SPEECH BY CLAUDE LANZMANN DURING THE CEREMONY OF HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY THURSDAY JANUARY 26, 2012 AT NEVE SHALOM SYNAGOGUE ISTANBUL

My dear friends,

I would have been truly honoured to be here tonight with you, not through a videoconference, in Paris at home, but in real flesh. For me it would have been not only a pleasure, but a great privilege. Unfortunately, a bad bronchitis keeps me in France and the doctors categorically forbid me to undertake the journey.

I am even more regretful as today is not a day like any other. What will happen tonight on the public Turkish channel TRT is truly historic, and will have huge consequences. For the first time since its release in France and around the world in 1985, my film Shoah will be officially broadcast in a Muslim country with subtitles in Turkish in order to reach the widest possible audience.

I welcome the decision of TRT officials. And I would also like to commend the hard work of the Aladdin Project to ensure that Shoah will be aired to the widest possible audience in Turkish, Persian and Arabic. I was very sensitive to the infinite care given to the subtitling work, and to the beauty of the characters on the screen in a language unknown to me. This projection, the first – I repeat – in a Muslim country, is a pioneer, and I hope that other Muslim countries will follow the good and fair example of Turkey.

I wholeheartedly support the Aladdin Project’s efforts to reconcile Jews and Muslims through mutual knowledge. Many initiatives have been undertaken including the translation of major works on the Holocaust into Arabic and Persian, the launch of a multilingual website with reliable information on the two religions, the publication of a books’ collection on the history of the Jewish communities in Islamic lands, and a project for educating young rabbis, priests and imams about the religion of the Other.

Last year, the Aladdin Project organized a visit to Auschwitz with an international delegation composed of 200 prominent politicians, academics, intellectuals and mayors from 40 countries, most of them from the Muslim world in order to launch a universal appeal for peace and respect. Representatives of the Turkish President and Prime Minister, many intellectuals and members of civil society were part of the Turkish delegation. After the visit, the collaboration between the Aladdin Project and Turkey has been strengthened. Several projections of the film Turkish Passport by Burak Arliel on the righteous Turkish Muslims will soon be organized.

I would like to thank the Turkish intellectuals who have been working with the Aladdin Project,  Professor Ilber Ortayli, President of the Topkapi Museum, Enver Yucel, President of Bahcesehir University, Professor Nilüfer Gole, Professor Cengiz Aktar, Cemal Usak, Vice-president of the Union of journalists, but also the members of the Jewish community in Turkey and its president, Sami Herman.

Today we commemorate the anniversary of the arrival of the Red Army in the Auschwitz camp. Exactly 67 years ago the first Soviet soldiers, disbelieving and terrified, discovered a few thousand sick and dying persons that had, miraculously, survived until this final day. The Auschwitz death factory had murdered a million and a half Jews and a lot of gypsies interned there, in a specific part of the camp (we don’t have any reliable figures).

I did not make Shoah in order to respond to Holocaust deniers, those who say that the Holocaust is a complete fabrication of Jews and Zionists, and to prove them wrong. Shoah is not a question of proving. The reality of the extermination of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazis, doesn’t need to be "proved". All you have to do is to visit the Jewish graves in Parisian cemeteries and to see a photograph affixed to a gravestone, with the caption: "Dead. Murdered or killed in Auschwitz (or Treblinka) in 1942 (or 1943)”. Sometimes the date is more complete, but it still has the same heartbreaking meaning: the graves are empty of any body or bone. The ashes of the dead Jews dispersed a long time ago in rivers or lakes in Poland are reduced to this simple picture on the gravestone, as if the living could not accept the brutal disappearance. The only evidence is there, irrefutable, to be passed down until the end of time.

When Shoah was broadcast for the first time in 1987 on the first channel of French television, French Holocaust deniers did everything to dissuade viewers from watching the film by publishing notably leaflets “Open your eyes, smash the TV”. They understood that my film, which doesn’t show any corpse, was the absolute refutation of their thesis and represented for them the greatest danger. There is not a single body in Shoah, but this precisely shows the reality and the success of the extermination itself. The only known archival footage showing bodies pushed by a bulldozer have nothing to do with the extermination camps. They were shot in Germany at the time of the opening of concentration camps: the dead suffered typhus epidemic. Three hours after the arrival of a three, four, five thousand people "convoy" in an extermination camp - Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec and Auschwitz - death had already done its work: all of them were asphyxiated by gas, and their bodies were burned in ovens or on pyres outside. The large bones, which had resisted the fire, were reduced to dust by pestles of wood or stone. The ashes were bagged up and thrown in the air. Nothing remained, not a single trace. The extermination was radical: humans were killed, but the destruction itself was destroyed. It was the perfect crime, denied the very moment it was accomplished.

We have come a long way ​​since 1945 in the European and global conscience. Only in 2005, the UN General Assembly unanimously designated January 27 as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Many people did not understand the importance of memory work in countries that had not been involved in the Holocaust. They did not recognize the universal impact of the Holocaust lessons. Auschwitz has gradually become the symbol of absolute evil. There is only one humanity. And if I can cry when I see a film by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu or a masterpiece of Turkish director Yilmaz Guney, even though it is not at all from my culture, I see no reason why Turks could not cry when they see Shoah as if it was about their own history. Because this film touches what is human in all of us.

Tonight we will remember together all the darkest pages of European history and we will learn lessons from it. We will remember the need to fight for human dignity and against intolerance, discrimination and all forms of racism. We will remember the importance of democracy and reliable institutions which protect a country from individual and collective passions.

It is no coincidence to me that Turkey is now the first Muslim country to present my film on public television. With its democratic system and moderate Islam, Turkey has become a model for Arab countries and governments after the recent revolutions. I hope that these countries dare to follow the good example of Turkey and commit themselves to teach their people the universal lessons of the Holocaust.

I would finally like to remind everyone that Turkey was for thousands of years a haven for the Jewish communities. Many Jews found refuge here after fleeing the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition or the Germanic states pogroms. The Turkish Jewish community today is one of the largest in the Middle East.

When I finished Shoah, after twelve years of work, I thought the film would be seen by 3,000 elite people and that would have fulfilled my expectations. Hundreds of millions of people around the world, including Japan and China, have now seen my film and I am very moved to present it tonight to the Turkish public.