But not even the killers ever imagined that there could come a time when the merchants of images and the brokers of language would set themselves up to speak for the victims.
The Holocaust has become a fashionable subject, so film and theater producers and television networks have set out to exploit it, often in the most vulgar sense of the word. The Night Porter, Seven Beauties, the docudrama Holocaust, Sophie’s Choice, and War and Remembrance (I speak of the films, not the books), Murderers Among Us, and the recent Ghetto, which played on Broadway for several weeks, and previously, to great acclaim, in Germany. These are only some of the most familiar examples over the years. An authentic documentary like The Final Solution, by the four-time Oscar winner Arthur Cohn, cannot find a distributor, but people fall all over themselves for cheap and simplistic melodramas. They get a little history, a heavy dose of sentimentality and suspense, a little eroticism, a few daring sex scenes, a dash of theological rumination about the silence of God, and there it is: let kitsch rule in the land of kitsch, where, at the expense of truth, what counts is the ratings.
WHY THIS determination to show “everything” in pictures? A word, a glance—silence itself communicates more and better. How, after all, can one illustrate famine, terror, the solitude of old people deprived of strength and orphans robbed of their future? How can one “stage” a convoy of uprooted deportees being sent into the unknown, or the liquidation of thousands and thousands of men, women, and children? How can one “produce” the machine-gunned, the gassed, the mutilated corpses, when the viewer knows that they are all actors, and that after the filming they will return to the hotel for a well-deserved bath and a meal? Sure, this is true of all subjects and of all films, but that is also the point: the Holocaust is not a subject like all the others. It imposes certain limits. There are techniques that one may not use, even if they are commercially effective. In order not to betray the dead and humiliate the living, this particular subject demands a special sensibility, a different approach, a rigor, strengthened by respect and reverence and, above all, faithfulness to memory.
You see, memory is more than isolated events, more even than the sum of those events. Facts pulled out of their context can be misleading. Take Ghetto. The author of this controversial production, Joshua Sobel, of Israel, insists that the play is based on fact. So what? By isolating certain facts, by giving them more prominence than so many others, and by illuminating them from a particular angle, he makes his play lie.
Ghetto is about a theater company in the Vilna ghetto that produced plays and concerts with the encouragement of Jacob Gens, the chief of the Jewish police, and the consent of the Germans. The author’s intention? To show, on one hand, the will to live, the thirst for culture among Jews at the very threshold of death, and on the other, the moral ambiguity of some of their own leaders. It is a laudable idea, but the play shifts direction in mid-course.
What do spectators remember when they leave the theater? The moral dilemma that faces Jacob Gens: May one sacrifice some human beings in order to save others? No. They remember the Jews, most of whom in this play allowed themselves to be defeated or seduced by the enemy. Bewildering scenes, nauseating in their collective degradation: orgies, depravity, sadistic exhibitionism, black-marketeering, prostitution, collaboration. With some notable exceptions, it is total decadence everywhere, debauchery and mockery at every level. Gens, a complex person, possesses astonishing dignity and courage, and yet he virtually becomes the Nazis’ accomplice. His policemen become the Nazis’ official instruments: it is they who hound the Jews, they who drive them to their deaths.
Is this a fair and true picture of the ghetto? Filmed as it is, full of ugliness, decadence, and moral abdication, it may be that it reflects a certain reality, but is that reality not a very limited one? It suffices to read the history of the Vilna ghetto, or to see a poignant film like The Partisans of Vilna, to realize how false and nasty a picture Ghetto paints for us. The religious vocabulary has a phrase for it: Hilul hashem—blasphemy or profanation, an act that strikes at all that is sacred.
