their message to us was this: ``Never forget.''
As Elie Wiesel, one of the most important voices of conscience that has ever lived said: ``If we forget, the dead will be killed a second time. If forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. The rejection of memory . . . would doom us to repeat past disasters, past wars.''
``Remembering the Holocaust, Fighting Anti-Semitism,'' that was the theme of the Yad Vashem observance. It is the charge that we carry with us.
We must always remember the horrors of the Holocaust, particularly now as the forces of evil that led to the Shoah, are reawakening, and, therefore, we must not only remember the Holocaust, but fight anti- Semitism.
Today, around the world, an epidemic of anti-Semitism and bigotry is spreading with appalling hate crimes being perpetrated everywhere from supermarkets to synagogues. Disturbingly, we have seen a surge of anti- Semitic attacks here in America.
230 years ago, President George Washington, under whose gaze we stand today, our patriarch, wrote to the Jewish community that our Nation would ``give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution, no assistance.''
Yet, from New York, to California, to Pittsburgh innocents are being attacked and lives are being brutally threatened, and too often, bigotry and persecution have been allowed to fester. More needs to be done.
Last spring, the House proudly passed H. Res. 183, which condemns anti-Semitism ``. . . as hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the United States.'' And soon after, we passed legislation to secure Jewish places of worship, which is now law.
Today, with this legislation, the House is taking another step to fulfill our pledge of: ``Never again'' thanks to all of our Members.
This legislation authorizes funding for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to support and strengthen their efforts to develop accurate, relevant, and accessible resources; to promote understanding about the Shoah, and the dangers of intolerance in our time.
We must educate the world about the dangers of what can happen when hate goes unchallenged, and when oppression is met with indifference.
Some of us were there the day the Holocaust Memorial Museum was dedicated. Elie Wiesel spoke so powerfully that rainy day, and years later, I was honored to return to the museum to speak at Elie's memorial service.
Inside the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Hall of Remembrance before the eternal flame, the words of Deuteronomy are inscribed in stone. It says: ``Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children, and your children's children.''
With this legislation, we pledge to keep alive the memory of the Shoah so that we can fulfill the promise: ``Never again.''
I anticipate an overwhelming, unanimous vote in support of this bipartisan legislation, and I thank my colleagues for their leadership on both sides of the aisle for making that victory possible.
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