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The Life Of Death
By Israel Shahak
I would like to make three rather extended observations about the
essays by Timothy Garton Ash, "The Life of Death" [NYR,
December 19, 1985], dealing with the film of Claude Lanzmann,
Shoah, and his and Lanzmann's opinions about the carrying out of
the Holocaust and their suggestions as to its 'nature.'
I am myself a survivor of the Holocaust: I was born in Warsaw (the
subject of a large part of the essay ) and was in the Warsaw Ghetto
almost till the end; then after various adventures that included
a period of time “on the Aryan side,” as it was called
then (that is, being hidden by a Polish Catholic family and helped
by other Poles). I finished in Bergen-Belsen where I spent nearly
two years. I think that being a child of nine to twelve years old
during the crucial part of those experiences (1942-1945) helped
me to understand them afterward better than could those who were
fully grown up; and of course children under such experiences grow
up and mature beyond their formal age, without however losing a
part of the openness to strange things which is one of the advantages
of youth. In numerous talks in Israel with many survivors of similar
experiences, of more or less the same age, I have found a confirmation
of my opinions.
In the first place I think that Garton Ash and, even more, Lanzmann
before him do not want to understand the behavior of those who tried
to lead a “normal” life, disregarding, so to say, the
mass murder that went on around them, or those who actually helped
in some secondary capacity to carry out the work of extermination,
because both of them limit themselves, completely and absolutely,
to the consideration of the Poles and disregard completely, or one
can say in the case of Lanzmann, willfully the fact that many Jews
had exactly the same attitudes. Let us take the Warsaw Ghetto. Before
the beginning of the actual extermination of Jews in other cities
was known to many including the children (especially after the news
came of the extermination of the Ghetto of Lublin) the life went
on exactly as usual, exactly as in Polish Warsaw during the extermination
of the Warsaw Jews.
More than this: When after the great majority of Warsaw Jews were
exterminated in summer 1942, and in the following late autumn and
winter there was a comparative lull in “the actions,”
that is, in the rounding up of Jews to be exterminated, life in
the pitifully small residue of the Ghetto that remained also returned
to some level of “normality” with some entertainment
and card playing or other kinds of parties. The explanation is simply
that the great majority of human beings cannot do otherwise; but
this is a human explanation, common, as I believe, to all humanity
not something peculiar to Poles as Lanzmann tries to make it, by
omitting a crucial part of the evidence.
The same I could observe under even more harrowing conditions in
Bergen-Belsen. For some months the platforms bearing hundreds of
naked, emaciated dead bodies passed daily at a certain hour in the
morning before our “special” little camp. When the horror
(which was a horror even to people so hardened to shocks as we all
were) began, it did shock all of us to the extent of disrupting
our “normal” lives, for it is an essential part of the
real and true experience of the victims of the Holocaust (and no
doubt of other similar experiences) that, except for very short
periods of time, “in the face of death” so to say a
sort of “normality” is being established under almost
all circumstances. But after a few days the same people who on the
first day could not eat, in spite of the continuous horrible hunger,
ate what they could find to eat, and the subject was mentioned less
and less in the common talk of our camp.
The same thing happened when for a shorter time (I think for about
a month) another camp with people who were literally being beaten
to death with clubs was situated in the shortest possible distance
from our own compound where we could see and hear the people being
tortured to death with deliberate beatings and starvation. (Much
of the beating was administered when the victims waited for their
small pittance of soup, much less than others got.) I am not implying
that most people who witness such horrors, whether Jews or Poles,
do not continue to suffer and to feel some sympathy for the victims,
only that they must after a rather short time return to some sort
of normal experience in which the sufferings of the victims do not
obsess and occupy their whole lives. Maybe this is what Plato implied
when he said that human beings cannot bear too much reality, but
in any case this is a part of our common human experience, in no
way peculiar either to Jews or Poles, as a little observation or
reflection on human beings placed in similar situations could show.
For example how have people behaved in the past when others, maybe
their neighbors and/or friends burned alive in the town square?
Or were stoned to death “before the gate?”
