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

Lev Shlosberg’s Speech at the Gilel Storch Award Ceremony

Stockholm

May 8, 2023

Distinguished members of the Storch family!

Distinguished members of the Board of the Storch Fund!

Dear ladies and gentlemen!

Dear friends!

The memorial awards are somewhat like beacons – their roots in the past, they remind us of the origins of many events, they allow us to see the present and the past without any illusions or lies, because the past contains only truth and nothing but the truth. The past has already happened.

These beacons of the past connect us, living today, in ways, which at times are so sudden, that you might start believing in historical Providence.

Dvinsk, today, Daugavpils, was Gilel Storch’s hometown. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Leiba-Wulf Berkal, who became a victim of the Holocaust, lived in this town until the last hours of his life in 1941.

His name is one of the more than 70 thousand names inscribed on the Wall of Memory in the The Riga Ghetto Museum, as well as the names of 160 people with a last name of Shlosberg, including one Lev Shlosberg.

All of us have miraculously survived the Holocaust. Each of our lives is а lucky happenstance, a coincidence of several marvellous circumstances. However, we find behind these circumstances the stoic labour and the selfless devotion of the people, who at the risk of their own lives saved our predecessors from peril, and it is absolutely just to call them Righteous.

History called for the heroic acts of the Righteous because a Disaster happened. The Righteous became who they were and showed their true colours as a response to crimes, which went beyond humaneness, which put into doubt the humaneness itself, indeed the humanity.

On one hand, the world has given an assessment to these crimes, a legal one, at the Nurenberg Tribunal, and which is equally important, a political one, through national state political acts of the civilised countries. For many years after 1945, it seemed that this political assessment was unwavering and would protect humanity from new Disasters. Today we understand that this was not the case.

Is a new Disaster possible? Yes, it is possible.

What nourishes the Disasters of the past and the present? What not only makes them possible, but brings closer the brink of an abyss into which millions of lives tumble down?

The cause of all the global Disasters is the dehumanisation of people, the dehumanisation of the public conscience, of the human behaviour and the political practices. The dehumanisation deprives people of their natural instincts and qualities, first and foremost, of the understanding a human life’s absolute value.

War is the highest form of a nation’s dehumanisation.

Dehumanisation never appears out of nothing, randomly, by its own accord. Dehumanisation is a product of state policy, which aims to proof, that the people who have become the object of hate, have no right to live, further still, they must be killed. Dehumanisation results in a formation of a state policy, the objective of which is mass slaughter of people, necessary to reach some higher goal.

This higher goal might be а change to the balance of social and political powers, seizure, usurpation and upholding of power, conquest of territories.

The common feature of these goals is full denial of the priority of human life as such, an establishment of full primacy of the interests of the state above the freedoms and liberties of the human beings, primarily when it comes to the right to life. From this moment in time the state turns into a weapon of mass crimes.

Studying the phenomenon of dehumanisation, we will notice continuous hatemongering. Dehumanising a nation, creating motifs for the murder of others, the state not only creates an image of the enemy, but it also creates an image of a degenerate, which has to be destroyed for a nation to enjoy a full life.

This phenomenon is not only fundamental to wars, but also to mass political repressions, which break down the society.

The Holocaust has demonstrated the consequences of dehumanising of an entire nation. One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that the Disaster doesn’t only strike the nation which dies a martyr’s death, but also the nation which commits the criminal murders. The hate kills the murderers. Dehumanisation destroys the only immortal human element in a human being – her soul. The hate dehumanises, removing the soul.

For a nation which had survived the Holocaust, the survival itself becomes a process of physical and moral rehabilitation. The surviving victims of Holocaust were crying because they were alive. The accomplices and the silent witnesses to murders, who survived the Holocaust, wanted, typically, to forget everything they have seen. They wanted to turn the pages of history without any repentance.

For a nation which had committed the crime of antihumanism, which was complicit to the crimes, the survival after a Disaster is the process of resurrection from morally dead, the return to this world from the state of the death of soul. This also is suffering. A painful return to life.

There is no nation which can avoid being affected by such a Disaster.

One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that there could be murderers and survivors among the same nation. After everything they have lived through, they must live together next to the memory of the murdered. And, quite often, next to the graves of the victims and the murderers. It is impossible to walk away from each other, just as it is impossible to walk away from the horrible history which has happened.

Who can help to build this bridge between a nation which had committed a crime and a nation which had survived through Hell? When it is one and the same nation.

This can be done by the Righteous who were saving people during the Disaster. Because, by saving every single person from death, they atoned for the crimes of an entire nation, therefore saving it. A personal experience of saving human beings helps to resurrect nations from the dead.

The heroic acts of the Righteous of the Holocaust were observed side by side with examples of disgraceful behaviour by the states.

One of the most sorrowful pages of the Holocaust is occupied by the political cowardness, symbolised by the tragedy of the liner St. Louis. In 1939 the USA and Cuba refused to accept more than 900 Jewish refugees, including children, who sailed from Hamburg escaping the Nazis. The ship had to return to Germany, with most of the passengers perishing in the concentration camps and the death camps.

We cannot forget how at the Evian Conference in the summer of 1938, convened to discuss the plight of the Jewish refugees, only one country out of 32, the Dominican Republic, made a decision to increase its immigration quotas.

Thousands and thousands of Jews died because the helping hand was never extended to them. One didn’t have to enter the war to offer this help. One had to keep one’s humanity and demonstrate it. Fear was the main reason behind the refusal to help the Jewish refugees. Fear was a total ally of the genocide.

