Dr. Samuel Pisar International Attorney, Author, and Holocaust Survivor

Neither an ecclesiastic nor a theologian, I hardly belong on a podium with the most illustrious religious leaders of France and America. The only credentials that can justify my presence here tonight-other than being both a New Yorker and a Parisian-is the Auschwitz number engraved on my arm, and our shared determination that the horrors perpetrated by man against man in this barbaric century, will never be repeated again.

During the Shoah-the crime of crimes against humanity-one third of an entire people had been wiped off the of the earth with malice aforethought. An evil, pagan ideology had decreed us to be pariahs for no other reason than that we were born Jews. We were excluded from society, communal life and the professions. Our assets and belongings were Arianized, confiscated, or plundered. Our places of worship were desecrated or razed to the ground. And under the largely indifferent eyes of our Christian neighbors, we were tagged with the yellow star of David and consigned to systematic extermination.

As an adolescent, struggling to survive in Europe's greatest inferno, where Hitler's grim reality eclipsed Dante's wildest imagination, I was convinced that if Jesus, his mother Mary, and the 12 apostles had lived in my time, they would have been with me at Auschwitz, because their blood was as tainted as mine. And in my innocence, while the gas chambers belched fire and smoke, I often raised a blasphemous fist to heaven and asked: "Where is God? Where is the Pope? Do they know what is happening here to us? Do they care?"

By placing the sins of the world on Jewish shoulders, Christian thinkers and inquisitors have often turned their backs on Christ himself, opening the way to persecution and mayhem. Last year, in contrast to such incendiary rhetoric, and in the ecumenical spirit of the Nostra Aetate declaration solemnly adopted in 1965 by the Council of Vatican II, the Church of France made an extraordinary mea culpa for Catholic passivity and silence during the somber period of Nazi genocide and Vichy collaboration. The long, moving and densely written document stated: "The time has come for the Church to recognize the sins committed by its sons. . . . We implore the forgiveness of God and ask the Jewish people to hear these words of repentance."

Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, Primate of France, you played a crucial role in inspiring and crafting that historic document. My intuition told me so, as I stood with you and Chief Rabbi Sirat, listening to its public reading by an emissary of the conference of Bishops at Drancy-the very site from which cattle trains had once transported innocent men, women and children to their doom. We heard these words of repentance with tears in our eyes. Tears which came from the same well of sorrow, because our mothers, yours and mine, had both perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. And because both, like the mother of Moses, had given us life a second time, before they went off to die: one by hiding her first-born under the roof of a compassionate Catholic family; the other by dressing her first-born in long pants, so he would look like a grownup, fit for slave labor.

As chairman of a committee which helps Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Memorial find and honor the righteous among nations-gentiles who had risked their lives to save Jews during the Shoah-I can testify that you were saved from certain death by righteous French Christians. In your new incarnation as a prince of the Church, you have consistently demonstrated that the memory of your Jewish childhood and salvation still lives within you, and that you are deeply dedicated to the cause of Christian-Jewish reconciliation. This cause has prospered considerably since the epoch-making reforms of tolerance adopted by the Catholic hierarchy under Pope John XXIII and endorsed by Pope John Paul II.

Karol Wojtyla is from a country upon whose living body was inflicted the massive wound of Auschwitz. He grew up in the shadow of that wound, and his ascent to the throne of Saint Peter was not unrelated to these origins. This became clear when he proclaimed to the world in 1980, "The Shoah is an experience which I carry within me." May God give him strength to continue to speak out against the venomous roots of religious and secular anti-Semitism, which have bred so much hatred and violence.

Eternal gratitude is due to him and to you for such accomplishments as helping to relocate the controversial Auschwitz Carmelite convent to a more appropriate site. Yet today, hundreds of crosses are again being planted near the death camp, to a point which even the Polish Episcopate has found criticizable. Auschwitz, a cemetery without tombs or tombstones is sacred to us all. We are jointly responsible for ensuring that those who perished there can rest in peace.
Allow me to say also that Edith Stein, recently canonized as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was gassed at Auschwitz in 1942 not because she was a Carmelite nun, but because she had been born a Jew. His Holiness' announcement that Catholics will henceforth commemorate with us the Shoah year after year, warmed our hearts. But the proposal to hold such commemorations on August 9th, the day of the new saint's death, rather than the 27th of Nissan, established under the Hebrew calendar half a century ago as Yom Hashoah, to mourn the six million Jewish martyrs, may generate needless confusion and pain. Let us hope that the Vatican will not be indifferent to such concerns.

Eminence, on behalf of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding, and in recognition of your immense and lifelong contributions to inter-faith harmony, it is now my great honor to confer upon you the Nostra Aetate Award. I do so with deep affection and friendship, confident that the dialogue between our two religions, which you have done so much to promote, will continue to flourish in mutual respect of one another's convictions and beliefs.

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