Justice Rosalie Abella, of the Supreme Court of Canada, spoke at the recent Yale Law School graduation, where she received an honorary degree. Justice Abella was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, after her parents survived Treblinka (the rest of her family was murdered, including a two year old boy who would have been her brother).
Abella's father had been a lawyer in Poland, and he helped the American Army create a legal structure in the occupation zone. Years later, Abella found a letter that her father had written to Eleanor Roosevelt on the occasion of her visit to the refugee camp:
We welcome you, Mrs. Roosevelt, as the representative of a great nation, whose victorious army liberated the remnants of European Jewry from death, and so highly contributed to their moral and physical rehabilitation. We shall never forget that aid rendered by the American people. We are not in a position of showing you many assets. The best we are able to produce are these few children. They alone are our fortune and sole hope for the future.
“As one of those children,” Abella concluded, “I am here to tell you that the gift of American justice at its best is the gift that keeps right on giving. A gift that propelled me from the DP camp in Germany to becoming the first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court of Canada, and now to this stage. I stand proudly before you, fellow graduates, believing as did my father that democracies and their laws represent the best possibility of justice, and that lawyers are the people who have the duty to make that justice happen, the duty to do everything humanly possible to make the world safer for our children than it was for their grandparents, so that all children–regardless of race, religion, or gender–can wear their identities with pride, in dignity, and in peace.”
The entire address is well worth watching:
[UPDATE] Here is a longer version, delivered in Poland on the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials:
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