1941, USSR
Working as I do in the sphere of Russian cinematography and Russian art, the very principle of racial hatred is foreign and loathsome to me.
The great tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, which has found its highest form of development in the Soviet intelligentsia, has always been remarkable for its broad international
viewpoint.
This with us was inseparable from ardent love for our native land, and powerful national feelings, and had, nothing in common with cosmopolitanism which takes no account of kith and kin or Fatherland. The traditional tendencies of our international viewpoint have culminated in the creation of our multi-national, state, in the free self-determination of its
peoples, and the flourishing of their national culture and art.
Basing itself on the principles of equal fraternal rights, of spiritual and material values for each nation, for each people, our country regards with undisguised indignation any form of
national oppression. The deeds of violence being committed in 'an historically unprecedented measure against Jewry by the Fascist criminals, cannot but evoke the fiercest hatred, the
most burning indignation.
But the time for calls to indignation and condemnation has passed. The-time has come to fight. The champions of brute ideology, the Fascists, and the champions of the ideals of humanism, the Soviet Union, and our great partners in the struggle, Great Britain and America, have met in mortal combat.
"Give me a fulcrum and I'll overturn the earth," said Archimedes. " Give us a fulcrum "-from the gloom comes the cry of the peoples oppressed by Fascism--" And we will deal'
with our enslavers."
There is such a fulcrum. In this sacred struggle the Soviet Union.i's uniting all peoples who with sword in hand are ready to rise for the right to call themselves Czechs, Poles, Dutchmen, Belgians, Russians or Jews. The Slavs have risen and there should not be one Jew on the face of the earth who has not also sworn, by all possible means and with all his power to participate in this sacred struggle, and to carry out that oath to the letter. Because it is not only a matter of saving a nation that has given humanity great poets, thinkers and artists; because it is not only a matter of saving a people numbering many millions of human lives, but because it is a matter of the triumph of humanism over brutality, barbarism, infamy and violence. Because it is a matter of the bright future of all humanity, irrespective of nationality.
" What have you done in this struggle ?" history will ask of everyone of us living in these times and he or she will be disgraced for ever who cannot say with proudly lifted head-
"All that was in my power."