WE ARE, in fact, living through a period of general desanctification of the Holocaust. In West Germany, historians are explaining away Hitler’s crimes by lumping them with Stalin’s; Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s official spokesman recently said that Germans have had enough of feeling guilty and that the Warfen S. S. of Bitburg were only good German soldiers. In France, a man called Le Pen considers the Holocaust “a detail.” Anti-Israeli propagandists compare Israeli soldiers to Nazis, and in France, as in the United States, and everywhere else, for that matter, shameless “revisionists” go so far as to deny the very existence of the death camps.
As for philosophers and psychiatrists, some of them have long been intrigued by simplistic theories that attribute to the victim a death wish or a secret need to dominate, to victimize, to oppress—in other words, to resemble the executioner. In the course of scholarly colloquia, one sometimes hears more about the guilt of the victims and the psychological problems of the survivors than about the crimes of the killers. Didn’t an American novelist recently suggest that the suicide of my friend Primo Levi was nothing but a bout of depression that good psychoanalytical treatment could have cured? Thus is the tragedy of a great writer, a man who never ceased to battle the black angel of Auschwitz, reduced to a banal nervous breakdown.
Who could have imagined it? There are still living survivors, and already their past has been turned into a kind of no-man’s-land where false certainties and arrogance rule. Newcomers to this history appoint themselves experts, the ignorant become critics. They give the impression of knowing better than the victims or the survivors how to name what Samuel Beckett called the unnameable, and how to communicate the uncommunicable. In the field of the audiovisual, the temptation is generally reductionist, shrinking personalities to stereotypes and dialogue to clichés. All is trivial and superficial, even death itself: there is no mystery in its mystery. It is stripped naked, just as the dead are stripped and exposed to the dubious enjoyment of spectators turned voyeurs.
Why this sudden explosion of nudity as a backdrop for the Holocaust? What by any rule of decency ought to remain unexposed is exposed to shock the television viewer. Naked men. Naked women. Naked children. And all of them made up with ketchup and paid to “fall” into the “mass graves.” How can one explain such obscenity? How can anyone justify such insensitivity? In the Jewish tradition, death is a private, intimate matter, and we are forbidden to transform it into a spectacle. If that is true for an individual, it is six million times more true for one of the largest communities of the dead in history.
But then, the “experts” will ask, how do we transmit the message? There are other ways to do it, better ways to keep the memory alive. Today the question is not what to transmit, but how. Study the texts—such as the diaries of Emanuel Ringelblum and Chaim Kaplan; the works by the historians Raul Hilberg, Lucy Davidowicz, Martin Gilbert, Michael Marrus. Watch the documentaries, such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and Haim Gouri’s 81st Blow. Listen to the survivors and respect their wounded sensibility. Open yourselves to their scarred memories, and mingle your tears with theirs.
And stop insulting the dead.
Bitburg*
MR. PRESIDENT:
This medal is not mine alone. It belongs to all those who remember what S.S. killers have done to their victims.
It was given to me for my writings, teaching, and for my testimony. When I write, I feel my invisible teachers looking over my shoulders, reading my words and judging their veracity. While I feel responsible to the living, I feel equally responsible to the dead. Their memory dwells in my memory.
What have I learned in the last forty years? Small things. I learned the perils of language and those of silence. I learned that in extreme situations, when human lives and dignity are at stake, neutrality is a sin: it helps the killers, not the victims.
I learned the meaning of solitude: we were alo
ne—desperately alone. Leaders of the free world knew everything and did nothing—nothing specifically to save Jewish children from death. One million children perished. If I spent my entire life reciting their names, I would die before finishing the task. Children … I have seen some of them thrown into the flames … alive. Words? They die on my lips. I have learned the necessity of describing their deaths.
I have learned the fragility of the human condition. The killers were not monsters. They were human beings. Good parents. Obedient citizens. Some had college degrees and a passion for the arts or philosophy. Did their education prevent them from committing murder? Evidently not.
A great moral essayist, the gentle and forceful Abe Rosenthal, having visited Auschwitz, once wrote an extraordinary piece of reportage about the persecution of the Jews called “Forgive them not, Father, for they knew what they did.”
