Lev Shlosberg gets the Gilel Storch Award for his outstanding contribution to the promotion of humanist values

Press Release, 13.05.2023

Photo: Marсus Storch hands to Lev Schlosberg the sculpture of the Gilel Storch Award

The Gilel Storch Award for 2023 was extended to Russian politician Lev Shlosberg, member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party. The award ceremony took place in Stockholm on 8 May.

The Gilel Storch Award is an international award and, according to its public declaration, is given to individuals who, through outstanding activities, have contributed to promoting democratic, universal, and humanistic values ​​in the spirit of Gilel Storch.

About the award and its founder

Gilel Storch (1902 – 1983), an entrepreneur and public figure, made heroic humanitarian efforts to save people from the Holocaust. He was born in Latvia and fled to Sweden after the outbreak of World War II, where he under demanding circumstances negotiated bold initiatives that significantly contributed to saving Jews from the Holocaust. Gilel Storch’s efforts were driven by courage, determination, insight and devotion for fellow human beings. The Gilel Storch Award is given to individuals who, through outstanding activities, have contributed to promoting democratic, universal, and humanistic values in the spirit of Gilel Storch.

The prize ceremony is administered by Jewish Culture in Sweden (J!). An independent institution, J! implements high profile programs that reflect Jewish history and thinking and their relevance to contemporary society, with focus on the universal aspects of Jewish culture. 

 Gilel Storch (1902–1983) was an entrepreneur and public figure known for his humanitarian efforts to save people from the Holocaust. He was born in Dvinsk (Latvia) and had to flee to Sweden after the outbreak of the Second World War, where, in extremely difficult wartime conditions, he negotiated and undertook tireless actions to save Jews from the Holocaust – until the very end of the war. Gilel Storch’s efforts were praised by the general public as motivated by courage, determination, insight and devotion to fellow human beings.

 After Second World War, Gilel Storch ensured that the granite monolith, which the German authorities bought in Sweden to erect a monument after their final victory, was transferred to Poland and erected as a monument to the courage of the prisoners of the Warsaw Ghetto.

 The Gilel Storch Award was established in 2017 by his son Marcus Storch. The Awards Committee is run by Marcus Storch and the closest friends of the Storch family. Marcus Storch, born in Sweden in 1942, is an engineer and industrialist. From 1968 he worked for Gasproduzenten Aktiebolaget Gas-Accumulator (AGA), including as its CEO and President from 1981 to 1996. Marcus Storch was Chairman of the Board of the Nobel Foundation from 2005 to 2013. He is also known for having funded the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial in New York.

The award is presented for the fifth time, Lev Shlosberg became its sixth laureate and the first from Russia. The laureates of the previous years were Joachim Gauck, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany (2018), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States (2019), Göran Persson, former Prime Minister of Sweden (2020), and Gloria Steinem, feminist activist in the United States (2020), Adam Michnik, Polish politician, public figure, writer and publicist (2022).

The Gilel Storch Award laureates receive a golden sculpture designed by Annie Winblad Jakubowski.  The financial part of the award amounts to SEK 250,000 (about 2 million roubles or 22,000 euros). Lev Shlosberg refused to receive the financial part of the award. By his decision, the Storch Foundation transferred the funds of the award to the AdVita Foundation, which operates in St. Petersburg and Berlin, and helps patients from Russia – both adults and children – in most cases, cancer patients, including patients of the Raisa Gorbacheva Memorial Research Institute of Children Oncology, Hematology and Transplantation. The AdVita Foundation pays for expensive treatment of patients, including bone marrow and transplantations of other organs, from charitable funds. Among the beneficiaries of the AdVita Foundation there are residents of the Pskov region, from which Lev Shlosberg comes from.

Photo: Yelena Gracheva, Member of the Board of the AdVita Foundation and one of its founders, with the sign of the Gilel Storch Award

Lev Shlosberg delivered a speech at the award ceremony in the Stockholm Concert Hall about the lessons of the Holocaust and the activities of the Righteous Among the Nations for the modern world. Marcus Storch, Chairman of the Storch Foundation, announced the donation of the award to the AdVita Foundation. Director of the AdVita Foundation Mikhail Kazbekov attended the ceremony in Stockholm.