The observation of Garton Ash that the Nazi oppression in Poland
was greater than in other countries and the argument of the Poles
who debated Lanzmann in Oxford that Polish Warsaw was in a state
of terror is no doubt correct (as I saw myself) but is only of secondary
importance in comparison with the fact that Jews, Poles, and everybody
else so far as we can know when we wish to know, behave in about
the same way in this respect, and that such behavior is a part of
something that we may call “human nature,” common to
most of us. The last passover Seder celebration (of 1943) which
I celebrated with my parents was held amid the noises of shooting
of the Jewish Revolt and its suppression in another part of the
Ghetto, not so far away. It was a poor and hurried celebration but
most accessories of the occasion were there and all the ceremonies
were carried out, including the prescribed singing. The one before
that in 1942 was a joyful occasion of much splendor, not only among
us but with very many thousands of other Jewish families of the
Warsaw Ghetto. Yet the extermination of Jews had already begun months
ago and was much advanced.
No doubt, had a survivor from one of the many small towns of conquered
USSR, where most of the Jews had been already exterminated, arrived
at a typical Passover celebration of spring 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto,
or at one of the numerous public balls, concerts, etc., he would
have said, if he was as stupid as the survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto
whom Lanzmann picked, that while Jews were killed in this area,
in the Warsaw Ghetto “life went on as naturally and normally
as before.” There are even prevalent theories that this “life
as usual” phenomenon in the ghettos was a justified part of
the passive Jewish resistance. I am not sure about that, but I am
sure, both rationally and passionately that human beings or most
of them, whatever their nationality or religion, have to behave
in this way in order to remain human beings.
Lanzmann simply heard what he wanted to hear, that Poles are such
and such and that Jews are chosen people whose behavior should not
be investigated. He did not want to hear the real truth, that both
of them, and of course all other people too, are human beings who
behave more or less in the same way in similar circumstances.
Similar considerations apply to the question of those who participated
in the extermination of the Jews (or on other mass murder committed
by the Nazis) or expressed sympathy for the extermination; except
that seeking normality, of whatever kind, is a reaction of a great
majority, of nearly everybody in fact, in all human societies; while
collaborating in fearful crimes even under the condition of impunity
and reward (in the form of steady work and relative protection from
state terror) is indulged, in all societies (so far as we can see)
only by a minority.
Again the crucial social fact, which could enlighten us about the
human reality of carrying out mass murders, is shirked both by Lanzmann
and Ash. Of course there were Polish policemen who rounded up Jews
and Poles, who blackmailed Jews whom they recognized as such. My
own mother was stopped on Warsaw street by such a one (she bought
herself with a diamond ring) while I followed a distance behind
with a Polish friend. We were both well trained enough to continue
past her, while she haggled for her life, and to stop and wait,
only behind a corner so that the blood price would not increase.
But who of the Jewish survivors does not know (and certainly Garton
Ash should know) that there were also Jewish blackmailers, some
of them quite famous by name, outside the Ghetto, who were neither
better nor worse than the Polish ones, and also Jewish policemen
in the Ghetto whose duty in the first weeks of the extermination
of summer 1942 was to deliver, each of them a specified number,
Jewish victims to “be sent” to extermination. Now, I
hold that both kinds of murderers or accessories to murder and fully
equal and that the abhorrence in which one should hold them does
not depend on nationality, but my memories (and the memories of
all the survivors who are honestly “talking among themselves”)
tell me that at the time we Jews hated the Jewish policemen, or
the Jewish spies for the Nazis in the Ghetto, much more than we
hated anybody else.
Maybe two actual “stories” which I witnessed myself,
but which I believe to be very typical, will illustrate this attitude.
