== sync, corrected by elderman == @elder_man
The speech by Guillaume TRICHARD,
Grand Master of the large East of France
Memorial ceremonies at the global Memorial of the Victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp,
Monday, April 8, 2024.
Mr Consul General of France in Poland,
Mr. manager of Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum,
MM⸫BB⸫DD⸫BB⸫ and M⸫B⸫D⸫S⸫ Councillors of the Order of the large East of France,
M⸫B⸫D⸫B⸫ Jacques LAFOUGE, erstwhile Grand Master of the large East of France,
Mr M⸫B⸫D⸫B⸫ Dominique LESAGE, Mr Sz∴ L∴ Gabriel Narutowicz, Guaranteed the relationship of the large East of France in Poland,
M⸫B⸫D⸫B⸫ Sylvain ZEGHNI, Grand National Champion of the French Federation of the global Mixed Masonian Order Le Droit Humain,
M⸫B⸫D⸫S⸫ Nicole PRANIAUX, Deputy Grand Secretary of the global Mixed Masonian Order Le Droit Humain,
M⸫B⸫D⸫B⸫ Philippe CANGEMI, Grand Master of the large conventional and Symbolic Lodge Opéra,
M⸫B⸫D⸫S⸫ Géraldine LETHIELLEUX, Grand Secretary representing Grand Master of the large Lodge of the Independent and Sovereign United Ryts,
M⸫B⸫D⸫S⸫ Marie GAUTHERON, Grand Treasurer representing the Grand Master of the large Lodge of Mixed France,
M⸫B⸫D⸫B⸫ Stéphane LESIEUR, Grand Master of the large East of Poland,
M⸫B⸫D⸫B⸫ Jean-Jacques MOUMDJIAN, Grand Master of the large Mixed Lodge Memphis Misraïm,
MM∴BB⸫DD⸫BB⸫ and SS⸫ The nobles of the befriended Obedition,
MM⸫BB⸫DD⸫BB⸫, MM⸫BB⸫DD⸫SS⸫,
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,
In the beginning, I think of our BB⸫ and SS⸫, who at this place went to the Eternal East or who went to the Eternal East after they were deported here. I am referring to our brother Raphaël Esrail, president of the Union of Deportees from Auschwitz (UDA), who for over 30 years was a surviving symbol of this crucial association and who was a associate of Sz⸫L⸫ La Libre Humanité in the East of Lyon.
First of all, I would like to thank on behalf of all of you, Perrine, who, together with our B⸫ Pierre Bertinotti, coordinated this commemorative journey, as well as, of course, the full Mémorial de la Shoah team, the manager of this, and Mr Olivier LALEU, as well as the guides and all those who accompanied us on this way of memory and pain.
This afternoon I talk with humility.
I do this due to the fact that it is my work to effort to express, to express our feelings, to erase what may be the evil that present consumes our society: habit, indifference, resignation...
I would like to mention with you what we can no longer see here.
The sound of the steps...
The sound of the bodies...
The sound of cars slamming doors...
The sound of locomotives...
Smells...
I must callback this community of frail, thin shadows, of all ages, at the center of the death mill where we are.
This is not a place, this is simply a cave. It's the stomach, the bowels of a filthy beast that swallows everything. It's a immense gap where we effort to be where we effort to defy dizziness.
I wouldn't be able to evoke brutality, hunger, cold and random selection procedures.
I'll never be accurate enough. And I will deficiency the words and breath to give fear, fear, resignation and misunderstanding contained in the infinitely questionable look of that kid who came alone, after a fewer days of the Dantean journey, to this place, getting off in the midst of the cries at the end of the ramp, behind us.
I could never tell you what truly happened here.
It remains a unusual feeling.
The place where we are, the very place where we stand, puts us in the face of large difficulty in reasoning of the present as the consequence of any process.
In fact, here and now we take a minute to think about what the act of barbarism was, unlike any another act in human history.