Photo: Lev and Zhanna Schlosberg with AdVita Foundation staff

Lev Schlosberg was introduced to the audience of the award ceremony, by Michael Sohlman, a member of the board of the Storch Foundation and the Award Committee, a prominent Swedish scientist, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Technical Sciences, and a descendant of the Russian princes Obolensky. His grandfather Ragnar Sohlman, former assistant and executor of Alfred Nobel, who protected Nobel’s will from different encroachments and actually created the Nobel Foundation as it is known now. He was also the Executive Director of the Nobel Foundation in 1936-1946. Michael Sohlman’s father, Rolf Sohlman, headed the Swedish Embassy in Russia for 17 years, from 1947 to 1964, and was the doyen of the entire diplomatic corps in Moscow.

Michael Sohlman was the Executive Director of the Nobel Foundation from May 1992 to June 2011. He is also well-known in Sweden as a politician, having served as Secretary of State in several Social Democratic governments in the 1980s.

More photos are here

“The world needs the righteous once more”

Politician Lev Shlosberg was presented with the Gilel Storch Award.  8 May 2023, 16:00

SPEECH DELIVERED BY LEV SHLOSBERG

“Hatred ends up killing the killers”

Esteemed members of the Storch family!

Esteemed members of the Board of the Storch Foundation!

Dear ladies and gentlemen!

Dear friends!

Memorial awards are similar to beacons – going back generations, they illuminate the origins of so many events and enable us to perceive both the present and future without harbouring any illusions or suffering any lies because the past contains the truth and nothing but the truth. It has already happened.

These beacons of the past connect each one of us living today, at times so suddenly that we start believing in historical providence.

Dvinsk, now known as Daugavpils, was the hometown of Gilel Storch. This same town was also home to my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Leiba-Wulf Berkal, a victim of the Holocaust who lived his final hours here in 1941.

You will find his name etched on the memorial wall in the Riga Ghetto Museum along with more than 70,000 other names, including 160 people with the surname Shlosberg, one also named Lev Shlosberg.

It is indeed a miracle that we all survived the Holocaust. Each of our lives is а fortuitous event, a confluence of a number of wondrous circumstances. However, these circumstances are due to the unrelenting efforts and self-sacrifice of individuals who saved the lives of our ancestors at the risk of their own, and it is only just that we call them the righteous.

The heroic feats of the righteous were sought by history specifically because the Catastrophe happened. The righteous stood firm and stood out in their responses to crimes which were bereft of any iota of humanity and called into question humanity itself, to all intents and purposes mankind per se.

On the one hand, the world has assessed these crimes – from a legal perspective during the Nuremberg trials, and what is no less important, from a political perspective – through the national acts of civilised countries.

For many years after 1945 we had the impression that these political assessments were sacrosanct and that they would safeguard mankind from new Catastrophes. Today we understand that this is not the case.

Is a new Catastrophe possible today? Yes, it is.

What are the underlying drivers of the Catastrophes of the past and the present? What makes them not only possible, but also expands the edges of the precipice shattering millions of lives?

All global catastrophes are due to the brutalisation and abasement of human beings, the dehumanisation of public consciousness, human behaviour and political practice. Through such brutalisation and abasement men renounce their natural instincts and attributes, first and foremost – their understanding of the absolute value of human life.

And war is the ultimate form of brutalisation and abasement of mankind.

Brutalisation and abasement never appears out of the blue, dehumanisation is never arbitrary. It is not some independent development.

Dehumanisation is the direct result of state policy which intends to prove that the people selected as the target of the hatred have no right to life, indeed, that such people must be killed.

Dehumanisation results in the crafting of a state policy whose goal is the mass murder of people which is allegedly an indispensable condition for the attainment of some abstract higher goal.

Such a higher goal might involve engineering a change in the balance of social and political forces, seizing and retaining power, conquering new lands.

Such goals are united by one common feature: they repudiate once and for all understanding of human life as the ultimate value, establishing the absolute primacy of state interests over human rights and freedoms, first and foremost – the right to life. When implementing such policies, the ruling regime bestows on itself the rights of God disposing of the fate of mankind. From this moment the state becomes an instrument for unleashing mass crime.

If we study the phenomenon of dehumanisation, we can see how the state relentlessly propagates hatred. By brutalising and abasing its own people, coming up with motives for murdering other people, the state creates not simply the image of an enemy, but instead the image of some abomination which must be destroyed at all costs if its people are to lead fully-fledged lives.

And this phenomenon serves as the basis not only for war, but also for widespread political repressions splitting and splintering society.