During the first weeks of the great extermination in the summer
of 1942, the Jews who worked in the big factories supplying the
German Army were not molested, while other Jews were being rounded
up. They were supposed to be in the factories till five o'clock
in the afternoon, when they were allowed to go out, and at that
time the catching of other Jews was supposed to stop. One such afternoon,
at quarter past five I was looking out of a window of “Tebens,”
one of those privileged factories, and saw a Jewish policeman dragging
a boy (naturally the Jewish Policemen having no guns, preferred
the weaker victims). The boy was shouting at the top of his voice
that now the Jewish policeman had no right to catch him and resisting
as well as he could, when suddenly the Nazi vice commander of the
factory, vicious brute by the name Bach, came out of the gate, hit
the policeman with the horsewhip which he always carried, and shouted
at him: “Cursed Jew! An order is an order!”
Naturally this became the talk of the next day, and as much as
Bach was hated (and he was one of the most vicious Nazis I ever
saw), he was much praised for what he had done. Everyone rejoiced
in the discomfiture of the Jewish policeman and exclaimed that no
matter how much Bach was a monster the policeman “must be
worse” (of course I see that they both, together with the
Polish policemen, etc., were perfectly equal in their wickedness).
Much later, in late winter 1943, a well known Jewish spy for the
Nazis was killed by the Jewish resistance in one of the entrances
of the double block of flats (in Leszno Street) which we then inhabited.
This was a necessary part of the preparations for the Jewish Revolt
which followed not long afterward. I witnessed the killing, done
by a very young man with a revolver from a short distance, and then
together with a few children and teenagers present danced for joy
round the dead body and then ran as quickly as I could to carry
the glad tidings to my mother. She was as glad as I was, and only
after a short time returned to normality enough to rebuke me for
dancing around the corpse, saying that a polite boy does not behave
so, however justified was the act...
Really, such stories could have been found by Lanzmann had he not
been a prisoner of his own prejudices, and they should be known
to Garton Ash. The attempt by both Lanzmann and Ash to find the
“essence” or the “essentials” of the Polish
situation is unfair and wrong in both senses of the word. It is
not honest and it is not true. It is also presumptuous and racist,
in spite of the unconvincing attempt of Garton Ash to quote Orwell
about the nationalism of the victim. Of course such nationalism
exists, but this is not the essential point, to use the expression
they both use.
The essential point is the behavior common to all humanity, in
this case of a criminal minority which is present in all bigger
human groups who even in their nauseating criminality behave in
a similar human manner; just as the opposite group, those who risked
their lives to save others, or the great majority who in almost
every situation wanted so passionately to return to some kind of
normality, also behaved in a way which is neither Jewish nor Polish
but typically human.
This difference between the reality and the distortion of it which
I see as profound, is also most important in my opinion, both for
the understanding of the past and for taking such precautions as
one can for the future. Faced by the extreme irrationality expressed
in Nazism we must try to think as rationally (and therefore as truly)
as possible. As Bertrand Russell remarked in his interpretation
of Aristotle: “The irrational separates us, the rational unites
us.” The correct rational and human understanding of the Holocaust
can be some help toward the unification of people of good will everywhere,
while the incorrect pursuit of the presumed “essentials”
of the Poles makes things worse and actually increase the dangers
of other Holocausts directed against other peoples happening.
Also, the correct perception of the actual horrors of the extermination
of the Jews in their all too human and typical character can be,
and should be, a powerful instrument of understanding and caution
to be addressed to all members of the human race without exception.
To see the typical common and human wickedness of the minority of
both the Jews and Poles who became Nazi servants is to become aware
of the common human danger which lurks everywhere, but against which
the imperfect human majority struggles with some success. Such expressions
as “but for the grace of God there I go,” as addressed
to everyone, express such truth as we will be able to find if we
will seek it, about what happened to all human beings under the
Holocaust.
The second subject to which I would like to address myself is the
generalization, based, as Garton Ash writes, on the opinions of
Professor Raul Hilberg, whether there is really a connection between
the historical Christian attitude to Jews and their extermination
by the Nazis, and whether there was a connection between the particular
forms of anti Semitism prevalent in Poland, either a little before
or even during the Holocaust or for longer periods, and the fact
that the extermination camps were in Poland and the Polish attitude
toward the Holocaust.
