Marcel Reich-Ranicki's speech on the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism
On January 27, 2012 , Marcel Reich-Ranicki gave a speech as the guest of honor in the German Bundestag in Berlin on the commemoration day of the victims of National Socialism . He reported on his own experiences with National Socialism .
Content of the speech
At the beginning of his speech, Marcel Reich-Ranicki emphasized that he was speaking not as a historian, but as a contemporary witness of the Holocaust . He himself was deported from Berlin to Poland in 1938 after a brief detention as part of the “ Polenaktion ” and was a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto .
In the following, Reich-Ranicki told how SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle commissioned the Judenrat with the so-called “resettlement of Jews from Warsaw”, also known as “ Big Action ”. Reich-Ranicki was forced to take minutes of the meeting on Höfle's order. After the conference was closed and the SS leaders and their companions had left the house, Reich-Ranicki had to take care of the Polish translation of the minutes. He himself said that on July 22, 1942, he had dictated the death sentence that the SS had passed on the Jews of Warsaw to his colleague Gustawa Jarecka.
On Jarecka's advice, Reich-Ranicki married his girlfriend Tosia shortly afterwards . The chairman of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków , committed suicide the next day, July 23, 1942. In the farewell letter to his wife, Czerniaków said that after he had been asked to kill the children of his people with his own hands, he had no choice but to die. Reich-Ranicki said that this act was seen as a sign that the situation of Warsaw's Jews was hopeless. Furthermore, Reich-Ranicki considered Czerniaków to be an intellectual man with principles who adhered to his ideals even in inhuman times. At the end of the speech Reich-Ranicki stated that the so-called "resettlement" of the Jews was a mere evacuation from Warsaw: "It had only one goal, it had only one purpose: death."
After his speech, Reich-Ranicki received standing applause from the audience.