The Holocaust showed the possible consequences if an entire people is dehumanised. One lesson of the Holocaust is that a Catastrophe affects not only the people dying a martyr’s death, but also the people committing the barbaric killing.

Hatred ends up killing the killers. Brutalisation and abasement destroys in man their only immortal human element – the soul.  Hatred dehumanises individuals to such an extent that their souls are destroyed.

In the case of the people who survived the Holocaust, survival becomes a process of physical and moral rehabilitation. The survivors of the Holocaust cried because they were alive. Meanwhile as a rule the surviving accomplices of the Holocaust and witnesses who turned a blind eye wanted to forget everything that they had seen. They wanted instead to turn the pages of history without repenting.

In the case of the people who committed crimes against humanity, the people who were complicit in the crimes, their survival after the Catastrophe is a process of resurrection from a position of moral death, a return to the world from the state of death of the soul. This is also a form of suffering. An agonising return to life.

No people can avoid such a Catastrophe.

One lesson of the Holocaust is that the people of one nation can be made up of both murderers and survivors. And after everything that they have experienced, they are compelled to co-exist next to the memory of the people who were murdered.

And it is often the case that they are next to the graves of both the victims and the murderers. They cannot escape each other, just as it is impossible to flee the monstrous history of the past.

Who can help to build this bridge between the people who committed the crimes and the people who survived such hell? When this is one and the same people?

This can be done by the righteous who saved people during the Catastrophe. For in saving each single individual from death, they atoned for the crimes of the people as a whole and thereby saved the people. Personal experience of saving human lives helps to resurrect the people as a whole from the dead. The heroic feats of the righteous at the Holocaust went hand in hand with examples of state infamy.

One of the most deplorable incidents of the Holocaust was political cowardice, as symbolised by the tragic fate of the passengers of the liner St. Louis. In 1939 the USA and Cuba refused to accept more than 900 Jewish refugees, including children, who had boarded the ship from Hamburg as they fled the Nazis. The ship had to return to Germany where most of the passengers died shortly afterwards in concentration camps and death camps.

We should never forget how at the Evian Conference held in the summer of 1938 and convened to discuss the plight of Jewish refugees, only one country out of the 32 countries represented there – the Dominican Republic – decided to increase its immigration quotas.

Thousands and thousands of Jews died because nobody was ready to offer them a helping hand. You could offer such help without going to war. You merely had to retain and demonstrate such humanity.

Fear was the main reason for the failure to help Jewish refugees. Fear was an indiscriminate ally of the genocide.

At the time a number of Jews were also paralysed by such fear, too afraid to help their fellow man. I was deeply struck by an episode from the history of the Storch family that occurred in Sweden which had accepted them. When Gilel Storch requested a seat in the synagogue for his wife who was pregnant with Marcus, the current head of the Storch Foundation, the leaders of the synagogue responded, afraid of the consequences of Gilel’s public efforts to save Jews from different countries, making a pun out of the surname Storch: “The wife of a stork can stand.”

History has shown that they are still standing tall.

There is one special lesson that we can draw from the Holocaust: the Holocaust taught us to document in detail war crimes and crimes against humanity, to look every day for information on crimes and on the actual perpetrators of the crimes, regardless of where they might be. Today. Tomorrow. Always. Crimes against humanity are not subject to any statute of limitations. Similarly, investigation of these crimes and the prosecution of the perpetrators of the crimes have no statute of limitations. The world came to this understanding namely after our Catastrophe.

One exceptional quality marked out the Righteous among the peoples of this world who saved Jews during the Holocaust: they had not set themselves the objective of achieving a military victory against anybody. They had set themselves only one objective – to save lives.

They dedicated all their efforts to this objective. For the sake of this objective, they overcame their own fears, for the sake of this objective, they risked their own lives. They had no desire to kill anyone. They resolved matters of life and death with no blood on their hands. And that is also why they are the righteous.

This unique quality granted these individuals the opportunity and the moral right to talk after the war with the victims, witnesses and apostates.

For many years after 1945 it seemed that the world had witnessed and recognised the monstrous lessons of World War II. The number of victims remains unclear to this day. For many years, it was impossible to imagine any military action in Europe and any real threat of World War III.

For several decades every country was run by leaders who had either taken part in person in the war and experienced its hardships or had been witnesses of the war. World War II remained an intrinsic part of their lives and they were psychologically inoculated against war. And that is why mankind drew the fundamental conclusion: “Never again”.

