Sen. Ted Cruz Delivers Remarks in Support of the HEAR Act

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This committee today is considering incredibly important bipartisan legislation. I thank Senator Cornyn for his leadership here, Senator Blumenthal. The Holocaust was one of the most horrific acts of mass murder and cultural erasure in human history. Six million Jewish lives extinguished. Entire families wiped from the record and their property scattered, sold, and far too often displayed without shame. Go to Auschwitz. Walk the grounds. Read the diary of Anne Frank. Hear the testimony of survivors. The brutality was not random. It was deliberate. It was not the chaos of war. It was the cold bureaucratic precision of evil. Those who survived did so by hiding under floorboards, in cellars, in ship berths, clinging to life as the world around them burned. When they emerged, they found their homes destroyed, their families murdered, and their heirlooms, the art, the books, the Torahs, the small treasures that carry their identity stolen by those who sought to erase not just a culture but a people. The Nazis stole hundreds of thousands of artworks in what has been termed the greatest displacement of art in human history. The Nazis looted over 600,000 works of art. To this day, more than 100,000 of those works of art are not yet recovered. Let me repeat that. More than 100,000 works of art are still missing today. These weren't just paintings. They included manuscripts, diaries, family letters, personal papers that carried a people's history, identity, and faith. Each stolen piece is not just an object. It is a story, a name, a fragment of a soul torn from history and waiting to be returned. I strongly supported and helped write the HERE Act in 2016, and I continue to strongly support the 2025 extension of the HERE Act. The HERE Act was written to make sure that justice for Holocaust victims is not lost to paperwork, procedure, or the passage of time. It ensures that their families can seek restitution on the merits, not be turned away on a technicality. Since the passage of the original HERE Act, some courts, unfortunately, have chipped away at that promise, twisting the law to protect institutions instead of victims, to prize possession over justice. Let me say right now, if you are a museum, if you are a corporation, if you are a railroad, if you are a family or individual and you are displaying the art that was pilfered by Nazis, you ought to be ashamed and you have no right to keep that stolen art. You are glorying in evil. This legislation that we are soon, I expect, to vote and pass unanimously, restores what Congress intended. That the law should never be a shield for theft, especially theft born of genocide. The law was never meant to be a refuge for those who profit from theft, let alone the systemic extermination of an object's original owners. Supporting and strengthening the HERE Act is not just about restitution. It's about remembrance. It's about telling the truth and refusing to let history or its victims be brushed aside. Because justice delayed is not justice denied unless we let it be. We hear their cries from the trains, from the camps, from the ashes of history. Through the HERE Act, we hear the pleas of the victims of the Holocaust and we are acting as a Congress and as a nation to deliver justice in the shadow of one of humanity's greatest atrocities.