This question should be raised even if one accepts (as I do) the
description which Garton Ash quotes from Jan Gross of the prevalence
of the anti Semitism in Poland of 1941, to the extent of adoption
of the postulate of emigration as a solution of “the Jewish
problem” even by the Polish socialists. Can one, even when
condemning “a solution of emigration” for “a problem”
of any human group, as I do, and as I presume Garton Ash does, do
a sort of “quantum jump” and make necessary connection
between such an attitude, however wrong, and a tendency to approve
or to participate in a mass murder? I think the answer is “no,”
and had there been a willingness to reason which necessarily includes
the willingness to compare other, similar phenomena, instead of
dogmatically accepting “the uniqueness” of the Holocaust
and of anti-Semitism, the absurdity of this opinion of Hilberg and
Lanzmann would be evident.
In 1944, during the actual course of the Holocaust, the British
Labour Party in its annual convention proposed to solve the problem
of the Palestinians in Palestine by having them emigrate from it.
This hateful approach had been very popular also in many other social
Democratic European parties in Europe in the Twenties and Thirties.
Much as I condemn that resolution and the use which to this day
is made of it in Israel (and among many diaspora Jews too, especially
in the US), I do not agree that supporting such an attitude, which
is identical with what Garton Ash solemnly quotes about Polish socialists
and others in 1941, has made the British Labour Party members favorable
to any mass murder or genocide of Palestinians.
The wish “to cause emigration” of Palestinians from
Palestine was, and is, also very common among Zionists, and especially
among the socialists part of the movement, for many decades, and
has become rooted in a great part of the Jewish Israeli community.
As I write, the Israeli papers reported that 22 percent of the Israeli
Jewish public see “getting rid” of those Palestinians
who are Israeli citizens “as the only solution.” The
percentages of those who advocate “getting rid” of “only”
the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip or a great
part of them must be much higher, and such a policy was actually
followed in 1967-1968 by the Israeli government then dominated by
the Israeli Labour party, when great number of Palestinians, perhaps
up to 500,000 were compelled to leave.
I opposed and still oppose this hateful crime against humanity
(and I insist that the fate of the Palestinians should be discussed
together with the Holocaust!) but I don't agree that extermination
and expulsion (or forced emigration) should be put in the same category,
or even assumed to influence each other. How people act and how
they are influenced should be deduced from observation of their
behavior and not by the use of syllogism. It is a simple fact that
for most human beings (whether Poles or Jews, or any of other groups)
morality as expressed by their behavior is organized in water-tight
compartments. People who “allow” themselves to steal
from the government will not steal from a friend. People who tolerate
one sort of crime when done by others will not do it themselves.
It may be and it really is illogical, but it is also human, and
I am not sure whether, at least in our stage of human development,
greater amount of logic in human behavior would make the majority
of human beings better or worse.
Memories, and the memories of my friends too, tell me that the
attitude of Poles during the Holocaust to the fact of the extermination
of the Jews around them was in this respect typically human and
almost illogical (and I assume that on the average every other group
of human beings would have behaved in more or less the same way,
Jews too.) That is, there was a small group of Poles who risked
their lives to save Jews, and many of this group actually lost their
lives for this reason, a fact to which Lanzmann does not seem worthy
of record.
It is of course true that there was another small group which either
helped the Nazis, or expressed, quite loudly too, their satisfaction
that the Jews “are gone.” My friends, and I too, remember
very well occasions such as that which Garton Ash quotes from Kazimierz
Brandys in which Poles expressed loudly or casually their delight
with the mass murder of Jews. But in justice it should be pointed
out that on many, perhaps most, of those occasions, there was a
verbal opposition to such a statement. The usual situation, so much
more human and even tragic, really, that what is expressed by people
who have particular axe to grind, was of an individual expressing
his delight that Jews were being exterminated, another one rebuking
him, and “the many” to use an ancient Greek term, being
silent and not committing themselves one way or another.
I will quote one really typical story which I myself vividly remember:
It was on a railway, a short time after a control of personal papers,
quite perfunctory to my great luck, was carried out by some German
soldiers. The people in the crowded railway truck naturally began
to converse about the sufferings caused by the occupation and their
hopes of eventual freedom and independence for Poland, when one
person suddenly exclaimed: “I am as great a patriot as any
of you, and I am ready to shed my blood for Poland, but after we
have our independence I also want to donate money in order to put
a golden statue of Hitler in Warsaw for freeing us of Jews.”
