Speech delivered by the rector Universidad ORT Uruguay, Dr. Jorge Grünberg.
I would like to thank Dan and his wonderful team for helping us organize this meeting. They really are a wonderful team. From what I’ve heard, Dan gave the go-ahead for 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 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 of it. Actually, Uruguayans and Jews have more in common than meets the eye. We are the only two groups in human history to have an exodus as a central part of our proud history.
For several decades, my mother never spoke about what happened to her and her family during the Holocaust. I don’t know why. She only shared a few remarks with us on special occasions. For example, during the Six-Day War. She was deeply moved by what was happening and she began to say to me, “It looks like this is going to happen again.” I didn’t understand at the time what she meant, but she was afraid that a Holocaust would happen again.
When I was a little older, I read about survivor’s guilt. Some people felt guilty because others had died while they had 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’ve met my mother, you know I can’t do anything. She’s a woman of her own mind.” But somehow, he got her approval, and for two years, they sat in her living room talking. My father’s job during these sessions was to bring the afternoon chocolate cakes.
After the book came out, my kids—our three children—started asking, “Why didn’t she talk to us? Why did she talk to Ruperto? Ruperto isn’t part of the family.” It was a real puzzle. We didn’t know how 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 of Ruperto Long as her honorary son.
After the book was published, my mother wasn’t very optimistic. She said, “Nobody will want to read this.” When you read the stories of Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, you don’t know if your story will resonate, but it did. It was a bestseller in Spanish. It was sold throughout Latin America and Spain. It was translated into Italian and finally into Hebrew. She was still with us when it was published in 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 available in English.
People have asked me, “Was it good for her?”, “Was it therapeutic? Was it good for her to have all this come out when she was almost 80, or was it bad because all those memories came flooding back?”
She used to say, “You can’t look forward and backward at the same time.” That was her way. You can’t hate all the time. You can’t forgive, but you can’t hate all the time either. If you want to live your life, don’t let those who destroyed your youth win; you must look forward. And forward she looked.
She established the new ORT in Uruguay in 1975, and at one point she said, “This country needs a technological university.” At the time, everyone said, “This is impossible, absolutely impossible.” In Uruguay, there was only one university. Private initiatives are viewed with some suspicion in Uruguay—and that’s an understatement. Private universities are viewed even more negatively. And a Jewish private university? Everyone said, “You shouldn’t go for it.” There were some tense encounters; as a very young person in the room, 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 get out of the room.”
After the book was published, we received more than 10,000 messages, most of them positive. It is a story of resilience and moving forward in life. As a result, many people related her story to their own personal struggles. People who had overcome illness. People who had been in prison. People connected this book to all sorts of experiences that had nothing to do with Judaism or the Holocaust.
As you will 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 get to Switzerland. They were betrayed by the people who were supposed to have sold them the escape route. They were betrayed and left in what was called at the time the “red zone,” which was the area between France and Switzerland. They were left stranded in a 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 take them back to Lyon. Years later, she told this story to the archbishop of Montevideo and when she spoke in churches.
After the book was published, we had long conversations with my mother about her life experiences. And she drew three key lessons from her experiences. First, she wasn’t entirely satisfied with “Never again.” She said, “Never again is a wish.” We should say “Never again defenseless. That is a call to action.” We talked a lot about this. Was the Shoah a failure of human rights or a failure of strength? I think she leaned toward the view that it was a failure of strength. You have to be self-reliant in many ways and also have allies.
The second takeaway is “Don’t sell your soul,” because she saw, with her own eyes, in Belgium, how many Jews were willing to adapt their Judaism to politically acceptable norms, thinking this would save them. It didn’t. From the far left to the far right of the political spectrum. You could be very religious or non-religious. You could be connected to a Jewish community or not. 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 home, you were going to risk your life, and later on, be deported. So, don’t sell your soul—it won’t save you.
And the third takeaway was that memory alone is not enough. For memory to be truly useful, you have to learn from it. You have to learn from what happened, not just remember it. Remembering what happened is important as long as it serves as a stepping stone to learning. And I think we can connect this to what is happening right now. I don’t think there has ever been a time in history when there were so many Holocaust museums, Holocaust memorials, Holocaust books, Holocaust courses, universities, and schools, and yet it still doesn’t seem that people have learned enough about it. In fact, my mother used to say, especially after October 7, 2023, “The world has learned nothing.”