In commemoration of Yom Hashoah, Tuesday 29 2003 / 28 Nisan 5763

MAJOR GENERAL GIORA ROMM

DEFENSE AND ARMED FORCES ATTACHE, EMBASSY OF ISRAEL

"THE HOLOCAUST AND THE ISRAELI SPIRIT"

SPEAKING ON OCCASION OF HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

THE PENTAGON, APRIL 18, 1993

It is 1961 and I am a student in the eleventh grade of my high school -- a military boarding school. This is the year of the Adolph Eichmann trial. Because there is no television in Israel yet, we all sit and listen to the opening session of the Eichmann trial on the radio. Then we go back to school, and during the afternoons, from time to time, we hear the testimonies from the trial. We are young men, 17 years old, who have never spoken about the Holocaust, and practically ignored it.

One day, about 25 of us are sitting and listening, and we hear the testimony of a woman who tells about standing behind a truck on which her two sons are being taken away. She's screaming and the German guard stops the truck, turns to her and tells her, "well, lady, you can pick one of them." I don't know how many of you read William Styron's Sophie's Choice; but unlike Sophie in that book who chooses her son over her daughter, this woman didn't pick either one and the truck left with her two children on board. When the testimony was over, and the room was quiet, one of us who was very silent stood up and said suddenly "I cannot take it any more"; and he left the room.

Deputy Secretary Perry; General McPeak; General Mundy; distinguished members of the Pentagon; it's a great honor for me, and I am deeply moved by the opportunity to speak on this very special occasion. I have been serving in this country for ten months. You can imagine I've spoken quite a few times, but I have never had the opportunity to speak on such a unique topic. Usually I represent my government -- I represent my country. This time I feel that I represent not only my country and my government; this time I represent my whole generation. I represent my parents' generation. I represent my wife, who is here, who spent the first six months of her life in some remote forest in Czechoslovakia taken care of by nuns.

I represent the generation of my grandparents, a generation that believed that Warsaw and Rodomsk in Poland were safe havens. I represent many other generations, and perhaps I also represent the generation of my children and of my grandchildren who have not yet been born.

I had the feeling when I was approached to speak about "the Holocaust and the Israeli spirit", that the expectation was for the "Israeli spirit" to represent (and forgive me for using this expression) "the bright side" of the Holocaust. One could have expected an Israeli general to come and say how life is not that bad any more. I'm going to make things a little more complicated, and try not to disconnect today's Israel from 20th century history.

Let me start by trying to explain what I mean by the "Israeli spirit". When I use this term, I speak about what I believe makes Israel different from other nations. If I want to summarize it, the Israeli spirit consists of deep and constant anxiety mixed with feelings of isolation and loneliness at moments of truth, very powerful resolve and unbreakable determination, and as I'll later describe, pursuit of excellence as a way of life.

I will need to put forth a number of historical comments in order to connect modern Israel as a whole, and Israel of '93 in particular, with the tragic events that occurred in Europe during the '30s and '40s. Where shall I begin? Maybe I'll begin by explaining that Zionism in Europe was born in the middle of the nineteenth century, growing out of the nationalist movements that spread over that continent. In fact, much before the Holocaust, there were five very significant waves of immigration to Israel.

My father came to Israel in 1925 as a teenager; as did my mother, five years later, while Hitler was still a non- personality trying to write his Mein Kampf and maybe paint some paintings in Austria.

At that time, there was no threat as much as there was a concept of trying to build a new kind of Judaism in Palestine. But as I said, there was no feeling of any pressure or urgency.

The assent of the Nazis to power marked the beginning of a process that would eventually destroy the large demographic base upon which the Zionist movement and the Zionist dream rested. This process is known to us today as the Holocaust. How can I briefly summarize what the Holocaust was? It was the systematic annihilation of an entire people just because of their particular religion. This extermination was a policy dictated from above, fully supported by the majority of the people of Germany, and at later stages by the majority of other European nations like Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, Romania as well as other nations that fell under Nazi occupation.