There was a short silence and another person exclaimed and I am
translating him literally as his words are branded in my memory:
"Fear God, Sir! They are human beings too!' There was
then a total, rather long silence, and then slowly people began
to converse about other subjects.
I had, by the way, many occasions to think about this and similar
occasions, when I heard completely similar statements made by the
Israeli Jews in the summer of 1982, when again a minority (but a
greater one I am sure than in the conquered Poland of 1943) expressed
delight in every report of the death of the Palestinians and Lebanese.
A more typical reaction of the majority of the Poles could be illustrated
by a completely casual conversation which I overheard quite by chance:
A group of workers were eating and conversing about the lack of
food and of money, and one of them observed that those who blackmail
Jews "make a lot of money. Will you do it?'' he added, turning
idly to another. "No" came the answer. "Why?"
"Because I will not be able to look on my own face in the mirror,"
and then they continued to eat.
This may be and really is a very illogical answer but it is more
true to the real pattern of behavior of the majority of human beings
than anything Lanzmann “compelled” his Polish witness
to say. It was not a “Polish” answer, it was for both
the bad and the good which was in it, a human answer. We
should try to be better than this average, we should try to belong
to this better minority which among the Poles admitted loudly, in
deeds too. its adhesion to the principles of humanity logically
expressed and done, but not at the price of ignoring the actual
behavior of the majority of human beings.
All those serious faults and dangerous mistakes committed by Lanzmann
and Hilberg, and to some extent by Garton Ash too, proceed from
the dogma of the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust; from
the assumption, utterly false in my opinion, that the extermination
of the Jews by the Nazis should also not be connected to other phenomena.
Let us take as our first example Hilberg's “logical progression”
of the causes of the Holocaust “because from the earliest
days... the missionaries of Christianity had said in effect to the
Jews “You may not live amongst us as Jews.”
Now this in itself is simply nonsense in two ways. First, although
Christian churches insisted on serious limitations of the rights
of Jews, on their humiliation and degradation, Jews were allowed
to live in Christian countries with a rather full protection of
their own religion and their right as Jews not be Christians, more
than any other non-Christian or heretical group. In the Middle Ages
and long afterward, the sole non-Christian group in non-Christian
countries was Jewish. Pagans, witches, heretics (and other groups
as well) were exterminated or persecuted with much greater ferocity
than the Jews. Saint Louis of France burned, after a long legal
process, the Talmud, and severely limited Jewish privileges, but
in comparison to the thousands of heretics, especially the Albigenses,
burned alive, and countless others imprisoned and persecuted, his
treatment of the Jews was relatively mild, and of course this difference
was with full approval of the Church in both cases.
But if not only the wishes, but the actual prohibition of the “others”
living inside a particular group can be the most important reason
for a Holocaust, for a mass extermination, then I must propound
a dilemma to Lanzmann and Hilberg: As I write, one of the two chief
rabbis of Israel, Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu, issued a ruling according
to which Jews in the Land of Israel are prohibited to sell or to
rent any real property, including flats, to non-Jews. This came
after many similar, or even worse, official pronouncements by local
rabbis, without, so far as I know, a single living Orthodox rabbi
expressing the slightest disagreement with this racist ruling, which
means that according to Orthodox Judaism the non Jews in the Jewish
State should not only be discriminated against and put into ghettos,
but denied, literally, the opportunity to live in Israel.This pronouncement,
which I quote because it is so recent, came after many others made
during the last ten years, in which many Israeli Orthodox rabbis
declared that non Jews (or sometimes only “idolaters”
meaning Christians as opposed to Muslims) should not be allowed
to dwell in the Land of Israel according to Orthodox Judaism.
Moreover this could be called the true opinion of the historical
Judaism, since before the beginning of the influence of the Enlightenment
on Jews at the end of the eighteenth century, all Jews were Orthodox.