The same fear paralyzed a lot of Jews at the time, who were afraid to help their fellow human beings. One episode from the history of the Storch family, which occurred in Sweden, which had accepted the family, shook me deeply. When Gilel Storch asked for a place in the synagogue for his wife, who was pregnant with Marcus, the current head of the Storch Fund, the leadership of the synagogue, who were afraid of the consequences of Gilel’s public activities saving Jews from different countries, responded, making a pun on his last name: “The wife of a stork can stand”. History showed that these storks stood up well.

The special experience of the Holocaust is that it has taught us to document in detail the war crimes and the crimes against humanity. The experiences of daily searches for information on crimes and on the perpetrators of these crimes, irrespectively of where they were located. Today. Tomorrow. Always. The crimes against humanity are not subject to any statutes of limitations, the investigation of these crimes and the persecution of the criminals are also not time barred. This understanding came to the world with our Disaster.

An exceptional quality of the Righteous among the Nations, who were saving Jews during the Holocaust, was that they did not put up a task of achieving military victory against anybody. The only task they put up was to save the lives of people. All their actions were dedicated to this task, they risked their lives for the sake of this task. They didn’t want to kill anyone. They were dealing with matters of life and death without any blood on their hands. And this is also why there are Righteous.

This unique quality gave these people a possibility and a moral right to speak after the end of the war with the victims, as well as with the witnesses, as well as with the apostates.

For many years after 1945 it seemed that the world had seen and had recognized the horrible lessons of World War II. The account of its victims has still not been closed. For many years, it was impossible to imagine military action in Europe, a real threat of World War III.

For several decades the states of the world were headed by leaders who either took part in the war, experiencing its hardships, or who were the witnesses of that war. World War II became a vital part of their life, they were mentally inoculated against wars. Therefore, the main universal conclusion after that war was “Never again”.

The politicians created the post war structure of the world, a so-called Yalta-Potsdam world, they founded the United Nations, the European Union, several other international institutions. The goal of these institutions was to ensure peace and development. These institutions seemed to be robust, reliable, operational, efficient.

Decades passed. The politicians who belonged to the war and the post-war generations left, first they left politics, then life. They were replaced by other politicians, who personally were not involved in the fighting, who, at some level, had not had enough fighting, had not had enough bloodthirsty playing with toy soldiers. They could not become the moral successors to the politicians who survived the war. The were not immuned from war.

They were replaced by other politicians, who personally were not involved in the fighting, who, at some level, were not done fighting, were not done playing with bloody toy soldiers. They could not become the moral successors to the politicians who survived the war. The were not inoculated from war.

What came back to politics, was a horrible understanding of the permissibility of war. And it became clear, that the distance between the understanding of the permissibility of war and the dehumanisation of a nation, and a death at the front, was 4 steps.

Almost all the Righteous among the Nations have passed. The world lives on, and it can only read about their acts of heroism. Unfortunately, based on what is going on, there seem to be not too many readers of these pages of history. And therefore, those who want to repeat, appear again.

Once again, we are living inside a Disaster, which is just starting up. It is a disaster of a lack of understanding, distrust, disrespect, deafness, hate, and over again, of dehumanisation. The air of this world is filled with the electricity of hate.

The politicians have lost the skill to create peace. The highest achievement is once again the ability to kill as many people as possible. While the highest achievement in politics should be the ability to save as many peoples’ lives as possible. If the politician does not see a path towards peace and is not able to prevent a war from happening, that this path will take us back to the XX century, to the fields of war, covering thousands of kilometres, to the death of millions of people, to the new concentration camps and the new Holocaust.

Which Book of Life says that this is impossible and that the humanity, due to all of its previous suffering, deserves the deliverance from the future war and the future Disaster?

The question on how to save the world today is open. Nobody has yet found an answer to it. Almost everyone is looking for answers on the battlefield. And the battlefield demands blood and nothing but blood. But, in the XXI century we cannot follow in the bloody footsteps of the XX century. They would lead us into the past. One hopes that we haven’t passed the point of no return, yet. Unfortunately, that point is critically close.

It seems, that the world needs its Righteous again. Every day people are dying. They lose their homes; they lose their ability to live a full life. If one would replace the colours on the documentary photographs of today with monochrome, a lot of photos will become indistinguishable from the photographs of World War II, primarily through the faces of people, who are experiencing the horror of death.

Millions of people of peace live in Russia today. They have maintained their humanity, they did not become a nation of hate and enmity, the did not dehumanise themselves. The are mostly out of the public view and are unnoticeable. You should know and remember that these people do exist. When we are talking of struggle for peace, first and foremost we are talking of struggle to save human lives – the lives of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Germans, Swedes, Latvians. Of everybody who has lived till today. Every life is priceless. We learned that from the times of the Holocaust. This thought guided the Righteous among the Nations.

Today is the 8th of May. On May 8th, 1945 at 22:43 CET (00:43 on the 9th of May, Moscow time) the German Instrument of Surrender to the states of the anti-Hitler coalition was signed in Karlshorst. This day created a possibility for a judicial investigation of the crimes of World War II, including the Holocaust, and for the prosecution of its perpetrators. Victory Day is the Day of the end of the world’s Disaster. This day gave life to millions of people, including you and me.

This day is passing into history and is no longer hot, but the understanding of the lessons of history should never cool down. Once it cools down the Disaster will return.

A stone is a symbol of Jewish remembrance. After the end of World War II, Gilel Storck made sure that the granite monolith, which was purchased by the German authorities in Sweden, to be erected as a monument after their final victory, was taken to Poland to be erected as monument to the courage of the prisoners of the Warsaw Ghetto.

I think that there is another of these stones, asleep somewhere in the world, which might be considered by someone to become a future monument over military triumphs, but which, thanks to the efforts of the Righteous among the Nations will become a monument to the saved human lives.

Spasibo / Спасибо.

תודה / Тода

Tack / Так

Translation of the speech by Vadim Belenky