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SPIELBERG URGES WORLD TO "CONFRONT" HISTORY ON HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY
Japan Economic Newswire
January 27, 2014 Monday 11:54 PM GMT
NEW YORK, Jan. 27
NEW YORK, Jan. 27 - Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg spoke
at the United Nations on Monday about the importance of remembering
the horrors of the past such as the Holocaust to prevent large-scale
atrocities from taking root.
At the annual International Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony, the
Oscar award winner praised survivors of Nazi German concentration
camps for their "undamaged optimism" and their ability to transform
"rage and grief into a wellspring of wisdom, progress and justice."
"The survivors' powerful determination to contribute to a future
without genocides does not come from leaving the Holocaust behind,
from escaping history," he said in the General Assembly hall addressing
U.N. officials, diplomats and survivors. "Their determined demand is
that we engage fully with history, that the Holocaust remain with us
in memory."
Since 2005, the United Nations has marked the day the
Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945 by
paying tribute to the 6 million Jews as well as other victims who
perished in the camps.
Born a year after World War II ended, Spielberg recalled childhood
memories of learning to read numbers from the camp tattoos on the
arms of Hungarian survivors who learned English from his grandmother.
The filmmaker was further influenced by meeting other survivors
while on the set of "Schindler's List," the true story of a German
businessman who saved over 1,000 Jews from extermination by having
them work at his factory.
After winning seven Oscars for the film in 1994, the director then
formed the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation as a way
of permanently recording their testimonies.
Since that time, videographers have captured tales of other survivors
of mass atrocities committed in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, as well as
the Nanjing Massacre, which took place in 1937 when large-scale rapes
and murders were carried out by Japanese troops in China. There are
future plans to incorporate more testimonies from survivors of the
events in Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovia as well as in Sudan.
"We know that repressing memory, willed forgetting, is perhaps the
greatest danger we face as a species," he said. "Because we've been
spared, we know that despair is a choice, and remembering is a choice,
but if we want to remain fully human we have no choice but to confront
and remember the past, to learn, and to act on what we've learned."
Japan Economic Newswire
January 27, 2014 Monday 11:54 PM GMT
NEW YORK, Jan. 27
NEW YORK, Jan. 27 - Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg spoke
at the United Nations on Monday about the importance of remembering
the horrors of the past such as the Holocaust to prevent large-scale
atrocities from taking root.
At the annual International Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony, the
Oscar award winner praised survivors of Nazi German concentration
camps for their "undamaged optimism" and their ability to transform
"rage and grief into a wellspring of wisdom, progress and justice."
"The survivors' powerful determination to contribute to a future
without genocides does not come from leaving the Holocaust behind,
from escaping history," he said in the General Assembly hall addressing
U.N. officials, diplomats and survivors. "Their determined demand is
that we engage fully with history, that the Holocaust remain with us
in memory."
Since 2005, the United Nations has marked the day the
Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945 by
paying tribute to the 6 million Jews as well as other victims who
perished in the camps.
Born a year after World War II ended, Spielberg recalled childhood
memories of learning to read numbers from the camp tattoos on the
arms of Hungarian survivors who learned English from his grandmother.
The filmmaker was further influenced by meeting other survivors
while on the set of "Schindler's List," the true story of a German
businessman who saved over 1,000 Jews from extermination by having
them work at his factory.
After winning seven Oscars for the film in 1994, the director then
formed the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation as a way
of permanently recording their testimonies.
Since that time, videographers have captured tales of other survivors
of mass atrocities committed in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, as well as
the Nanjing Massacre, which took place in 1937 when large-scale rapes
and murders were carried out by Japanese troops in China. There are
future plans to incorporate more testimonies from survivors of the
events in Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovia as well as in Sudan.
"We know that repressing memory, willed forgetting, is perhaps the
greatest danger we face as a species," he said. "Because we've been
spared, we know that despair is a choice, and remembering is a choice,
but if we want to remain fully human we have no choice but to confront
and remember the past, to learn, and to act on what we've learned."