Head Down, Hopes Up

December 7, 1970

Today, I travelled to Warsaw, Poland on a state visit in order to better relations with Poland and the USSR. “An unusual burden accompanied me on my way to Warsaw. Nowhere else had a people suffered as in Poland. The machine-like annihilation of Polish Jewry represented a heightening of bloodthirstiness that no one had held possible. On my way to Warsaw [I carried with me] the memory of the fight to the death of the Warsaw ghetto.” On this day, I attended a commemoration of the Jewish victims of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. Although it had been many years since the historic uprising and the end of the Holocaust, I knew the importance of this official state visit. Filled with emotion on the day of the ceremony, and taken by the enormity of the moment, I suddenly dropped to my knees before the commemoration monument, as a profound act of apology and repentance. “I felt I had to do something to express the particularity of the commemoration at the ghetto monument. On the abyss of German history and carrying the burden of the millions who were murdered, I did what people do when words fail them." Although some Germans doubted the motives of my action, I can sincerely promise that it was one of peace and reconciliation. I hope to accept the past and use it as an opportunity for rapprochement and compromise.