Marcel Reif: Sports commentator gives a moving speech

Marcel Reif (74) spoke alongside Holocaust survivor Eva Szepesi (91) at a memorial event in the Bundestag for the victims of National Socialism on January 31st. The sports commentator and journalist was born in 1949 as the son of a Polish Jew and did not just remember his father in his speech. Among other things, he also discussed the events of the last few months in Germany after the terrorist militia Hamas attacked Israel.

He wanted to thank Szepesi for speaking in the Bundestag, “not to demand atonement or even revenge, but to remember and awaken where necessary.” She gives “this new, different Germany with an incredibly big heart a second chance.” This second chance should never and nowhere be wasted. I don’t like the word reminder in this context. It gives me too much supposed leeway. Never again is by no means an appeal. Never again can only be, must only be, never again must be : lived, immovable reality.”

Marcel Reif between horror and hope

“Some of the things I had to hear and see on Germany’s streets and squares after October 7th – after the Hamas massacre of Israelis – horrified me and my father must have turned in his grave. But what I saw last and I heard the big demonstrations of the upright, that gives me hope.”

Reif remembered, among other things, the 1950s in Poland. When anti-Semitic tendencies spread there again, my parents, especially my father, decided: ‘Once is enough.’ He had survived the Holocaust, but most of his family had not.” The family moved to Germany via Israel, “to the country of the perpetrators.” There were friends and relatives there “who could help. Here we found a roof over our heads, here my father found work to support the family. The new, the other Germany now offered him a second chance at a decent, dignified life .”

He grew up here with his sister in a sheltered place, “happy and carefree, not least, I know that today, because my father was silent. Not a word about everything he experienced, what he survived. […] The truth was clear enough. I had no grandparents, and I knew why. An uncle, an aunt, a cousin remained, all the others were murdered.”

At the end of the speech, Reif explained that he remembered more and more every day “how often he gave me this sentence. Sometimes as a warning, sometimes as a warning, as advice or even as a reprimand. Just three words, in the warm Yiddish, that I so miss: ‘Be a human being.’ Be a human being! Your silence, your joy of life despite everything, your unbroken ability to give us so much love and care and this sentence ‘Be a human being’ – thank you for that, Dad. And I am proud that I can tell my sons and grandchildren who Sitting up there, I was obviously able to pass on this legacy of my grandfather and great-grandfather.” Especially today and here he wanted to leave this sentence from his father: “‘Be a human being.’ Be human!”