In anguish, I wonder: What can we do not to forget the question? What can we do to vanquish oblivion?
WHAT SIGNIFICANCE does Passover have, if not to keep our memories alive? To be Jewish is to take up the burden of the past and include it in our concerns, our projects, and our obligations in the present.
We read the news and it’s always the same: violence in Jerusalem, bombings in Lebanon, riots in Hebron.… Were it not for its past and its history, what right would Israel have? It is because of Moses, not only Sadat and Begin, that the peace between Israel and Egypt strikes one as miraculous.
As we recite the Haggadah, which tells us of the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, we experience a strange feeling, the feeling that we are living in Biblical times, living at a vertiginous pace.
My contemporaries have witnessed and lived through what no other generation has seen: the power of evil, but also the victory of a promise; the kingdom of night, but also the rebirth of a dream; Nazism and its victims, but also the end of the nightmare; the deaths at Babi Yar, but also the defiance of young Russian Jews, the first to challenge the Kremlin’s police dictatorship.
Sometimes our heads spin, so frenzied and terrifying is the flow of events. History advances so quickly. And although man has conquered space, he has not conquered his own fears and prejudices. Have we learned nothing? All the wars that continue to rage, all the victims fallen to terrorists’ bullets, all the children dying of hunger and disease in Africa and Asia. Why is there so much hatred in the world? And why so much indifference to suffering, to the anguish of others?
I love Passover because it remains for me a cry against insensitivity.
TWO STORIES. The first is about Job, who was in Egypt at the same time as Moses. What’s more, he held the important position of adviser in the Pharaoh’s court, with the same rank as Jethro and Bileam. When the Pharaoh asked how he might resolve the Jewish question, Jethro spoke in favor of Moses’ request—to let his people go. Bileam, on the other hand, took the opposite stand. When Job was consulted, he refused to take sides; he wished to remain neutral, so he kept silent, neither for nor against. This neutrality, the Midrash says, earned him his future sufferings. At critical times, at moments of peril, no one has the right to abstain, to be prudent. When the life or death—or simply the well-being—of a community is at stake, neutrality is criminal, for it aids and abets the oppressor and not his victim.
The second story is no less provocative. It is found in the Midrash, in the passage about the Red Sea. The expected victims are saved at the eleventh hour, while their oppressors drown before their eyes. It is a moment of grace so extraordinary that the angels themselves begin to sing, but God interrupts them with the most humane, the most generous, the most sympathetic reminder. What has come over you? My creatures are perishing beneath the waves of the sea and you are singing? How can you praise me with your hymns while human beings die?
Although neither of these stories is part of the traditional Seder, I like to tell them. For me, Passover is an ongoing commitment to others and to compassion.
OH, I KNOW … it’s easy enough to say. Compassion for the enemies of one’s people—who has the right and the audacity to preach such a position? We can understand it on the level of God and the angels, but not on the human level. Why this story, then? To prompt us to question. If God demands compassion, then it must figure into the equation, it must play a role.
A topical question for the whole world—and for Israel and its inhabitants. Face to face with hatred, what should their attitude be? What do they feel, what should they feel, in the face of those Palestinians who treat them as despicable usurpers?
I have seen Israel at war, and I can attest to the fact that there was no hatred for enemy soldiers. Yes, there was a fierce desire and determination to win, but there was no hatred.
At the time, I remember how difficult it was for me to understand this phenomenon; it seemed illogical, irrational. For an enemy who desires only our destruction, you have to feel as much hatred as he feels for you. All of military history exists to prove it. But all of Jewish history exists to prove the contrary. The Jewish people have never had recourse to hatred, even when it involved a fight for survival.
If we’d had to hate all our enemies, we’d never have known where to stop.
And so, I return to the last holiday I celebrated at home with my family in my small town. The region was already infested with Germans. In Budapest, Adolf Eichmann was planning the deportation and liquidation of our communities. But we didn’t know this. The Russian front seemed so close. At night we heard the cannons, we saw the reddening of the sky, and we thought: Soon, soon we will be free.
Communal prayer was forbidden in the synagogues, so we arranged to hold services in our house. Normally, on Passover eve, we chanted lightheartedly, enthusiastically. But not this time. This time we only murmured.
I remember now, and I’ll always remember, that Seder. With bowed heads and heavy hearts, we evoked the old memories almost in silence; we dared not ask ourselves if, once again, God would intervene to save us.
In addition to my family, a strange visitor participated in the ceremony. In my imagination, I saw him as the Prophet Elijah. He spoke and fell silent and spoke again, like a madman. Fuming with rage, he frightened us with his cruel and horrifying stories.
Now I understand. He did not want to tell about the past but to predict the future. It is he too that I remember today when I invite “all who are hungry to come and eat.” But he will not come. He will never come again. Nor will the others.
Meeting Again*
SOME THIRTY-SIX and thirty-seven years ago, we experienced, together, a moment of destiny without parallel—never to be measured, never to be repeated; a moment that stood on the other side of time, on the other side of existence.