In reality, when the Nazis first came to power, it was not annihilation they had in mind but more of an ethnic cleansing. They wanted to purge Europe of Jews, whom they perceived as a destructive element. For a very short while there was the Madagascar Plan -- namely, to move all the nine million Jews of Europe to the island of Madagascar -- a plan which very rapidly proved to be unrealistic. Then, the Jews began to be encouraged, if you want to call it encouraged, to leave Germany. Of course, they had to leave everything behind, all of their friends, property, and history. They had to leave the country and never return.

There is a very famous book, which also became a movie, called The Voyage of the Damned, about a ship named the St. Louis, full of hundreds of Jews leaving Germany, in search of refuge. The ship traveled for months on the open seas. It tried to port in Cuba. It tried to disembark here in this country. In the end, it was forced to go back to Germany where most of the passengers soon perished in the Holocaust. The lesson of this episode for the Germans was very clear: nobody cares about the Jews.

As time went by, it became clear that ethnic cleansing was not a viable solution if Europe was to be totally cleansed of Jews. The move to genocide was almost inevitable. In January 1942, in the Wanasee Conference, the decision was very clearly made; namely, that the Germans systematically clean Europe of Jews through extermination. It then became, if you will, a huge logistical problem.

First, they had to decide how to run the deception operation. Jews, like many other people, refused to believe that with each sunrise they were very near their final day. There were, of course, very complicated transportation problems as you know. The Nazis had to find a way to solve these. They had to find a solution with German ingenuity for massive extermination, so Zyklon B gas took its infamous place in history. And there was the problem of disposing of corpses -- so they put very efficient German people on the job who created the crematoria mechanism. This began a process through which 6 million people, 1.5 million of them children, lost their lives.

The genocide of the Jews was one of the most important goals of the Nazis, and in fact, it reflected their world view. Toward the end of the war, when Germany began to come under pressure and there was a shortage of re- sources, they cut back in every place but in their ongoing machine of extermination. When there was a question of which would take priority, trains to the camps or trains to the Eastern front, trains to the concentration camps got priority. Money was not an object. Transportation was not an object. The goal had to be achieved.

In the outer circle, there was not a lot of help. The allies who began to learn more and more about what was going in Europe decided not to allocate any military resources to stopping or slowing down the genocide. There was no bombing of the camps; no attacking of the trains; no sabotaging of the railways.

Even when something known as "trucks for blood" was considered -- namely, a deal to try to save the Jews of Hungary for 10,000 trucks -- there was a complete refusal on the side of the British to supply these trucks, which would have saved over 100,000 Hungarian Jews.

I try to think what a Jew would have felt during these horrible years. Anxiety seems to me as too weak a word. Maybe fear; maybe desperation. There were some desperate attempts at resistance, most famous of which was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising 50 years ago. By and large, there was a wide sense of helplessness. There was nobody to turn to, so six million Jews perished.

By the end of the war 1.5 million Jews found themselves behind the Iron Curtain; and the rest were moved to displaced persons camps all over Europe. These Jews began to look for ways to get to Palestine, understanding that Europe was no longer a safe place.

It seemed safe to assume that after World War II, when the magnitude of the catastrophe would be revealed to all, that getting to Palestine would be no problem. But, in the three years between '45 and '48, strange phenomena occurred. The British, who ruled Palestine during that time, refused entry to the Jews. Ships were intercepted in the high seas and turned back to Europe or to new camps -- displaced person camps -- in Cyprus. I believe the most famous of these ships, but not the only one, was the Exodus, where 4500 Jews packed onto an old ship tried to make their way to Israel.

As the story goes, they were stopped by the British and tried to resist. The British then stormed the ship, killed some of the Jews, and turned the ship back to Europe, all the way to Hamburg -- to the displaced persons camp.

I think that as a reaction to the fear, the desperation, the anxiety, the loneliness, and the helplessness of these years, there developed in Palestine, now Israel, a very deep resolve.

The people said, " we must have our own country; we must take care of ourselves; we cannot expect anybody else to assist us." So we declared our independence in May 1948. Immediately afterwards, we found ourselves in an 18 month war with seven armies and irregulars.

We were faced with an embargo from the United States, while getting some help from the Soviet Union, -- the irony of history. During these 18 months we ended up losing one percent of our population. This is as if the U.S. would have lost 1.5 million Americans during World War II, five times as much as the actual losses were. Then one day the war was over, and there was a new Israel.

