Shoah 2005

As happens to me every year, I was again deeply disturbed by the memorial ceremonies to the Shoah. Perhaps even more so than in other years – I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was that I was at home this week and watched a lot of television, Whatever I watched soaked me anew in awareness of the terrible tragedy Jews endured 60 odd years ago when the Nazis created a new definition of what it means to be human.

As I think Ellie Wiesel, says one can’t even say these people were less than human… animals. For animals do not have the capacity to stoop so low. No, the final solution for the Jews, was the creation of the human intellect. In fact, the intellect of the most brilliant minds and of the most cultured people in all of Europe.

One of the ‘stories’ I saw recreated, was the infamous Wannsee conference. Have you seen the film – Conspiracy —? For 90 minutes, we are ‘treated’ to a dramatization of the meeting at which an elite committee of the German Reich discussed their solution to the Jewish problem. The dialogue is based directly on a transcript of the meeting discovered after the war.

The German problem was what to do with their Jews. There seems to have been 4million Jews in Europe at the time – only 337,000 in Germany itself! Some 500,000 Jews had already been deported from Europe. There were 5 million in the Soviet Union, 11 million in all the territories the Germans envisaged conquering. So they had to confront the problem of what to do with all these Jews.

They had tried to export them but nobody wanted them. The Americans had closed their doors, England only agreed to take in several thousand children … but the Germans wanted a Judenfrei (Jew-free) Europe. Judenrein.

So they sit down at a large oval table to work out the logistics of different kinds of solutions, inventing their own vocabulary to make it easier for them to deal with what they had to deal with, in good conscience. In the entire protocol, the word extermination is not used. However, there is a discussion about language and an agreement, that “evacuation” would be the best way to refer to the final solution.

What could be more harmless than talking about the evacuation of Jews. The fact that these people were to be evacuated to concentration or labor camps - for the sole purpose of exterminating them, was accepted but not spoken about.

I was horribly fascinated by the discussion. Among the participants, not one stood up and objected as a matter of conscience. The problems that plagued these highly intelligent humans were two-fold – the legality of the measures (according to the Nurenberg protocols) and the logistics of ‘evacuating’ so many Jews. How? Where? And what would they do with the bodies?

Well, we all know what was decided and what was accomplished. Using their barbaric extermination camps, they evacuated 6 million Jews (and a million or more others like gypsies, homosexuals etc.) The Germans gassed them and burned their bodies in incinerators that operated 24 hours a day.

And the Allies pretended they did not know what was going on. Hundreds of thousands, if not more, could have been saved if the Allies had dropped a few bombs on the incinerators and gas chambers.

There’s so much that is disturbing about this picture. I have so many questions.
If the Germans were ‘forced’ to develop this solution because the rest of the world (i.e. America) refused to allow the Jews in – then one has a new awareness of American culpability.
If the sense of morality is what distinguishes man as a species – what kind of distortion accounts for the total lack of morality that allowed a philosophy such as Nazism to take root in the most cultured and civilized of all societies? For, even if the common Germans–as they claimed–did not know about the extermination camps… where were they when they burned Jewish books, literature, treasures… on Kristallnacht? Where were they when the Germans marched into the buildings they were living in and brutalized their Jewish neighbors? Where were they when Jewish children were expelled from their schools? When Jewish shops were boycotted and Jews beaten in the streets? These were, after all, the stepping stones to dehumanizing themselves and the Jewish people to the level where they could commit the atrocities they did and still consider themselves guiltless.

In Israel, between Pesach and Yom Ha’atzma’ut, we experience days of darkness. Of soul searching… and mourning. Thursday was Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Day. For 24 hours, all the programs on TV dealt with the Shoah. There were interviews with survivors, documentaries dealing with history… heroes … stories about rare righteous gentiles. There were dramatized stories of suffering and heroism.

On the morning of the Day of the Shoah, we stood to attention as we do every year, when a 2-minute siren pierces the atmosphere with an eerie scream. In the evening, there was a ceremony at Yad Vashem. Since this was the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, there were special commemorations. Notably, a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, by some 21,000 people from all over the world. (I believe the majority were from Israel.)

I watched the ceremony, which was very moving.

One of the things that struck me as I watched, was how Israeli the ceremony was. I flicked through the channels to CNN, Fox, BBC and Sky – none of them were showing the ceremony at all. I wonder – did you see it? Many of the officiating personages were Israeli: Sharon gave a speech, and President Katsav too. Then there was the President of Poland… and Elie Weisel (Wonderful speech – so moving!) And I wondered… who else was watching? Sure the 21,000 people who participated in the March of the Living. And Israelis who still care about these things.

But where was the rest of the Jewish community? How did they (you) remember the Holocaust? Where were the 6 million Jews of America, who today share center-stage in Jewish life with Israelis, and who many (for instance, author Philip Roth) regard as more fundamentally Jewish than we are? (I would certainly take issue with this.)

And if you… and this vast pool of Jewish life and thought, especially including the youth of our communities… were going on with your business… not watching, not thinking about what happened … not aware or even interested … not wanting to be reminded of this terrible stain on our history… then there must be a great cultural and spiritual divide between us.

If it is only in Israel that the Shoah still plays a meaningful living role in the Jewish psyche --- how different must be the prism through which you and we experience our Jewishness.

I wonder what you are thinking as you read this. Are you telling yourself that it’s time to get over it, to stop wallowing in our martyrdom? Are you saying to yourself that it happened 60 years ago and those were different times and couldn’t happen again? Are you saying, as we Israelis like to do, that this is the purpose of the Jewish State, and as long as we have Israel, we will not let it happen again?

Oh, how we delude ourselves! Anti-Semitism has never died. There are as many reasons to hate the Jews as can be manufactured by the human heart. And we have seen time and again, brutality and genocide are still all too possible. All you have to do is dehumanize your victims, in order to find a way to become a brutal murderer and feel good about it.

Today they desecrate a Jewish cemetery. Tomorrow they burn Jewish books. Next they bring out their famous Protocols of Zion (you want to know evil – look to the Protocols of Wannsee!). Last week in Britain, academics voted to boycott Israeli academics and universities because of alleged human rights infringements.

Why do we still have to answer to these immoral judgments… the deniers of the holocaust… the Jew haters. We are even called upon to justify our right to be in Israel…

Am I paranoid to be as worried as I am? Why am I unable to tell myself, 'It can never happen'? Why am I not comforted by the thought that the Jewish state has solved the Jewish problem?