These politicians established the post-war world order, the so-called Yalta-Potsdam new order. They founded the United Nations, the European Union and other international institutions. The goal of these institutions was to ensure peace and development. These institutions looked robust, reliable, operational and effective.

Decades passed. The politicians of the war and post-war generations left, initially politics and then life itself. They were replaced by other politicians who had not been personally involved in fighting and to some extent wanted to continue fighting in the same vein, wanted to play at toy soldiers, but involving real blood and tears. They failed to become the moral successors of politicians who had experienced war. They had not been inoculated against war.

A monstrous understanding of the admissibility of war had returned to politics. And it transpired that there were only four steps from understanding the admissibility of war to the dehumanisation of a people, and then death on the front lines.

Almost all the Righteous among the peoples of the world have died. Meanwhile, the world lives on and can only read about their heroic feats. Unfortunately, looking at current developments, we can see that not many people read those pages today and this is the reason why they want to repeat the past.

Once again, we are living within a Catastrophe which has only just started. This is a catastrophe borne of misunderstanding, mistrust, a lack of respect, an incapacity to listen, hatred and yet again dehumanisation. The air of the world is powered by hatred.

Politicians have forgotten the art of peace. Once again the highest achievement in politics is the ability to kill as many people as possible, whereas the highest achievement in politics should be the ability to save as many lives as possible.

If a politician cannot perceive the path to peace and is unable to prevent war, then such a path will lead the world backwards – to the 20^th century, to fields of war stretching over thousands of kilometres, to the deaths of millions, to new concentration camps and a new Holocaust.

In which Book of Life is it written that this is impossible and that humanity with all its previous suffering merits deliverance from a future war and future Catastrophe?

The question of how to save today’s world remains unanswered. To date nobody has found an answer. Almost everyone is looking for the answer on the battlefield. However, the battlefield demands only blood and nothing else. However, in the 21^st century we cannot follow the tracks reeking of blood of the 20^th century. Such a route takes us back to the past. I want to believe that we have still not passed the point of no return. Unfortunately, we are critically close.

To all intents and purposes, once again the world needs its righteous. Every day people are dying and losing their homes, and losing the chance to lead a fully-fledged life. If we were to replace the colour on the documentary photographs of the present with monochrome, we would find that many photos are indistinguishable from the photographs of World War II – primarily when it comes to viewing the faces of anyone experiencing the horror of death. In other words, the Catastrophe.

You will find in Russia today millions of people advocating peace. They have maintained their humanity, they are not driven by hatred and enmity, they have not become barbaric and are not bereft of human values. In the majority of instances they are not in the public view and are inconspicuous. You should know and remember that such people do exist.

When we talk about the fight for peace, we are talking first and foremost about the fight to save lives – the lives of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Germans, Swedes, Latvians, of every single individual who has managed to live until now. Every single life is priceless. We were taught this lesson by the Holocaust. This thought was a driving light for the righteous among the peoples of the world.

Today is the Eighth of May. On 8 May 1945 at 22:43 central European time (9 May 1945 at 00:43, Moscow time) the German Instrument of Surrender to the states of the anti-Hitler coalition was signed in Karlshorst. This was the day that opened up opportunities for a judicial investigation of the crimes of World War II, including the Holocaust, and for the prosecution of the perpetrators of these crimes. Victory Day is the Day of the end of the global Catastrophe. This day gave life to millions of people, including you and me.

This day is now receding into the past and is no longer a date eliciting a hot-headed response. However,  understanding of the lessons of history should never lead our memory to grow cold and indifferent. As soon as that happens, Catastrophe will rear its ugly head again.

Stone is the symbol of Jewish remembrance. After World War II, Gilel Storch made sure that the granite monolith – which had been purchased by the German authorities in Sweden to erect a monument after their final victory – was taken to Poland and used to build a monument to celebrate the courage of the prisoners of the Warsaw Ghetto.

I think that another such stone can be found slumbering somewhere in the world, which might be perceived by someone as the basis for a future monument to celebrate military triumphs, but which will become a monument to all the lives saved thanks to the efforts of the righteous of the world.

Thank you.

Спасибо  / Spasibo.

תודה / Toda.

Tack / Tak.

8 May 2023, Stockholm

 LEV SHLOSBERG

is a member of the Federal Political Committee of Yabloko and Chair of the Pskov regional branch of the party. Headed the Yabloko faction in the Pskov Regional Assembly of Deputies