"Never Forget, Never Forgive"

A presidential commission journeys into the nightmare of the past

Fulfilling a pledge made on the 30th anniversary of Israel's founding, Jimmy Carter last year appointed a 34-member presidential commission on the Holocaust to develop a memorial in the U.S. to the 6 million victims of the Nazis' "final solution." Last week, as a first step in that effort, the commission toured the sites in Eastern Europe where the campaign of extermination of Jews took place in a search for historical material that could be included in American archives on the Holocaust.

The only journalist to accompany the group was TIME Senior Editor Stefan Kanfer, author of The Eighth Sin, a fictional account of the Nazi slaughter of European gypsies. His report of the journey:

There are almost as many vows made on the White House lawn as there are blades of grass. But there were almost as many victims of the Holocaust, and when Carter promised to create a living memorial to the Jews killed by the Third Reich, he might as well have carved it in marble.

Within weeks the nucleus of a presidential commission was formed: Senators Claiborne Pell, Frank Church and Henry M. Jackson signed on; so did Congress men and scholars, fund raisers and survivors of Hitler's death camps. The President named Novelist and Essayist Elie Wiesel chairman of the commission.

It was a natural choice. At 50, Wiesel has the bearing and diction of an Old Testament prophet. His books and many articles are scrolls of agony, depicting as pects of the Jewish tragedy of the '30s and '40s that, in his view, "blighted and still blights civilization."

On the flight to Warsaw, Historian Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews) regarded the few survivors among the travelers.

"They have three things in common," he noted. "They're in all in their 50s or early 60s, they all still have incredibly fast reactions and, with the exception of Wiesel, they are not strong on philosphy."

Soon after the plane arrived, the group was taken to the site of the Warsaw ghetto. Every building, every person, had literally gone up in smoke when German troops annihilated the last holdout of Warsaw Jewry in 1943. At the steps of the monument, New York Businessman Benjamin Meed, who had been smuggled out of the ghetto just before its destruction, read his simple statement: "I hear once again their very last command to us all: 'Pamietaj! Remember! Never forget and never forgive!' " Later, racked with sobs, he recalled the years of hiding and flight. "On the last day I heard some Poles shouting, 'Look at the Jews fry!' as the ghetto flamed. But I also owe my life to Polish Christians who kept me and my father hidden in a cemetery, where we lived for over a year." He shrugged. "There is good and bad in all."

New Jersey Petroleum Executive Miles Lerman, a survivor of Nazi slave labor camps in Russia, agreed. "There is no way to measure what the Germans did against the helpless. Still you can't allow it to kill your own life. You must go on. And speak out: about Africa, the boat people, anyone in trouble."

Isaac Goodfriend, the ebullient cantor of an Atlanta synagogue and singer of the National Anthem at Carter's Inauguration, also returned without bitterness. Hidden by Polish farmers, Goodfriend came back 35 years later to the house of his saviors with presents and memories. The family reciprocated--with a lunch of Polish ham.

Said Goodfriend: "They never did know what kosher meant. But they defined decency."

There were no echoes of decency at the next stop, a short bus ride from Warsaw. In 1943 the outside of Treblinka was designed like a Hollywood set to assuage the arriving victims and make them easier to manage. Bewildered Jews, released from cattle cars, saw a mock railroad station, complete with buffet and flower beds. Hours later the passengers were forced to strip and take "showers." They were crammed into gas chambers so tightly that babies were often thrust in over the heads of adults. The doors were then closed and the gas jets turned on. There were few survivors of Treblinka. In shame the Germans later tore down the camp's structures, and now all that stands on the bare acreage is a kind of modern Stonehenge.

So many people were murdered there that the vast parade of rocks bear the names of cities rather than individuals. Around the stones are stands of tall trees whose leaves moan endlessly in the wind.

A more silent and harrowing arena awaited the group in Auschwitz, not far from the city of Cracow. Here, in 1944, the killing machines operated with irrational efficiency. Even when the Germans needed rolling stock to bring their own wounded soldiers back from the front, the railroad cars of Auschwitz kept on rolling.

Hannah Rosensaft, a plump, cheerful passenger through the early journey, held back tears for as long as she could.

But the survivor of Auschwitz could find no consolation. Behind great glass containers the story of the prisoners was presented in mute detail: a room of human hair, to be used by the Reich for textiles; a room of confiscated Jewish prayer shawls. Commission members could see the gas chambers near by, but what no one could see, except the survivors in their minds' eyes, was the process of selection that led to death. A former prisoner testified in an Auschwitz guidebook: "During the selection of children, the SS men had placed a rod at the height of 1.20 meters. Children who had passed under the rod would be gassed. Small children, knowing what was awaiting them, tried hard to push out their necks when passing under the rod, in the hope of escaping gassing."

