Acclaimed Hollywood director Steven Spielberg
has addressed a U.N. conference to mark the
international day of commemoration for the
victims of the Holocaust.
I became a filmmaker because it was important
to me to communicate my concerns and preoccupations
to my audience and when I became a father,
to my children. And it took me approximately
20 years of directing sharks, aliens and dinosaurs
before I believe I might be ready to make
a film about the Holocaust.
The filmmaker, whose grandparents came from
the Ukraine, was the keynote speaker at the
event and talked about why making his 1993
film Schindler's List was his way of coming
to terms with the Holocaust.
Directing Schindler's List, interviewing survivors,
this was my way to try to understand the Holocaust.
Breaking down the phenomena of overwhelming
horror into individual moments was the only
way I knew how to approach and better understand it.
Those who lived through it know what we will
never know, but we can learn because they
want to teach us. Survivors and witnesses
often say that their dearest hope, the hope
to help keep them alive was the be heard and
to be believed and to be understood. So although
I have no personal journey through the Holocaust
to recount, I offer my journey to the journeys
of survivors. My Holocaust journey and that
of everyone, not a survivor, is a journey
toward understanding.
Six million European Jews were murdered during
the Holocaust, along with millions of other
victims who suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
At the conference Spielberg talked about the
importance of memory and documentation of
the Holocaust and going forward, making sure
current and future forms of genocide are addressed.
We know that justice lives in memory. We know
that repressing memory, willed forgetting,
is perhaps the greatest danger we face as
a species. Because we've been spared, we know
that to spare is a choice and we know that
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 act on what we've learned. There are no
bystanders to history. History doesn't flow
around us and past us; it flows through us.