What we do together present is to come to a gathering with hundreds of thousands of deportees, people like you and like me who are unlike each other, due to the fact that each of them was perfectly unique, but besides similar, due to the fact that each of them was primarily human... Like us...
This emptiness – the consequence of totalitarianism, I dare say: absolute totalitarianism – does not let us to see them, admit them. And their absence haunts us.
Under our feet, in front of our eyes, in the air we breathe, in these completely real natural circumstances in which we walk – how could we feel it so pregnant unspoken?
And yet...
We are numerous, diverse men and women attached to humanism based on sharing.
And yet here and now we are walking on non-earths, entering the abyss that sucks out our consciousness and freezes our imagination. This place imposes on us a burden, suffering – although without any comparison with what they experienced here.
You could tell hundreds of thousands of stories to express: misery, horror, survival, elusive fragility of being.
But in this place, nothing is little certain than human thought.
We children of Enlightenment, accustomed to the model nature of rationality, are embarrassed by the request to retreat and think differently.
‘Hier ist kein warum!”
‘There's no reason why!”
In the celebrated passage “Is It a Man” in which Primo Levi mentions his arrival at the Auschwitz extermination camp, the author with 1 stroke of the pen gives a gathering of what is human and inhuman.
You should never ask a question here why. However, Primo Levi throughout his life has not stopped asking this question, himself and not just himself.
How could human beings like you and like me do what has been done to another human beings like you and like me?
All of our beings are shaken and they fall into nothingness and filth.
What happened here has nothing to do with morality, nothing to do with the attitude to deity. What happened here is the culmination of a long process, a long ripening, a combination of ideologicalized systems, thoughtful, rationalized and organized based on social Darwinism, common racism, eternal anti-Semitism, first anti-humanism.
How can you imagine that a fewer meters distant from us passes a barely two-year-old girl, barely able to walk, holding the hand of an aged lady, 1 for another stranger, in a group of strangers, marching together toward destruction?
They now passed before us, entered the entrance ramp, stairs, "Himmelweg" (way to heaven) and terrified entered this unimaginable space.
They're coming a fewer more minutes, endless, while I'm speaking and erstwhile we're silent...
Their lives are gone. They're carried by the wind now. It's just a memory of them that we're trying to resurrect.
Our presence here is simply a sign of their existence, but it's just a sign... This is besides the message I wanted to convey to them today, here and now, with you, with the utmost seriousness.
I wanted to summon this loneliness, which casts an untiring shadow upon our heritage, creates a teardrop in human nature.
Edmund Burke would compose that “evil prevails by the inactivity of good people.” Yes, this happens erstwhile hatred of another develops and is justified by deceptive statements. The another same is no longer restrained or fought; then we lose ourselves ultimately.
Times return to our past of humanity. The sky is covered in dark brown and asks us for a moment, a consciousness stronger than any other. After what we experience present and now, for many of us, nothing will be the same, due to the fact that after what happened here, nothing was truly the same anymore.
We are the heirs of these dark times. We must never tire of passing on memory, we must never tire of worshiping these victims of barbarity. Otherwise, we will lose a part of what we are: us free-muralists.
While it is actual that words can be many, it is vain to search fresh ones to describe this place.
We're on this earth with people. Yet here the spirit community looks at us and whispers. We are at the largest judaic cemetery in Europe. And yet there is no grave. Dust, ashes, wind... Nothing but traces of women, men and children.
And if there is anything else to say, I will mention a fewer words borrowed from Stéphane Brunel from his exhibition "Fragments":
"I am 1 of those people without a star in my heart who defend the memory of those who wore that star. I am 1 of those who, like those exiled from humanity, never stopped fighting, out of rage, despair and madness. Their blood sacrificed on the altar of barbarity flows in my body and soon, if we are not careful, will flow into the pantheon of oblivion.”
MM⸫BB⸫DD⸫BB⸫, MM⸫BB⸫DD⸫SS⸫, Ladies and gentlemen,
I said it.
Guillaume TRICHARD
Grand Master of the large East of France