One of those children, Elie Wiesel, led the commission on to Birkenau, the neighboring camp, where crematories once burned night and day. Linking arms with four other survivors, Wiesel marched over the tracks that had brought him here a world ago and laid a wreath on a monument to the fallen. "Do not let your eyes deceive you," he said quietly.

"No sun ever shines here. Those who perished at Birkenau have not even a cemetery. We are their cemetery." Sigmund Strochlitz, a Connecticut automobile dealer, recalled his arrival at Birkenau: "The day I got here I saw the chimneys vomiting black smoke. That day I became an orphan. But I did not know it. The next day I learned my friends were no more. On the third day they told me I was dead. And may be I am."

In Poland, Wiesel met again and again with government officials to try to persuade them to share materials and records of Polish Jewry that they had withheld for almost 40 years. Repeatedly he managed to gain concessions. Exhausted, as lean as a Giacometti sculpture, Wiesel walked through the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, past the forest of neglected tombstones, until he found one that seemed to summarize his mission: the carved figure of a man who died in 1943, holding in his hand the final symbol of the ghetto struggle, a grenade.

In the Soviet city of Kiev, the group stood at Babi Yar, where during two years of Nazi occupation some 80,000 Jews were killed and thrown into a mass grave. Here a stark sculpture of monumental figures rises from a knoll. But the only evidence that Jews died here were the Hebrew words from Job, "Earth do not cover my blood," on the memorial wreath presented by the commission. Oddly, it was two non-Jews who did most to recollect the past. In his great poem, Babi Yar, Yevgeni Yevtushenko reminded his countrymen back in 1961, "I stand terror-stricken. Today I am as ancient in years as the Jewish people themselves are ... I myself am like an endless soundless cry, over these thousands and thousands of buried ones." Eighteen years later, Black Activist Bayard Rustin stood before a vast assemblage of commissioners and Soviet sightseers and sang the spiritual that once nurtured Martin Luther King Jr.:

Before you 'd be a slave

You 'd be buried in your grave

And go home with your God and

be free.

We'll remember, we'll remember

thee.

In Moscow, the only monument was a single synagogue. About 100 old men, their Rembrandt faces limned by faith, prayed as their ancestors have done for thousands of years. Here Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, 34, deputy director of the commission, read from Lamentations:

"Remember our days as of old, except if you have scorned us utterly."

Again in Moscow, Wiesel pressed for records withheld since the end of the war.

And again he succeeded. Roman Rodenko, the Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, praised Wiesel's mission as "noble"; Soviet historians and writers first insisted that only Soviet citizens died in the war, not Jews as such. But they ended by promising copies of documents and inviting an exchange of scholars.

In Scandinavia, no concessions had to be wrung from the government or from private sources. During the German occupation, Denmark had saved some 7,000 Jews by spiriting them to Sweden; and before he disappeared in Russia, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish citizen, had saved nearly 30,000 Hungarian Jews by arranging special trains and supplying false papers. Yet no matter how the commissioners praised members of the Danish resistance, the veterans kept insisting that they had only done "the normal thing." Conceded Christian Theologian Roy Eckardt, chairman of Lehigh University's religion department: "Perhaps it was the normal thing.

Maybe goodness is as imponderable and mysterious as evil."

In Israel, the group toured Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's graphic memorial to the Holocaust. Passing the photographic murals of atrocities and victims, Professor Yaffa Eliach of Brooklyn College kept remembering the cries of her infant brother as they hid in Vilna until at last he was smothered by adults who feared that he might give them away. "There is an unbridgeable difference between those who went to the camps in the '40s and ourselves today," she insisted. "We have round-trip tickets. They didn't. It is impossible to fully recall the horror."

Then why try? Why not let the unbearable past recede into the anaesthesia of history books? "Simply because we can't and still call ourselves human beings," said Wiesel at journey's end. "We do not have this commission simply to remember, but to warn. Last time it was the killing of the Jews, then the attempt to annihilate humanity itself. Between the two came the sin of indifference. Today when we hear the word holocaust it is preceded by the word nuclear. If there is to be no new holocaust, first we have to look backward and learn. We hope this mission is a beginning. For if we forget, the next time indifference will no longer be a sin. It will be a judgment."

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