Conferencia pronunciada por el rector de la Universidad ORT Uruguay, Dr. Jorge Grünberg.
I would like to thank Dan and his wonderful team for helping us set up this meeting. They are really a wonderful team. From what I heard, Dan greenlit this meeting from a bunker in Tel Aviv under the ballistic missiles. I also want to thank the Uruguayan ambassador and his wife for being here today.
Listening to the Uruguayan ambassador, you might understand why my mother was so proud to be a Uruguayan. I was born in Uruguay, so I am Uruguayan, I never thought about having another nationality. But my mother was Uruguayan by choice, and she was very proud to be one. Actually, Uruguayans and Jews have more in common than what appears on the surface. We are the only two people in the history of mankind to have an exodus as a central part of our proud history.
My mother, for several decades, never spoke about what happened to her and her family during the Shoah. I don’t know why. She only told us a few comments in special moments. For example, during the Six- Day war. She was intensely moved by what was happening and she started telling me, “It looks like this is going to happen again”. I didn’t understand at that time what she meant, but she was afraid of a holocaust happening again.
When I was a bit older, I read about survivors’ guilt. Some people felt guilty because others had died while they survived. There was also this hierarchy of pain. She said “I don’t deserve any attention because the people who were killed and the people who were in the camps are the ones who deserve the real attention. We were never in the camps. We survived”.
At some point, Ruperto came into our lives, and he started talking to her. He wanted to write a book, and he called me and said “Your mother is against it. She doesn’t want to cooperate with it. Can you help?”. And I said “Ruperto, if you have met my mother, you know I can’t do anything. She is of her own mind”. But somehow, he obtained her approval and for two years, they sat in her living room talking. My father´s mission during these sessions was to bring the afternoon chocolate cakes.
After the book came out, my kids, our kids, our three children, started to ask “Why didn’t she speak to us? Why to Ruperto? Ruperto is not a member of the family. It was a conundrum. We didn’t know what to answer. So, we decided that the only way forward was to designate him as a member of the family. He is now my brother. My mother spoke about Ruperto Long as her honorary son.
After the book came out my mother was not very optimistic. She said, “Nobody will want to read this”. When you read the stories of Eli Wiesel or Primo Levi, you don’t know if your story is going to resonate, but it did. It was a best seller in Spanish. It was sold all over Latin America and Spain. It was translated into Italian and finally, to Hebrew. She was still with us when it came into Hebrew. That meant a lot to her. Unfortunately, this was during the pandemic, so we couldn’t make it to Israel. And now it is in English.
People has asked me, “Was it good for her?”, “Was it therapeutic? Was it good for her to have all this coming out at almost 80 years old or was it bad because all these memories came back flooding again?”
She used to say, “You cannot look forward and backward at the same time”. That was her way. You cannot hate it all the time. You cannot forgive, but you cannot hate all the time either. If you want to live a life, don’t give victory to the ones who destroyed your youth, you must look forward. And forward she looked.
She established the new ORT in Uruguay in 1975 and at a certain point, she said “This country needs a technological university”. At the time everybody said, “This is impossible, absolutely impossible”. In Uruguay, there was only one university. Private endeavors are seen with some suspicion in Uruguay, and that is an understatement. And private universities are even worse. And a Jewish private university. Everybody said, “you shouldn’t go for it”. There were some rough encounters, being in the room as a very young person and there was this person who was quite aggressive in saying “Don’t go for it, you must back down”. She said “Look, the Gestapo couldn’t stop me, so, leave the room”.
After the book came out, we received more than 10.000 messages, mostly positive messages. It is a story of resilience and going forward in life. So, many people connected her story to their personal challenges. People coming out of diseases. People who were in prison. People were connecting this book to any other kind of experience that had nothing to do with Judaism or the Shoah.
As you are going to learn from the book my mother and her family were saved along the way by a Catholic priest. So, she always said “There is good everywhere”. They were trying to go to Switzerland. They were betrayed by the ones who supposedly sold them the escape route. They were betrayed and were left at what was called at that time, the red zone, which was the zone between France and Switzerland. They were left stranded in the field, very close to a town and the town priest hid them in the church for a few days until they found a truck to go back to Lyon. Years later, she told this story to the archbishop of Montevideo and when she spoke in churches.
After the book came out, we had long chats with my mother about her life experience. And she had three takeaways from her experience. First, she was not completely satisfied with “Never again”. She said, “Never again is a wish”. We should say “Never again defenseless. That is a call for action”. We talked a lot about this. Was the Shoah a deficit of human rights or was it a deficit of strength? I think she leaned towards the opinion that it was a deficit of strength. You have to be self-reliant in many ways and also have allies, as well.
The second takeaway is “Don’t sell your soul”, because she saw, with her own eyes, in Belgium, how many Jews were prepared to transform their Judaism into politically acceptable ways, thinking this was going to save them. It didn’t. From the left to the left spectrum up to the right to the right extreme of the political spectrum. You could be very religious, non-religious. You could be connected to a Jewish community or non-connected to a Jewish community. You could be a Zionist; you could be an anti-Zionist. You could be a communist. You could be anything. If you were Jewish, you were going to be sent to a labor camp. You were going to lose your house, you were going to risk your life and later on, deported. So, don’t sell your soul, it will not save you.
And the third takeaway was that memory is not enough. For memory to be really useful, you have to learn from it. You have to learn from what happened, not only to remember it. Remembering what happened is important as long as it is a precursor to learning. And I think we can connect this to what is happening at the moment. I don’t think any time in life were so many Holocaust museums, Holocaust memorials, Holocaust books, Holocaust courses, universities and schools, and still it doesn’t seem that people have learned enough about it. Actually, my mother used to say, especially after October 7th, 2023, “The world has not learned anything”.