Lecture delivered by Dr. Jorge Grünberg, rector , from the Universidad ORT Uruguay.
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who made this event 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 that comes up when discussing this story is why my mother, Charlotte, decided to talk 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 would sometimes invite Holocaust survivors to speak. My mother never accepted those invitations. She never spoke 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 don't know the exact reason. What I can say is that Ruperto has a very strong gravitational pull.
She had reflected deeply on what she had experienced and on how survivors responded to it. She had little patience for certain interpretations. She spoke about writers such as Jean Améry and Primo Levi and about the difficulty of carrying on with life after such an experience.
One of the ideas she kept repeating was that you can't live looking both 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 went on vacation to Uruguay, 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 she wanted to stay in Uruguay, and after some family discussion, my grandfather finally said something that has remained part of our family history: “If the Gestapo hadn’t been able to separate them, love wasn’t going to separate them either.”
That is how they all ended up in Uruguay.
Some people ask me whether talking about the past was ultimately good or bad for my mother. I would say the jury is still out on that one.
On the one hand, opening up can be therapeutic—an opportunity to let the darkness out. For our children, the book was beneficial in that it gave them a chance to learn about their grandmother's story.
On the other hand, revisiting all these harrowing memories can also be very painful.
Survivor's guilt was a constant presence in 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?
In a way, there was also a hierarchy of suffering. She would say that she didn't 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 gone through terrible things, they had never been in concentration camps. To her, that represented an entirely different kind of suffering.
Although she always said you have to look forward or backward, there was a strong connection between her commitment to education and her previous experience.
Fear was the constant feeling that my family experienced throughout the war and in its aftermath. My mother couldn't stand the sound of boots because it reminded her of the Nazi security forces and the French collaborators.
After the war, she kept telling me that 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 dilemmas. Some people risked their lives to protect Jewish families but charged large sums of money for terrible hiding places.
She had tuberculosis and suffered from it her entire life because it could not be treated. At the time, there were no antibiotics and no access to medical care. And that was partly due to the humidity in the places where they were hiding.
So she always said that humiliation and helplessness were her dominant feelings, and they shaped her personality and her life.
In her second life in Uruguay, she devoted herself to education. Eventually, in the 1970s, she became the director of ORT Uruguay, which was a very small Jewish technical school.
Her great work transformed it 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 establishing a Jewish private university made the challenge even greater. Time and again, people told her it couldn't be done.
Despite everything, my mother had an iron will and she pressed on, because she believed that giving people an education was giving them a weapon so they wouldn't be defenseless. A weapon in a metaphorical sense. A tool for avoiding helplessness.
If your financial situation, your health, or your lack of education leaves you completely at the mercy of another person's wishes, you are never truly free.
So she committed herself to this.
Now we are facing this new wave of artificial intelligence, which is once again causing people to fear for their jobs. And this is happening again.
But she was committed her entire life to giving people the tools they needed to ultimately become independent, self-reliant, and able to live with dignity. That was her guiding principle.
My mother has been very concerned in recent years because the trends she was seeing in the world were, in a way, reminiscent of decades past. At one point, she told me that the world hasn't 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. There are so many memorials, museums, and courses on the Holocaust and other human tragedies.
On the other hand, when you observe how governments, people, and other organizations behave, you get the impression that all this teaching does not translate into the kind of learning you would expect 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 that she had never seen so many books about the Holocaust, so many courses—even at the high school and university levels—as well as academic departments and museums dedicated to the subject.
There is a lot of noise, a lot of teaching, but relatively little connection to learning in terms of people's deeper feelings and attitudes.
I think that remembering is the most important thing.
We have to know and we have to learn the stories of what happened. You know that famous quote by Santayana: “Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat it.”
I think that's a fundamental concept we need to understand, not only about this period, but also about many other eras.
As a university president, I naturally believe that universities are forces for good. But as a scholar, I also know that schools and universities can become forces for harm.
When you conduct in-depth research into German schools during the period well before the Holocaust—from 1933 onward—you find that educational institutions played a role in spreading and legitimizing ideas that portrayed Jews as a threat to society.
Education was very effective. The problem was what was being taught.
When you look at the track record of German institutions, the universities are a disgrace.
Universities have a role to play in making the world a better place. But on the other hand, I think it's possible to 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 assume they'll last forever.
You have to be vigilant, build connections with the right people, and strive to improve in general.