REMARKS OF

	       THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

			       AL GORE

	AT THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

			    WARSAW, POLAND

			    April 19, 1993


We seek words to honor those whose heroism and sacrifice are beyond
the power of words to express.


A half century has passed since the Nazis set out to destroy the
Jewish Ghetto here in Warsaw. Hitler had long since decided to
exterminate the Jews in a world where few could believe that any
government could deliberately, methodically, and ruthlessly carry out
the mass murder of millions. Indeed, not even the Jews themselves
could at first grasp the full truth about the horror being inflicted
upon them.


But the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought back. And on this April day
fifty years ago, the Nazis were stunned by the fierce resistance into
temporary retreat. For weeks, a few hundred poorly armed freedom
fighters fought on against impossible odd with their greatest weapon
the courage of a righteous cause.


Finally, after almost a month of house-to-house fighting the Nazis
torched the entire Ghetto. And even then, some Jews chose the flames
instead of surrender. The German ministry of propaganda sent
photographers to record the procession of survivors who marched out to
waiting boxcars under the merciless gaze of heavily armed German
soldiers. The Propaganda Ministry decreed that the "triumph" over the
Jews was to be preserved "for all history."


And so it was. So it has been.


But in this long testing and trial of time, the Nazis leering at their
victims are branded in memory with an indelible infamy and shame. The
courageous Jews march in our hearts in an everlasting procession of
honor.


No one with human feeling can contemplate these photographs without a
welling up of pity and rage. Before these images of children, of
women, of old men marching with their hands in the air to their
deaths, words fail. We are reduced to silence--a silence filled with
the infinite pool of feeling that has created all the words for
humility, heartbreak, helplessness, and hope in all the languages of
the world.


How could the human race have allowed such a calamity as the
holocaust to fall upon us? What terrible darkness lies coiled in
the human soul that might account for this barbarism? The sorrow
rising from such questions is deeper than all tragedy and leaves
us mute before a mystery the human mind cannot penetrate.


And yet the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto shines in our consciousness
like a pole star of the human spirit.


We remember their courage with awe. They were Jews claiming an ancient
heritage. They were also Poles, many still claiming a nation they
loved and served to the end. They were members of the human race
claiming honor and dignity in the face of desolation, despair,
depravity, and death.


The story of the Warsaw Ghetto is sacred text for our time. It warns
us of the unfathomable power of evil, the pestilence of the human soul
that for a time can dissolve nations and devastate civilization.


But the uprising in the Ghetto also warns tyrants wherever they rule
that a fierce, bright light blazes eternal in the human breast, and
that the darkness can never put it out.


Those who seek power through violence and oppression, rather than the
consent of the governed, ignore the bitter lessons of
history. Tonight, petty tyrants in other lands seek to distract their
people by finding someone different--a different religion, a different
ethnic identity, a different heritage of any kind--as a target against
which to focus fear and hatred and oppression.


Surely in this new springtime of history we can plant hope and peace
in Europe and the world and nourish them with the incandescent
sunlight of the universal demand for human dignity.


Tonight we celebrate the Jewish people and their great flourishing and
resurgence after the horrors of Naziism. We celebrate that triumph of
the human spirit which survived the sacrifice offered here by brave
people on the altar of humanity.


Centuries ago, after another experience of sorrow and captivity, the
Psalmist wrote, "They who sow in tears shall reap in joy."


The fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto sowed the seeds of courage and
dignity, and we reap their harvest today in solemn gratitude. To truly
honor their heroism, we must demand that justice and decency form the
basis for relations among all nations and peoples. And lest we neglect
one important specific, we must be vigilant in fighting anti-semitism
wherever it appears, for it was, after all, anti-semitism in its most
virulent and singularly evil form, which created the tragedy we
remember here tonight.


The Jews the Warsaw uprising died in affirmation of the justice that
informs every human conscience that will let itself listen. Their
faith blows to us like a gentle wind from their springtime of
sacrifice to our springtime of hope. We honor them now with reverent
silence and promise to remember them and to love them as lang as the
world stands.


Our duty to them was written in the Deuteronomy:


"Only take heed to thy self, and keep thy Soul diligently, lest thou
forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart
from thy heart the days of thy life; but teach them to thy children,
and thy children's children."