I have learned that the Holocaust was a unique and uniquely Jewish event—albeit with universal implications. Not all victims were Jews; but all Jews were victims. Dachau’s first inmates were German anti-Nazis; but Treblinka and Belzec and Ponar and Babi Yar were designed to serve as a sacrificial altar for the entire Jewish people.
I have learned the guilt of indifference. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Jews were killed by the enemy but betrayed by their so-called allies, who found political reasons to justify their indifference.
But I have also learned that suffering confers no privileges: it depends upon what one does with it. This is why survivors have tried to teach their contemporaries how to build on ruins. How to invent hope in a world that offers none. How to proclaim faith to a generation that has seen it shamed and mutilated.
THE SURVIVORS had every reason to despair of society; they did not. They opted to work for humankind, not against it.
A few days ago, on the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, Americans watched with dismay as the Soviet Union and East Germany distorted both past and present history. Mr. President, I was there. I was there when American liberators arrived and gave us back our lives. What I felt for them will nourish me to the end of my life.
Mr. President, we are grateful to this country for having offered us haven and refuge. Grateful to its leadership for being friendly to Israel—for we are grateful to Israel for existing. Grateful to Congress for its continuing philosophy of humanism and compassion for the underprivileged. As for yourself, Mr. President, we are grateful to you for being a friend of the Jewish people, for trying to help the oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union and for your continuing support of the Jewish State.
Mr. President, am I dreaming? Is this but a nightmare? This day was meant to be a day of joy for me, my family and our friends. Why then is there such sadness in my heart?
Allow me, Mr. President, to touch on a matter which is sensitive. I belong to a traumatized generation; to us symbols are important. Following our ancient tradition which commands us to “speak truth to power,” may I speak to you of the recent events that have caused us much pain and anguish?
We have met four or five times. I know of your commitment to humanity. I am convinced that you were not aware of the presence of S. S. graves in the Bitburg cemetery. But now we all are aware of that presence. I therefore implore you, Mr. President, in the spirit of this moment that justifies so many others, tell us now that you will not go there: that place is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the S. S. We know there are political and even strategic considerations—but this issue, as all issues related to that awesome Event, transcends politics, and even diplomacy. The issue here is not politics but good and evil, and we must never confuse them. I have seen the S. S. at work; I have seen their victims.
There was a degree of suffering and loneliness in the concentration camps that defies imagination—cut off from the world, without refuge anywhere, sons watched helplessly as their fathers were beaten to death; mothers watched their children die of hunger. And then there was Mengele and his selections—terror, fear, isolation, and torture.
MR. PRESIDENT, you seek reconciliation. So do I. I, too, wish to attain true reconciliation with the German people. I do not believe in collective guilt—nor in collective responsibility. Only the killers were guilty. Their sons and daughters are not. I believe we can, we must, work together with them and with all people to bring peace and understanding to a tormented world that is still awaiting redemption.
*A speech delivered upon acceptance of the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement at the White House, April 29, 1985.
Testimony at The Barbie Trial*
YOUR HONOR, gentlemen of the bench, gentlemen of the jury, I thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I will try to speak about some of the nameless absent—but not for them. No one has a right to speak in their name. If the dead have something to say, they will say it in their own way. Perhaps they are already saying it. Are we capable, are we worthy, of hearing them?
May I say immediately that I feel no hatred toward the accused? I have never met him; our paths have never crossed. But I have met killers who, like him, along with him, chose to be enemies of my people and of humanity. I may have known one or another of his victims. I resembled them, just as they resembled me: Within the kingdom of malediction created by the accused and his comrades, all Jewish prisoners, all Jews, had the same face, the same eyes; all shared the same fate. Sometimes one has the impression the same Jew was being killed by the enemy everywhere six million times over.
No, there is no hatred in me: there never was any. There is no question of hatred here—only justice. And memory. We are trying to do justice to our memory.