Therefore if one accepts the thesis of Hilberg and Lanzmann, all
non Jews in the state of Israel would be serious danger of being
denied a place to live, and the Jews, especially the religious ones,
could be suspected of either helping with such a project when they
will be able to do so, or of rejoicing in it because of their Judaism,
and of course Hilberg and Lanzmann should say as much. If not, then
although we have here a piece of racism, of an apartheid of South
African proportions which we should oppose, still we should make
a distinction both in the case of Judaism and of Christianity, between
the worst sort of racism, which does not include mass denial of
a place to live, and mass expulsion itself.
The sophistic tricks of putting statements in the mouth of groups
(“the missionaries of Christianity”) which never made
them also ignore the facts about whom the Nazis exterminated. The
first large scale Nazi attempted extermination of a group of completely
innocent people was the well known murder of the Germans who were
disabled or insane. How in a discussion of what Nazism is can one
ignore it? Especially how can one ignore it when putting the historical
blame for what the Nazis did on Christianity? Whatever was the Christian
attitude to Jews or to heretics, it is quite clear even without
invoking the example of St. Francis of Assisi, that Christian attitude
to the disabled, the weak, the ill, and the miserable is most praiseworthy
in principle, and that nothing can be imagined which is further
removed from Christian principles (no matter if they have not been
always or even often realized) than the purposeful extermination
of people because they are ill or weak. That the extermination of
the insane or the disabled Germans was stopped by the Nazis after
a strong Christian opposition revealed itself in practice (particularly
by the Catholics) does not affect this argument. (It is relevant
to another important argument of what could or could not be done
to stop the extermination of the Jews.)
It is relevant to add in this context that in the cases where a
resolute opposition to the extermination of Jews was manifested,
which could be perceived by the Nazis as being dangerous enough
for them, the Jews were not exterminated although under the Nazi
rule. Such was the case in two widely different countries, Bulgaria
and Finland, and such was the very general case of the Jews who
could prove a citizenship of either neutral or enemy independent
countries. The Nazi intentions of exterminating ultimately both
all the Jews and the German disabled (and of course of many other
groups as well) are not affected in either case.
In fact, if we simply look on the reasons which the Nazis gave,
there is no mystery about the origin of their views: it is the debased
and the vulgar application of “social Darwinism” and
of the “survival of the fittest” as it has developed
in Europe and North America from the late nineteenth century. Such
concepts together with “Lebensraum,” the race theory
especially in its more debased forms, can take hold if applied fanatically
enough under totalitarian conditions in which people are unable
to reply to them. Bolstered by the tenet of an overriding loyalty
to the state and combined with a lot of chauvinism, this way of
thinking is enough to explain everything that the Nazis did (or
intended to do after their victory) to everybody, including to Jews
who of course suffered especially but who were not the only victims.
This dogmatic and total separation from the sufferings of the people,
of which Garton Ash is aware to some extent but not enough, seems
to me the worst fault, almost I would say the spiritual crime of
Lanzmann, which induces almost total moral blindness in him and
even indifference to the fate of human beings who are non-Jews.
One should know that the Nazi aims in Eastern Europe were different
than those in the West. Garton Ash here is not accurate when mentioning
only the Poles. All Slav peoples east of Germany were intended by
the Nazis for an ultimate fate not very much better than the fate
assigned by them to the Jews, while the fate of the French and others
in Western Europe was to be much less bad, because of a measure
of respect and snobbery that the Nazis, including especially Hitler,
had towards them. Instead of unfolded remarks about the nature of
the French and the Poles, I would advice Lanzmann, if he can be
advised, to research the well recorded reactions of Hitler toward
the French (especially on his visit to Paris in 1940 for example)
and towards the Poles. And if he doubts that the minority of French
can wish to exterminate another group, then some reading of the
more extreme Catholic proposals of what to do to Huguenots in the
sixteenth century, together with some few descriptions of what was
done in some cases, would be recommended. Indeed at that time it
was one of the Huguenot arguments that they should be tolerated
in France at least on the same terms as the Pope tolerated Jews
in the Papal States, which then included Avignon, an enclave inside
France itself.
