"French Children of the Holocaust"
Mar 21, 2005
Opening speech of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, Archbishop of Lyons,Primat des Gaules,at the exhibition "French Children of the Holocaust" in Lyons Railway Station, 2003.
Dear Friends,
I would like to thank you, Mr Klarsfeld, for this invitation and, through you, thank the Association of the Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deported of France, who organized this travelling exhibition of the "Deported Jewish Children of France". We also would like to express our gratitude to the French National Railway Company that welcomes this exhibition in various symbolic places of France, and today in Lyons, capital of the Resistance and, if you allow me, capital of the Gauls.
It was my duty to visit you and be attentive to your needs, through my convictions of course, but also because of the heritage of my predecessors on the Primatial See of Lyons. They have, as you know, lived in the same attachment to values and the historical work as you, Mr Klarsfeld and your wife, have represented for such a long time in France, with your friends, and particularly M. Jean Lévy in Lyons.
This is to say that I answer your invitation with an immense amount of respect, "in a muted and trembling voice" as Elie Wiesel said as he spoke of Auschwitz.
I do this, having arrived in Lyons, this city in which the Jewish people have lived for so long. I would have liked to begin by visiting the Community and the regional Rabbi, but a death in my family has impeded me from this. This meeting is planned for the coming days.
Here, in Lyons itself, Cardinal Decourtray reminded us:
"Calling a man by his name is to recognize that he exists, to speak with him and collaborate with him. Calling the departed by their name is to call upon them, to bring them into the life of our spirits, our hearts and consciences. This is why we must keep the names of the departed and places of their death so that they may not die completely in the chasm of the emptiness of oblivion".
Mr Klarsfeld, you have taken part in the collection of names and the history of each person. You have brought out this people engulfed in the night of catastrophe to have them appear in the light of our living memories.
Your exhibition is not firstly a commemoration, but an act of courage and fidelity tumed towards the future, a call to a commitment to which I profoundly subscribe, because the Shoah -especially that of the children -takes the most profound place in my heart, my thought and my prayers. This is, as Cardinal Decourtray said "a particular Shoah within the Shoah". It presents this unique singularity, that children died because of their names, names directly linked with the Jewish people, to God Himself. They were little, ordinary, and certainly were not yet conscious of being Jewish: They were the Shoah in the Shoah.
Faced with this expression, I do not forget that the road of Auschwitz was paved, of course, with the exactions of pagan Nazism, but also with the manifestations of Christian Anti-Semitism, now unequivocally condemned, and for which the French Bishops in Drancy, the German Bishops, Pope John Paul II in Rome, then in Kötel, have made their act of repentance. This excuses nothing. However, if we are Christians, this repentance keeps our consciences awake -and my own among others, I promise you.
I want to contribute, personally and in my place, to transmitting the memory of the Shoah to young generations, to the conversion it calls for in humility and prayer. This is not a way of salving the conscience of Christians or erasing responsibility by hiding behind repentance. It is a desire to pay homage, today, to all those who are aware of the singularity of the Shoah. They are working to make a survey in France, to remind the world of the implementation of the "final solution", according to the very expression of the Nazis -the systematic extermination of the entire Jewish people. This extermination necessitated the destruction of the future in the person and faces of these children; extermination they justified by pagan, perverse and totalitarian ideologies, scientifically conducted as of high priority in relation to any other objective, and carried out in an implacable and barbaric way in the extermination camps and gag chambers installed in Poland and the Ukraine.
Your works, Mr Klarsfeld, thwart all revisionism and any attempt to mock, dilute, demean, play clown or recuperate the Shoah. Your testimony is capital: it is the inalienable property of the Jews and is a part of the Jewish dignity.
The inventory of names, places, trains and their destinations is necessary, because they are the sole and last tangible sign of the Jews who disappeared from among the nations.
These names and places are also the property of the surviving Jews, of those born after the Shoah, their families and their descendants. They belong to those and who shall be Jews among the nations, who will speak to us as Jews for the future of the world, to those who exercise their dignity for the service of humanity faced with the rise of neo-paganism, its new idols, assimilation and secularisation.
You are the watchmen of life. Continue your admirable task. Through your historical work, your tenacity, your essential and indisputable role in Izieu, you have known how to reconstruct the identity, history and the names of the children in establishing facts for the Barbie trial.
I was appointed Archbishop of Lyons last 16th July, day of the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the great pillage of Vel' d'hiv', and I spent these summer months remembering these children. I saw their faces and asked them for help and protection for the new mission entrusted to me and for the testimony I wish to make in the footsteps of my predecessors.
With you, I would like to make this prayer of Cardinal Decourtray my own:
"We pray the Lord for the intentions of the Jews, remembering the thousands of Jewish children who died in the camps, only because of what they were: they were Jewish.
We remember that even in France, many have been driven to and placed in transit camps, robbed, before being delivered to the Militia and the Gestapo to be transported in cattle trucks to the extermination camps, where they were tortured, done to death, gassed, burned, their ashes dispersed, deprived of burial forever.
Let us remember in our prayer that they did not die for God - many were not old enough to know Him. They died simply for their names, the blessed names of His chosen people, who designated them for death to men who had decided to destroy forever the people of Revelation, Election, the Covenant, the Law of Sinaï and the Promise, the people of the holy Patriarchs, the Judges, the Kings and the Prophets".
This is my heart-felt religious answer faced with the Shoah. The little faces of the children of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps will never leave us.
Amen, Shalom, may the Lord bless your work! May He also bless the renewed brotherhood between Jews and Catholics!
"French Children of the Holocaust"