The following remarks were delivered by Aryeh Rubin (see picture) at a press conference announcing the launch of Operation Last Chance in Germany. The press conference took place at the Bundestag in Berlin on January 26, 2005. Operation Last Chance, already active in nine countries, offers a ten thousand dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of war criminals involved in the murder of Jews. Mr. Rubin, the founder and director of Targum Shlishi, conceived and funded Operation Last Chance, which is coordinated by the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

I am often asked why I spend significant time and resources on Operation Last Chance. After all, we are down to the wire and these remaining criminals are very old men.

Is it that ich habe eines Deutsche abstammung and meine muter stamt aus Hannover (I have a German background, and my mother hails from Hannover), escaped from Hitler in 1939, and remained scarred for the rest of her days? That’s part of it.

Is it because my father spent his formative years from 1939 to 1945 as a refugee running from his hometown in Eastern Poland, to Siberia, to Uzbekistan, and then Kazakhstan? Or that in a two month period of a Siberian winter he lost his father, brother, and niece to refugee diseases? Or is it that he lost two of his sisters, one in Majdanek and the other in the Lodz ghetto (we think)? That’s part of it.

I know what it isn’t. It is NOT about revenge. The eighty-year-old guard has lived his life and has his grandchildren, while we have no grandmothers, the repository of our oral culture. That can’t be revenge. IT’S ABOUT JUSTICE. Always has been. Always will be.

Jewish tradition teaches us, Im ain ovar, ain hoveh v’ ain atid. If there is no past, there can be no present and no future. This is really our last opportunity to achieve justice for the crimes of the recent past. History will not judge today’s postwar generations by the cars they drive, the movies they produce, or the buildings they erect. They will be judged by the society they build and the legacy they leave.

Hitler wanted to rid Germany of its Jews. But look at the legacy that he left us. Our cultures and our histories are intertwined forever. Ironically, this relationship has given us a joint mission. You, the Germans, the perpetrators, and we, the Jews, its victims, must stand together and not allow today’s intolerance and fanaticism to destroy today’s world as it destroyed ours. Technology has made it easier for few to cause havoc for many. Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia go without saying. Addressing this situation is our collective responsibility for the future.

But your responsibility to the Jewish people goes further and deeper. And while we do not cast the sins of the fathers upon their sons and daughters, this responsibility, and I repeat, responsibility, and not guilt, is to last forever. And if this moral responsibility is heeded, it will benefit German society as much as Jewish society.

Consider the following:

• When sixty-five percent of Germans believe that Israel is the greatest threat to world peace, you should be alarmed by the specter of a destructive phoenix rising from dark ashes.

• When fifty percent of British youth do not know what Auschwitz was, it is you who should sound the alarm bells, and eradicate this ignorance. As Santayana has said, and as it is inscribed in the halls of Yad Vashem, if we do not remember the past, we are condemned to repeat it.

• When a local German government body boycotts a resolution on the Holocaust, it is you, the collective German people, who must know that the demons could come back and engulf us all.

• When a high ranking minister in Iran calls for the destruction of the sovereign state of Israel, a legitimate member of the United Nations, and says that Islam with its 1.25 billion people could afford to lose twenty-five to fifty million people to solve the Jewish problem of five million, we are getting closer to the tipping point. And it should be the Germans at the forefront of the campaign to end the madness.

You have Jewish cultural fairs in Berlin, Jewish film festivals in Frankfurt, Jewish book expos in Munchen, and Jewish cooking classes in Hamburg. And in May, you dedicate in the heart of your capital, a stone’s throw from where we now stand, the somber Holocaust memorial. I cannot reconcile the cultural connections and commemoration of its victims with allowing the remaining murderers the freedom of movement and the peace of mind to live out their days. They must be brought to justice, and fear that knock on the door, be they 75 or 105.

There are many that believe, and I am one of them, that the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust was not a distortion of Catholic and Lutheran teachings, but was central to it. The dogma was not a contributing factor but rather a decisive factor in the Holocaust.

It is German society, the German government, and the German people, using German wealth, German power, and German strength, that must act responsibly to preserve the present and assure the future. But first we must deal with the past. Operation Last Chance is truly your last chance to support justice for the past.

URL: "die jüdische" 03.02.2005