When we first met, at the threshold of a universe struck by malediction, we spoke different languages, we were strangers to one another, we might as well have descended from different planets. And yet—a link was created among us, a bond was established. We became not only comrades, not only brothers; we became each other’s witnesses.
I remember—I shall always remember the day I was liberated: April 11, 1945. Buchenwald. The terrifying silence terminated by abrupt yelling. The first American soldiers. Their faces ashen. Their eyes—I shall never forget their eyes, your eyes. You looked and looked, you could not move your gaze away from us; it was as though you sought to alter reality with your eyes. They reflected astonishment, bewilderment, endless pain, and anger—yes, anger above all. Rarely have I seen such anger, such rage—contained, mute, yet ready to burst with frustration, humiliation, and utter helplessness. Then you broke down. You wept. You wept and wept uncontrollably, unashamedly; you were our children then, for we, the twelve-year-old, the sixteen-year-old boys and girls in Buchenwald and Theresienstadt and Mauthausen knew so much more than you about life and death. You wept; we could not. We had no more tears left; we had nothing left. In a way we were dead and we knew it. What did we feel? Only sadness.
And also: gratitude. And ultimately, it was gratitude that brought us back to normalcy and to society. Do you remember, friends? In Lublin and Dachau, Stuthoff and Nordhausen, Ravensbruck and Maidanek and Belsen and Auschwitz, you were surrounded by sick and wounded and hungry wretches, barely alive, pathetic in their futile attempts to touch you, to smile at you, to reassure you, to console you and most of all to carry you in triumph on their frail shoulders; You were heroes, our idols: tell me, friends, have you ever felt such love, such admiration?
One thing we did not do: We did not try to explain; explanations were neither needed nor possible. Liberators and survivors looked at one another—and what each of us experienced then, we shall try to recapture together, now, at this reunion which to me represents a miracle in itself.
At this point, allow me to say a few words about the Council whose chairman I am privileged to be.
Created by the President
of the United States and unanimously enacted into law by both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, our Council is essentially nonpolitical.
Our activities are manifold in nature and in scope. The International Relations Committee, which coordinated this conference, is but one of the committees functioning within the Council.
Moscow, 1979. Members of a Presidential delegation met with certain high-ranking Red Army officers. One of them in particular meant much to us: General Petrenko had liberated Auschwitz. It was an extraordinary encounter. We exchanged stories. He told us of the preparations to break through the German lines and I told him of the last day in camp, the last roll call, the last night, the last consultations among inmates, friends, fathers and sons. What should one do? Hide? Where? The Red Army was so near, so near. We prayed, I told General Petrenko. We prayed for you and your men and no believer ever prayed to his or her God with more fervor.
And so—while General Petrenko and I were telling each other tales of courage and despair, I suddenly had the idea of bringing together liberators from all the allied forces. To listen to you and to thank you. And—why not admit it?—to solicit your help. Our testimony is being disputed by morally deranged Nazis and Nazi-lovers; your voices may silence them. You were the first men to discover the abyss, just as we were its last inhabitants. What we symbolized to one another then was so special that it remained part of our very being.
Well—here you are, friends from so many nations, reunited with those who owe you their lives, just as you owe them the flame that scorched your memories.
On that most memorable day, the day of our liberation—whether it took place in 1944 or in 1945, in Poland or in Germany—you embodied for us humanity’s noblest yearning to be free, and even more; to bring freedom to those who are not.
For us, you represented hope. True, six million Jews were annihilated, millions of brave men and women massacred by the Nazis and their collaborators, but we are duty-bound to remember always that to confront the fascist criminal conquests, a unique alliance of nations, gigantic armies, transcending geopolitical and ideological borders, was raised on five continents, and all went to war on behalf of humankind. The fact that millions of soldiers wearing different uniforms united to fight together, to be victorious together, and, alas, sometimes to die together, seemed to justify man’s faith in his own humanity—in spite of the enemy. We thought of the killers and we were ready to give up on man; but then we remembered those who resisted them—on open battlefields as well as in the underground movements in France, Norway, Holland, Denmark, and the U.S.S.R.—and we reconciled ourselves with the human condition. We were—can you believe it?—naive enough to think that we who had witnessed, for a while, the domination of evil would prevent it from surfacing again. On the very ruins of civilization, we aspired to erect new sanctuaries for our children where life would be sanctified and not denigrated, compassion practiced, not ridiculed.
It would have been so easy to allow ourselves to slide into melancholic resignation. Instead we chose to become spokespersons for the human quest for generosity and need and capacity to turn suffering into something productive, something creative.
We had hoped then that out of so much grief and mourning a new message would be handed down to future generations, a warning against the inherent perils of discrimination, fanaticism, poverty, deprivation, ignorance, oppression, humiliation and injustice, and war—the ultimate injustice, the ultimate humiliation.
Yes, friends; we were naive.
And perhaps we still are.
Together we have the right and the duty to issue an appeal to which no one can remain deaf: an appeal against hatred, against human degradation, and against forgetfulness.
