Who said Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never be a bystander?
On January 27, 1998, Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, delivered a speech to the German Bundestag in which he said “I come from a people who gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.” Variations of the quote have been used in many other contexts and attributed to various people. The quote does not appear on the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The full text of Bauer’s speech to the Bundestag is available on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site. The quote gained further attention when Professor Bauer included it in a speech delivered at the opening of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust on January, 26, 2000.