During the '50s I was a child. I didn't know anything about the Holocaust. I thought that I was raised in a normal country. I learned later that I was living through a melting pot period -- a very intensive period of immigration in which we multiplied our population, expanding our demographic base with Jews from Iraq, North Africa, and elsewhere. We wanted to create a situation by which Israel would be able to build itself. And, we really felt that we were building the "new" Israel.

We didn't know who all these strange people were with their six digit numbers tattooed on their arms. We knew that there was some black hole behind them. But, we didn't want to know any more. It was time to look forward.

But as we were growing up, we learned that you cannot ignore history. I think that there were two events (out of many) that in a very dramatic way returned all of us to square one, reminding us that the Holocaust was like a ball and chain on our foot. The first event was the Six Day War. Three weeks after Egyptian President Nasser made his first move, Israel had to launch a war in order to save itself. During these three weeks the different layers of Israel's defense collapsed one after the other.

The United Nations, just by the word of Nasser, evacuated Sinai, without even consulting with the Government of Israel. We sent our foreign minister Abba Eban to our greatest ally of that time, France. He was just about kicked out of DeGaulle's office, told not to dare do anything but sit back.

He then flew to Washington, where he tried to look for an American document which assured free passage through the Straits of Tiran to the Gulf of Eilat. They looked for the document for 24 hours. One day later, however, when Abba Eban left Washington, all he had was President Johnson's message: do whatever you can do, you are on your own.

I was a young pilot -- a lieutenant in the Six Day War. I could not understand the anxiety of the older generation. I could not understand why our very beloved Prime Minister Levi Eshkol stuttered when he spoke to the nation over the radio, which resulted in the formation of a national unity government. I could not understand why thousands of graves were being prepared in Tel Aviv. I had my Mirage and I felt very, very safe.

So, when we went to war, with our deep resolve, it was clear to us that we should win. You know that in the first day of the Six Day War, we had more losses in our air force than we had in the first two days of the Yom Kippur War -- which you will remember was a very tough war. In this first day, we lost 9% of our fighter air force. But everyone went with the determination that it's "make or break", so we were ready to take any losses.

One cold Monday morning, on June 6, 1967, we found ourselves diving into the anti-aircraft artillery fire which defended the Egyptian Air Force Bases. Above the base of Enchase, just before dropping its bombs, the plane of my good friend Lieutenant Dan Engel exploded into a thousand pieces, bringing his life to an end.

My good friend Lieutenant Dan Engel, my high school classmate, who six years earlier "couldn't take it any more" when some Jewish mother was unable to decide which of her two sons she loved more and sent both of them to the crematorium.

In fact, it is no surprise that the day after the Six Day War, there was a transition from a sense of impending doom -- maybe another Holocaust -- to a feeling of euphoria, of rebirth, of redemption -- perhaps a feeling of omnipotence. This transition was something that had a great impact on the Israeli character and has led us to make a lot of clever and not so clever moves ever since.

The second event I want to mention occurred nine years later, in July '76, the hijacking of the Air France plane to Entebbe. Well, as you know, there have been many plane hijackings before this event, there were many afterwards, and, probably, there will be plane hijackings in the future. But that was the only case where after being hijacked, the 250 passengers were taken off the plane and separated into two groups: 150 passengers "to the right", and the 100 Jews "to the left". Exactly the Holocaust "selection" process.

The 100 Jews were not necessarily Israelis -- there were 30 Jews from other countries along with 70 Israelis. In the eyes of the five German hijackers, all Jews should share the same destiny. So the Jews were taken "to the left" and the 150 others were flown back to Paris.

I haven't come to tell you about the Entebbe operation; it is well known. What I can say is that there was no one in Israel who was part of the thinking, planning, or the preparation who was not ready to do anything it took to rescue these 100 Jews. We had initiatives from many units in the IDF: the Paratroopers wanted to take part, the Air Force wanted to fly there, even our Navy Seals came with the idea to parachute into the Lake Victoria and storm the airport from there.

It really made no difference which operation was carried out in the end. Everyone in the military was ready to take part without considering his own fate.

