Conferencia pronunciada por el rector de la Universidad ORT Uruguay, Dr. Jorge Grünberg.
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who made this gathering possible. It is a great honor for us to be here in New York and to see this book published in English.
One of the questions when talking about this story is why my mother, Charlotte, decided to speak about her experiences after remaining silent for 60 years. The answer is that I don’t really know.
When my children were growing up, their school sometimes invited Holocaust survivors to speak. My mother never accepted those invitations. She did not speak about what had happened to her, not even to my father.
Then Ruperto Long came into our lives and, somehow, she began to open up. I do not know the exact reason. What I can say is that Ruperto has a very strong gravitational power.
She had reflected deeply on what she had experienced and on the way survivors responded to it. She had little patience for some interpretations. She spoke about writers such as Jean Améry and Primo Levi and about the difficulty of continuing to live after such an experience.
One of the ideas she repeated was that you cannot live looking forward and backward at the same time. At some point, you have to choose. She chose to look forward.
When she was 18 years old, she travelled to Uruguay on a holiday trip, where she met my father. He spoke Spanish and she spoke French. It was, as we say, coup de foudre, love at first sight.
She decided that she wanted to remain in Uruguay, and after some family discussion, my grandfather finally said something that remained part of our family history: “If the Gestapo had not been able to separate them, love was not going to separate them either.”
That is how they all came to Uruguay.
Some people ask me whether speaking about the past was ultimately good or bad for my mother. I would say the jury is out on that one.
On one hand, opening up can be therapeutic, an opportunity to let the darkness out. For our children, the book was good in the sense that they received an opportunity to know their grandmother's story.
On the other hand, revisiting all these harrowing memories can also be very painful.
Survivor’s guilt was present throughout her life. My mother would ask why she had survived when so many others had not. Why did her family survive when other families did not?
There was also, in some way, a hierarchy of suffering. She would say that she did not deserve attention because the people who deserved it were those who had died. But those who are dead could no longer speak.
She also insisted that although they had experienced terrible things, they had never been in the concentration camps. To her, that represented another category of suffering entirely.
Although she always said you have to look forward or backwards, there was a big connection between her commitment to education and her previous experience.
Fear was the everlasting sentiment that was with my family all the time during and after the war. My mother couldn't listen to the sound of boots because it reminded her of the Nazi security personnel and the French collaborators.
After the war, she kept telling me there was something beyond fear: humiliation and defenselessness. The helplessness that came from being unable to defend yourself, and the need to depend on someone else.
During the war, the family depended on people willing to hide them or help them escape. There were enormous moral ambiguities. Some people risked their lives to protect Jewish families but charged large amounts of money for terrible hiding places.
She had tuberculosis and she had problems all her life because the tuberculosis could not be treated. At the time, there were no antibiotics, no possibility of medical care. And that was in part because of the humidity of the places where they were hidden.
So she always said humiliation and helplessness were the prevailing sentiments, and they shaped her personality and her life.
In her second life in Uruguay, she dedicated herself to education. Eventually, in the seventies, she became the head of ORT Uruguay, which was a very small Jewish technical school.
Her great work transformed that into a university, Universidad ORT Uruguay.
That was not an easy project. Establishing a private university in Uruguay was extremely difficult at that time.
It was a time when a private university in Uruguay was unheard of, and creating a Jewish private university made the challenge even greater. Again and again, people told her that it could not be done.
Despite it all, my mother had an iron will and she pushed forward, because she felt that giving people education was giving them a weapon not to be defenseless. A weapon in a metaphorical sense. A tool for avoiding helplessness.
If your economic situation, your health or your lack of education leaves you completely subject to another person's wishes, you are never really free.
So she committed herself to this.
Now we are facing this new wave of artificial intelligence, putting people in fear again about their jobs. And this is happening again.
But she was committed all her life to giving people tools to be able, at the end of the day, to be independent, autonomous and have their own dignity. That was her guiding star.
My mother was very concerned in recent years because the trends she was seeing in the world were, in a way, reminiscent of decades before. At some point, she told me the world has not learned anything. It was quite sad.
In more technical terms, when we discussed this, she said, “We live in an era in which there is a surplus of teaching and a deficit of learning.”
There has probably never been so much teaching about the Holocaust. So many memorials, museums or courses on the Holocaust and on other human tragedies.
On the other hand, when you see how governments, people and other organizations behave, you have the impression that all this teaching does not correlate with the sort of learning you are expecting in terms of changing people's behavior and attitudes.
Prejudice is still here. Violence is still here. And there is also indifference.
In a way, my mother was saying she had never seen so many books around the Holocaust, so many courses, even at the high school level, university level, departments of studies, and museums.
There is a lot of noise, a lot of teaching, but relatively little correlation with learning in terms of people's deeper feelings and attitudes.
I think that remembering is the basic thing.
We have to know and we have to learn the stories of what happened. You know that famous sentence by Santayana: “Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat it.”
I think that's a basic idea we need to know, not only about this time, but about many other ages.
As a university president, naturally I believe universities are forces for good. But as a scholar, I also know that schools and universities can become forces for harm.
When you research deep into German schools during the period well before the Holocaust, from 1933 onward, educational institutions participated in spreading and legitimizing ideas that portrayed Jews as a risk to society.
Education was very effective. The problem was what was being taught.
When you look at the record of German institutions, universities are shameful.
Universities have a role to play in bettering the world. But on the other hand, I think you can overstate the power of universities or schools to do good.
My mother used to say in French that nothing should be taken for granted. Jews have full civil rights: don't think it's eternal.
You have to be vigilant and try to establish links with the right people and try to improve in general.