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In Scandinavia, no concessions had to be wrung from the government or from private sources. During the German occupation, Denmark had saved some 7,000 Jews by spiriting them to Sweden; and before he disappeared in Russia, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish citizen, had saved nearly 30,000 Hungarian Jews by arranging special trains and supplying false papers. Yet no matter how the commissioners praised members of the Danish resistance, the veterans kept insisting that they had only done "the normal thing." Conceded Christian Theologian Roy Eckardt, chairman of Lehigh University's religion department: "Perhaps it was the normal thing.
Maybe goodness is as imponderable and mysterious as evil."
In Israel, the group toured Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's graphic memorial to the Holocaust. Passing the photographic murals of atrocities and victims, Professor Yaffa Eliach of Brooklyn College kept remembering the cries of her infant brother as they hid in Vilna until at last he was smothered by adults who feared that he might give them away. "There is an unbridgeable difference between those who went to the camps in the '40s and ourselves today," she insisted. "We have round-trip tickets. They didn't. It is impossible to fully recall the horror."
Then why try? Why not let the unbearable past recede into the anaesthesia of history books? "Simply because we can't and still call ourselves human beings," said Wiesel at journey's end. "We do not have this commission simply to remember, but to warn. Last time it was the killing of the Jews, then the attempt to annihilate humanity itself. Between the two came the sin of indifference. Today when we hear the word holocaust it is preceded by the word nuclear. If there is to be no new holocaust, first we have to look backward and learn. We hope this mission is a beginning. For if we forget, the next time indifference will no longer be a sin. It will be a judgment."