One cannot repeat too often: The extermination of the Jews by the
Nazis, with all its horrors and all the typical human behavior involved
in those horrors, was not unique, and one can only begin to understand
it when one sees that it was not unique in two ways. First, by trying
to see that the majority of human beings really behaved almost all
the time in a perfectly typical human way, we may perhaps be prepared
for other similar horrors which may well come. If we cannot prevent
them maybe the true understanding of what happened will cause some
of us not be merely content with the role of the majority of human
beings (of whatever group) and with them seek only for normality
under most circumstances, but to look higher, and without despising
this majority, to try in the hour of trial to be better, whether
by protesting verbally or by acting to save life. By "reducing'',
so to say, the Holocaust to what happened to Jews only, one encourages
the attitude, whether consciously or not, first of all of indifference
and the wish to disregard what has happened or is happening (or
may happen in the future) to other human beings, to other human
groups.
One of the wisest sayings recorded in the course of human history
is the insistence of Confucius on the need of rectification of the
terms to be used and his warning of the calamities that follow the
use of false terms and misleading descriptions. Of course the Nazi
usage is a good example of this, and in particular their use of
terms like “the Final Solution,” “thinning out,”or
“making clean of Jews” when they meant mass murder.
(By the way, the use of the last two terms with regard to Palestinians
does occur in Israel.) There when we want to understand the Holocaust
we should do two things: First we should look to the other examples
where mass murder of whole group of people was carried out either
wholly or almost so, or for praises, continuing now, of such behavior;
or for a behavior in which although a whole group is not intended
to be exterminated, yet the murder of very many members of it (chosen
by especially inhuman suffering really indistinguishable from the
fate of the Jews under the Nazis).
In this last category the horrors of the African slave trade, particularly
as involving the “Middle Passage” through the Atlantic,
should be regarded by everybody, including the Jews, as being fully
equivalent to the horrors of the Holocaust. If I try to imagine
to myself an African village raided, the able bodied males and females
“selected” (as in Auschwitz) to be kept alive, the children,
the old, and the weak killed, the long march and shipping under
the most degrading conditions, as bad as anything I have seen under
the Nazis, and then the life of slavery, particularly on the plantations
then I must consider rationally and sympathize passionately as a
human being, and also as a Jew who survived the Holocaust, say:
Both were qualitatively such an enormous horror that we must regard
them, and the reactions of human beings to them, as being equal,
for in such altitudes of human suffering we can not differentiate
and remain human. And we must remember, and I do so, that only the
defeat of Hitler saved Poles, Russians, and all other Slav peoples
of Eastern Europe from a similar fate of slavery.
In the same way we should look on examples of the actual extermination
of groups, big or small, which were actually carried out. Of many
examples, which can be found through the recorded part of human
history, I will offer here three: the total extermination of the
Tasmanians in the second quarter of the nineteenth century carried
out by the British settlers with the help of the Australian Aborigines
(whom they brought from Australia to Tasmania for this purpose);
the nearly complete extermination of the Armenians in a great area
of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 - 1917; and the custom prevalent through
the greater part of Chinese recorded history of “wiping out”
whole families and clans of “enemies of the state” including
especially the careful extermination of children. Since under the
mildest conditions this involved the killing of five generations
“only,” that is the murder of all those descended from
the grandfather, the father, the person sentenced, his sons, and
his grandsons, and since the upper class of the Chinese was polygamous,
one can easily make a rough calculation how many people were involved
in one such proscription, of let us say, a sixty year old minister!
But serious thinking about the Holocaust cannot be limited even
by consideration of behavior in the past (and of current attitudes)
to such examples. We should go on and ask direct and really embarrassing
questions about our (or our neighbors') real attitude to mass murder,
to mass extermination of children, to all of what really happened
during the Holocaust; ask such people who while ready enough to
condemn Hitler and the Nazis (they failed after all) really praise,
even now, the same attitude of extermination if commanded by their
God in their Holy Books. For after all, extermination of whole peoples
including children, or “selection” in the Nazi manner,
that is, murder of innocent people or children arbitrarily chosen
on orders of “an authority,” is expressly commanded
in the Old Testament and damnation of the greater part of human
race in “the eternal fire” is predicted in the New (and
in the Koran too).