When I think of what enabled us to go through the Six Day War and the Entebbe operation, I come to the conclusion that we have developed a real commitment to pursue excellence as a way of achieving independent self- defense. We began this process in the middle of the '50s, when we discovered failures in our military -- small failures, but very significant ones. We decided that a different pattern should be taken: no achievement will be good enough, no effort will be great enough, no goal will be out of reach. And we injected this resolve into our armed forces day and night. We felt in the military that every time we do something, the fate of the nation, the morale of the people is on our shoulders.

In the Six Day War, as I described before, we sent our entire Air force to attack the Egyptian air force. We kept only 12 Mirages for Israeli air defense, four on each one of the three bases where we kept our Mirages. I was one of the four pilots who stayed on the ground in my base and we were told that we were for the defense of Tel Aviv. There were the four of us -- Carmy, who was my leader; I was his number two; Abraham, the leader of the second pair; and Menachem, his number two. These are the four names that protected Tel Aviv on the morning of July 6. There was no second tier, there was no strategic depth, there were only the four of us. So when I leaned forward to fasten my shoulder harness, I literally felt that I put the quarter million people in the Tel Aviv area on my back.

Generally speaking, I think that the pursuit of excellence has to serve first and foremost as the most important principle of Israel's security perception; we must be independent in facing threats to our existence. We have been very fortunate over the past 25 years to be an ally of the United States. We have received most of our weapons system from the United States. We have received a lot of technology.

We have received the aerial security supplied during the Yom Kippur War; and much more than that.

Still, we want to be independent when it comes to threats to our survival. We were not provided for instance with air refueling. And as we felt responsible for Jews all over the world, we had to build our own air refueling potential that we used when we flew to Iraq, and that we used when we wanted the still far away C- 130's coming back from Entebbe to be escorted by Israeli Phantoms as the sun rose. We used it when we went to attack the PLO headquarters in Tunis; a flight that I had the privilege to command. And we used it in many other times when there was a need -- not to serve the expansionism of Israel as the Arabs claim -- but to protect ourselves and to protect other Jews all over the world.

We are grappling now, for instance, with how to protect ourselves against ballistic missiles in the next decade and forward. How should we relate to the question of early warning? Should we be the United States' clients? Or should we make every effort to achieve independence? If surface-to-surface missiles with non-conventional warheads become a real existential threat, we want to be independent.

The Jewish, Israeli character I have just described should also explain our interpretation of Arab animosity. For years, when they said they wanted to throw us into the sea, we took their words at face value. We knew that there is a kind of asymmetry in the Middle East. Arab military defeats were never a risk to their national existence. That would not be the case if it was the other way around.

It took a very outstanding, unusual move by the late President Sadat to try to convince us that we can live together. By coming to Jerusalem, by landing in an Egyptian plane at Ben Gurion Airport, by speaking to the Knesset, President Sadat convinced us that we may relax a little bit -- a feeling we yearned for.

The current peace negotiations do not carry the same character. There has been no outstanding move. There has been no visit to Jerusalem. The negotiations with Syria are a kind of bargaining process, and so we still are left with those traits that I have described earlier -- we feel we are not safe enough.

So what is the Israeli spirit that emits from the Holocaust? Outwardly, it's the pursuit for excellence and independence. It is driven by necessity and combines ingenuity with some Chutzpah, if you will, and very strong determination. Internally, we live with feelings of constant isolation and deep-seated anxiety, perhaps exaggerated sometimes, and fear of the constant threats. There is also a feeling of very deep commitment for the physical well being -- not the welfare but the physical well being -- of our next generation, and the generations afterwards. There is an almost desperate need for friendship -- friends who give a strong feeling of camaraderie, a feeling of partnership. In addition, I think there is a high level of sensitivity for human lives, be it Israelis, Jews elsewhere, or all other innocent people who are killed without cause and without committing any crime -- anywhere in the world.

We hope that 1993 will be an historic year for peace. Our counterparts should understand that we want peace; but that we carry with us the tragic history of the Holocaust. We do not, we cannot take our security concerns lightly. So while we seek to make progress in the negotiations, we will simultaneously continue our pursuit of excellence in order to guarantee the future of the Jewish State and the Jewish people. Thank you very much.

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Last Updated April 27, 2003