Gilbert Michlin's moving story of his arrest in Paris in February 1944, his deportation to Auschwitz, and his struggle to survive his fifteen month ordeal as slave laborer in Nazi concentration camps tell us much about the climate in which the postwar Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. Eighteen-year old Gilbert was stripped of the entirety of his political, civil, social, economic, and cultural rights not because of what he did but because of what he was—a Jew. Identified by the French and German regime as someone different from and inferior to the human race, Gilbert, like so many others, became the victim of a political ideology emphasizing not what humans fundamentally share with all others—their humanity—but what makes them superficially different—race, gender, ethnicity, belief, sexual preference, political belief and so on. Deportation, slavery and extermination were built upon the premise that no universal principles of civil law exist; that no individual has basic inherent rights; and that only dominant cultural groups or state authorities determine who is and who is not to be endowed with such rights. Universalism—the belief that all members of the human family are endowed with basic inalienable rights—is the starting point of our postwar concern with putting human rights on the international agenda.
Gilbert Michlin’s ordeal and story remind us that the appeal for universal values is also a call for protecting individual people like Gilbert himself, his mother Riwka, and his father Moshe from those institutions (e.g. state, cultural or racial group, religion, tribe, or family) that often see such people as subjects, and not objects, of the very group endeavors that define them.
What thoughts and feelings did Gilbert Michlin evoke in you as you watched and listened to him speak? What additional impressions or questions would you like to share with him now, a week later and after having reflected upon his life and past ordeal? Now that we know Gilbert Michlin personally, let's use the second person singular voice.