We have seen that which no one will ever see. We have seen what fanaticism leads to: mass cruelty, imprisonment, and death.
We have seen the metamorphosis of history, and now it is our duty to bear witness. When one people is destined to die, all others are implicated. When one ethnic group is humiliated, humanity is threatened. Hitler’s plans to annihilate the Jewish people and to decimate the Slavic nations bore the germ of universal death. Jews were killed, but humankind was assassinated.
You, friends, liberators, stopped this process. Be proud. We are grateful.
If we unite our memories and wills, as we did then, everything is possible. Forgetfulness leads to indifference; indifference to complicity and thus to dishonor.
Friends, I speak to you as brothers. The ties that bind us to one another are powerful and timeless. Together we constitute a community that has no equal. Yet it diminishes from day to day. Who among you will be the last messenger? Our moral judgment, both past and present, determines our dignity. Yes, we are against prisons, against dictatorships, against fear, against confrontation, nuclear or otherwise. We give proof that it is possible for men and women to join forces and affirm the right to live and dream in peace.
I may be naive but I believe with all my heart that if we speak loudly enough, Death will retreat.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, we looked deep into the abyss—and the abyss looked back at us. No one comes close to the kingdom of night and goes away unscathed. We told the tale—or, at least, we tried. We resisted all temptations to isolate ourselves and be silent. Instead we chose to affirm our desperate faith in testimony. We forced ourselves to speak-however inadequately, however poorly. We may have used the wrong words—but then there are no words to describe the ineffable. We spoke in spite of language, in spite of the void that exists between what we say and outsiders hear. We spoke and … explosions in Paris, bombs in Antwerp, murderous attacks in Vienna. Is it conceivable that Nazism could dare come back into the open so soon—while we are still alive, while we are still here to denounce its poisonous nature, as illustrated in Treblinka?
Again we must admit our naiveté. We thought we had vanquished the beast, but no: it is still showing its claws. At best, what a gathering such as this could do is to shame the beast into hiding. If we here succeed—and I hope and pray that we shall—in rising above politics, above the usual recriminations between East and West, above simplistic propaganda, and simply tell the world what both liberators and liberated have seen, then something may happen; the world may choose to pay more attention to what hangs as a threat to its very future.
If we succeed—and I hope and pray that we shall—in putting aside what divides us—and what divides us is superficial—if we dedicate ourselves not only to the memory of those who have suffered but also to the future of those who are suffering today, we shall be serving notice on mankind that we shall never allow this earth to be made into a prison again, that we shall never allow war to be considered as a solution to any problem—for war is the problem. If we succeed, then our encounter will be recorded as yet another of our common victories.
If we do not raise our voices against war, against hate, against indifference—who will? We speak with the authority of men and women who have seen war; we know what it is. We have seen the burnt villages, the devastated cities, the deserted homes, we still see the demented mothers whose children are being massacred before their eyes, we still follow the endless nocturnal processions to the flames rising up to the seventh heaven—if not higher.…
We are gathered here to testify—together. Our tale is a tale of solitude and fear and anonymous death—but also of compassion, generosity, bravery, and solidarity. Together, you the liberators and we the survivors represent a commitment to memory whose intensity will remain. In its name we shall continue to voice our concerns and our hopes not for our own sake, but for the sake of humankind. Its very survival may depend on its ability and willingness to listen.
And to remember.
*A speech delivered at the International Liberators Conference in Washington, D.C., on October 26, 1982.
Trivializing Memory
WITTGENSTEIN SAID IT: Whereof one cannot speak, one must not speak. The unspeakable draws its force and its mystery from its own silence.
A nineteenth-century Hasidic teacher put it his own way: The cry unuttered is the loudest.
If this is true of language as a means of communication in general, it is even truer of literature and art that try to describe, without ever succeeding, the final reality of the human condition during the Holocaust. Is proof needed? It has come in the recent spate of fictionalized accounts of that tragedy in the mass media.
Let us repeat it once again: Auschwitz is something else, always something else. It is a universe outside the universe, a creation that exists parallel to creation. Auschwitz lies on the other side of life and on the other side of death. There, one lives differently, one walks differently, one dreams differently. Auschwitz represents the negation of human progress and casts doubt on its validity. Then, it defeated culture; later, it defeated art, because just as no one could imagine Auschwitz before Auschwitz, no one can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz. The truth of Auschwitz remains hidden in its ashes. Only those who lived it in their flesh and in their minds can possibly transform their experience into knowledge. Others, despite their best intentions, can never do so.
Such, then, is the victory of the executioner; by raising his crimes to a level beyond the imagining and understanding of men, he planned to deprive his victims of any hope of sharing their monstrous meaning with others. In the tale of a survivor that appeared some twenty years ago, an S.S. officer tells a young Jew, “One day you will speak of all this, but your story will fall on deaf ears. Some will mock you, others will try to redeem themselves through you. You will cry out to the heavens and they will refuse to listen or to believe.…”