The spirit of Shoah

California may be the bluest of states, but at an event on the Universal Studios back lot not long ago, everything was bathed in a warm pink light. It brought back days when the country seemed less divided, both color-wise and otherwise, which certainly gave the guest of honor his hue.

The occasion was a fund-raising dinner for the Shoah Foundation and the honoree was former President Bill Clinton, who flew in to town to accept Shoah’s Ambassadors for Humanity Award before going on to Indonesia to tour areas devastated by the tsunami. The Feb. 17 event, hosted by Tom Cruise with performances by Robin Williams and Sheryl Crow, briefly reunited the former president with Hollywood, where it was once speculated he would land in his post-presidency years. This time, though, the ties that bound weren’t an interest in entertainment but in human rights and the battle against genocide.

Shoah’s founding chairman, Steven Spielberg, told the crowd of 750 that Clinton’s efforts on the world stage exemplified the spirit of the Shoah Foundation, which the “Schindler’s List” director began in 1994 to collect oral histories from Holocaust survivors as tools to battle bigotry. Spielberg said that when he was starting Shoah, Clinton was confronting the humanitarian crisis posed by the war in Bosnia.

“President Clinton remained dedicated to ending the sickening practice of ethnic cleansing, and ... he was eventually able to broker a cease-fire,” Spielberg said. “This is a story that proves, like the story of Oskar Schindler, that one person can make a difference.”

The former president received a standing ovation studded with cheers and whistles even before he began ruminating on the causes of genocide, which he laid at the feet of grasping politicians. “Most of the truly horrible things that have happened in human history, like the Holocaust ... were propagated by politicians for power,” Clinton said. And he said he was still haunted by his administration’s failure to intervene in the attempted genocide of the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda during three months of 1994. “Could we have saved them all?” he mused. “No way. Could we have saved a third of them? Probably. I went to Rwanda and asked them to forgive me for not doing better, and I’ve spent a lot of time since then helping them deal with AIDS.”

Before the dinner, big donors were able to get face time with the former president at a VIP cocktail party at the nearby offices of Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment. The evening raised $2.5 million, which will help the foundation forge ahead with the third stage of its mission -- to disseminate the contents of the archive.

The first stage was collecting videotaped testimonies in 32 languages from more than 50,000 survivors and liberators in 56 countries. By the end of this year, the foundation expects to have completed its second stage -- cataloging the interviews so they can be called up on computer searches much like text.

The foundation has used the testimonies to create documentaries and classroom materials for teachers. Researchers can access the archive at the foundation’s enclave of trailers at Universal, USC, Yale, Rice and the University of Michigan.

At the dinner, Clinton praised Spielberg for his ongoing efforts to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. “We are friends, but it is, I think, objectively true that ‘Schindler’s List’ is one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. The power of the movie alone would have left a lasting imprint. It is a tribute to his insight that he understood the power of the true stories of the real people who survived could do even more.”