The Thirteen Commandments

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.

Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from a speech delivered to the German Bundestag on January 27, 1998. The quotation gained greater recognition when Bauer included these lines in a speech to the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust on January, 26, 2000.

For further reading: www.ushmm.org