Here is one memory: the spring of 1944. A few days before the Jewish Pentecostal holiday—Shavuot This was forty-three years ago, almost to the day. I was fifteen and a half years old—my own son will turn fifteen in three days. A profoundly religious child, I was moved by messianic dreams and prayers. Far from Jerusalem, I lived for Jerusalem, and Jerusalem lived in me.
Though subjected to a fascist regime, the Jews of Hungary did not suffer too much. My parents ran a business, my three sisters went to school, the Sabbath enveloped us in its peace.… The war? It was nearing its end. The Allies were going to land in a day, in a week. The Red Army was twenty or thirty kilometers away. But then …
The Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944. Starting then, events moved at a headlong pace that gave us no respite. A succession of anti-Semitic decrees and measures were passed: the prohibition of travel, confiscation of goods, wearing of yellow stars, ghettos, transports.
We watched as our world was systematically narrowed. For Jews, the country was limited to one town, the town to one neighborhood, the neighborhood to one street, the street to one room, the room to a sealed boxcar crossing the Polish countryside at night.
Like the forty-four Jewish children of Izieu (shipped to Auschwitz in 1944), the Jewish adolescents from my town arrived at the Auschwitz station one afternoon. What is this? we wondered. No one knew. The name did not evoke any memory in us. Shortly before midnight, the train began to move. A woman in our car began shouting, “I see a fire, I see a fire!” They made her be quiet. I remember the silence in the car. As I remember the rest. The barbed-wire fences stretching away to infinity. The shouts of the prisoners whose duty it was to “welcome” us, the gunshots fired by the S. S., the barking of their dogs. And up above us all, above the planet itself, immense flames rising toward the sky as though to consume it.
Since that night, I often look at the sky and see it in flames.… But that night, I could not look at the sky for long. I was too busy clinging to my family. An order rang out: “Line up by family.” That’s good, I thought, we will stay together. Only for a few minutes, however: “Men to the right, women to the left.” The blows rained down on all sides. I was not able to say goodbye to my mother. Nor to my grandmother. I could not kiss my little sister. With my two older sisters, she was moving away, borne by the crazed, black tide.…
This was a separation that cut my life in half. I rarely speak of it, almost never. I cannot recall my mother or my little sister. With my eyes, I still look for them, I will always look for them. And yet I know … I know everything. No, not everything … one cannot know everything. I could imagine it, but I do not allow myself to. One must know when to stop.… My gaze stops at the threshold of the gas chambers. Even in thought, I refuse to violate the privacy of the victims at the moment of their death.
What I saw is enough for me. In a small wood somewhere in Birkenau I saw children being thrown into the flames alive by the S. S. Sometimes I curse my ability to see. It should have left me without ever returning. I should have remained with those little charred bodies.… Since that night, I have felt a profound, immense love for old people and children. Every old person recalls my grandfather, my grandmother, every child brings me close to my little sister, the sister of the dead Jewish children of Izieu.…
Night after night, I kept asking myself, What does all this mean? What is the sense of this murderous enterprise? It functioned perfectly. The killers killed, the victims died, the fire burned and an entire people thirsting for eternity turned to ash, annihilated by a nation which, until then, was considered to be the best educated, the most cultivated in the world. Graduates from the great universities, lovers of music and painting, doctors, lawyers, and philosophers participated in the Final Solution and became accomplices of death. Scholars and engineers invented more efficient methods for exterminating denser and denser masses in record time.… How was this possible?
I do not know the answer. In its scope, its ontological aspect, and its eschatological ambitions, this tragedy defies and exceeds all answers. If anyone claims to have found an answer, it can only be a false one. So much mourning, so much agony, so many deaths on one side, and a single answer on the other? One cannot understand Auschwitz either without God or with God. One cannot conceive of it in terms of man or of heaven. Why was there so much hatred in the enemy toward Jewish children and old people? Why this relentlessness against a people whose memory of suffering is the oldest in the world?