No significant and really human discussion of the human significance
of the Holocaust of the Jews can, in my opinion, take place if people
more courageous than Lanzmann will also not ask questions of those
Jews who believe in the “essential” holiness and rightness
of such texts as “you shall save alive nothing that breathes”
(Deuteronomy 20:16) or “do not spare them, but kill
both man and woman, infant suckling” (I Samuel 15:3)
or the Nazi like “selection” described as being carried
out in cold blood on women and children by the order of Moses: “Now
therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every
woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls
who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves”
(Numbers 31:17-18)
I could imagine that without going to the neighborhood of Treblinka,
or better still, together with going there, Lanzmann could find
some people in Paris who would, on being asked, really defend all
those atrocities, first because they were supposed to be carried
out by their own group and commanded by their own authority (a supposedly
divine one which really makes matter worse) and second because in
this case the atrocities are supposed to be supported by the success
of survival and their acceptance by so many generations of believers.
Of course such hypothetical behavior needs real courage, such as
I will dare say Lanzmann (and Hilberg) do not possess. To stand
up actively or passively against the open or supposed enemies of
one's own group does not testify to the really superior type of
courage and honesty, for in this case the person, even though he
knows that he is going to die, is being supported emotionally by
the known feelings of solidarity, of the particular group to which
he belongs after all by an accident of birth and upbringing.
The really great form of courage and honesty that could be witnessed
under the conditions of the Holocaust was when a Pole opposed (in
open opinion or in an individual action) the opinion or the silence
of other Poles, when a Jew opposed other Jews, and when Germans
opposed other Germans or against the Nazism in general (like the
“White Rose” group or others).
This is the type of courage which we should learn about and emulate,
without despising, at least without despising too much, the majority
that is not capable of it, both under the conditions of the Holocaust
and of all others, whether similar or lesser ones. In this really
essential, unending, quest Lanzmann failed and Garton Ash does not
understand his failure.
Maybe others will try to do better.
First published in the New York Review of Books, January 29,
1987
Israel Shahak (April 28, 1933 July 2, 2001) was a Holocaust
survivor, a Professor of Chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
the former president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights,
and an outspoken critic of the Israeli government and of Israeli
society in general.
(CX5019)
Related:
Israel Shahak: Brief biography:
Born in Warsaw, Poland, Shahak was the youngest
child of a cultured Polish Jewish family. After Nazi Germany occupied
Poland, his family was forced into Warsaw Ghetto. His brother escaped
and joined the Royal Air Force (only to be shot down), and his father
disappeared. His mother paid a poor Catholic family to hide him,
but when her money ran out he was returned, and in 1943 they were
both sent to Belsen concentration camp. Israel Shahak was liberated
in 1945, and shortly thereafter emigrated to the British Mandate
of Palestine, where he volunteered for a kibbutz, but was turned
down as "too weedy".
After graduating from high school Shahak served in the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) in an elite regiment. After completing service with
the IDF, he attended Hebrew University where he received his doctorate
in chemistry. In 1961, he left Israel for the United States to study
as a postdoctoral student at Stanford University. He returned two
years later to become a teacher and researcher in chemistry at Hebrew
University, where he remained until his retirement in 1990. He published
many scientific papers, mostly on organic fluorine compounds.
After the 1967 Six-Day War Shahak became critical of Israel's treatment
of Palestinians, and a supporter of a Palestinian state. He wrote
a number of works which argue that Israeli law and society contains
entrenched attitudes of Jewish supremacism.
Shahak died in Israel at the age of 68 due to complications from
diabetes. In his obituary in The Guardian
Elfi Pallis described him as "an old-fashioned liberal".
Remembering
Israel Shahak (Alexander Cockburn)
Beyond
Judgement (Primo Levi)
The
Middle East: Resources for peace, justice, and human rights
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