Legends of Our Time
Future historians will find plenty of gaps in the Eichmann trial: the research will have to go on. Contrary to what we had every right to expect, the brief of particulars kept within the narrow concerns of the accused, of him who was actually standing trial. The role played in the annihilation program by all humanity—Nazified or otherwise—was brought up only in passing.
Yet, we all know that the Germans could never have succeeded in solving the Jewish Question with such speed and efficiency if it had not been for the help and tacit consent of the Ukrainians, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians. The Slovaks paid for every person the Germans took out of their country; the Hungarians put pressure on Eichmann—who was by no means lacking in enthusiasm himself—to speed up the transports; the Letts and Ukrainians in their cruelty surpassed the Germans themselves; and as for the Poles, it was not by accident that the worst concentration camps were set up in Poland, worse than anywhere else.
But it is a well-established fact that wherever the local population was opposed to the deportation of their Jewish fellow citizens, the “yield” was poor—unsatisfactory to the Nazis. Eichmann himself emphasized this point in the confessions he made to the journalist Wilhelm Sassen, at Buenos Aires. In Denmark, almost the total Jewish population was saved. And because the Nazis could not get wide support for their anti-Jewish measures from the people of France, Belgium, or Holland, Eichmann’s henchmen did not do very well in those countries either—to the bitter disgust of the authorities at Berlin, it is known. Only where the indigenous populations were themselves eager to become Judenrein did the cattle trains with their suffocating human cargo roll swiftly into the night. This very important fact was hardly touched on at the Jerusalem trial.
Nor did the indictment at Jerusalem dwell much on the failure of the whole outside world, which looked on in a kind of paralysis and passively allowed whatever was being done to be done. The number—six million Jews murdered—could never have been reached if the voices of Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Pope had been more distinctly heard. If the Germans took the precautions they did to cover up their bloody deeds, it was because they were not indifferent to world opinion. In the confessions at Buenos Aires which I cited above, Eichmann notes—with amusement—that even if, through Joel Brand, he had managed to put up a million Jews for sale, there was not a single country which would have bought them. The indifference of our civilized world allowed the Germans a free hand: go ahead, do what seems best to you with your Jews, we see nothing.
By 1942, Washington, London, and, yes, Jerusalem, too, were aware of what was going on, and Hitler and Goebbels on their side were expecting an avalanche of angry protestations. When none came, they understood: they had been given a free hand by the Western powers.
In the Jerusalem courtroom, correspondence between Chaim Weizmann and the British Foreign Office was offered in evidence: it spoke of a simple, touching favor that Weizmann had asked for: would His Majesty’s government give the order to the Royal Air Force to bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz? The answer was no. It is known that a similar request was addressed to President Roosevelt by one of the American Jewish leaders who had an entrée to the White House. As we also know, Roosevelt did nothing about it.
Is it not strange—let us use only that word—that the civilized world waited until it was too late before expressing its moral indignation, waited until there were scarcely any Jews left to be saved?
And finally, in order to keep inviolate the historical truth, the prosecutor should have removed the last taboo: to reveal the sorry but nonetheless ineluctable fact that the Jews themselves failed to do everything they should have done: they ought to have done more, they could have done better. The American Jewish community never made adequate use of its political and financial powers; certainly it did not move heaven and earth, as it should have. We know the reasons and the justifications: they are not good enough. There can be no justification, nor any explanation for passivity when an effort had to be made to save five to ten thousand Jews from murder each day. Just how many meetings were there at Madison Square Garden, and how many demonstrations in front of the White House? To think of how few makes one’s blood run cold.
In Palestine, the situation was hardly different. In Palestine, heart and conscience of the Jewish people, the means had not yet been found as late as the end of 1944 to give warning, or help if necessary, to the dense centers of Europe’s Jewish populations, over which death already hovered. By the time the few parachutists had landed in Budapest (with what results we learned from the Kastner trial) there was nothing they could do: half of Europe had been emptied of Jews. Why had agents not been sent over from Palestine sooner, with or without parachutists’ uniforms? Yes, we know that there was the war in Palestine, but the young men of Palmach would gladly have volunteered to go. Ten, maybe only five, out of a hundred volunteers might have reached their destination in Europe; even those ten or five could have organized resistance, escape, rescues.
One of the war’s most unforgivable incidents occurred when the Hungarian Jews from Transylvania were deported to Auschwitz. Their mass deportation took place in May–June of 1944, just a few days before the landing at Normandy. Arriving at the Auschwitz station, they still had no idea of what lay in wait for them; they were ignorant of the very name of the place, they had not heard of the horrors it concealed from them. Had they known, they could have made a dash for it, been saved. Not all, maybe, but the great majority. Mountains surrounded the area, and the Jews might have fled into these mountains and hidden out for a while. The Red Army had advanced to within eighteen to twenty miles from Auschwitz, and at night the rumbling of their guns could be distinctly heard. It was only a matter of a few days before the liberators would appear. But these pious Jews of Transylvania were told that they had nothing to fear, that they were only being transferred further inland—were told and believed, for there was no one to tell them anything else.
This took place, I repeat, in the spring of 1944, by the time every child in Brooklyn, in Whitechapel, and in Tel Aviv knew that Treblinka and Birkenau were something other than the names of provincial little railway stations.
And yet to Joel Brand’s urgent solicitation for an interview so that he might make known his doubly tragic mission, Chaim Weizmann replied, through his secretary, that he was at the moment too busy to see Brand, that he would be able to receive him in a couple of weeks. Brand had made it clear, in his letter to Weizmann, that every hour counted; every passing day meant the lives of at least ten thousand Jews. How did Brand not go stark raving mad? That in itself remains, for me, one of the great enigmas—the enigma of man’s will to survive his damnation.
The terrible fact is that Weizmann’s response reflected an attitude widespread among the Jews of Palestine. An attitude, I dare to say, of an inconceivable detachment. People in Palestine behaved as if what was happening over there did not concern them too much. In his memoirs, Yitzchak Grunebaum, who was at one time head of a Rescue Commission, tells how the question came up again and again among his colleagues of whether they had the right, in order to try to save European Jews, to use money earmarked for the building up of Palestine. Grunebaum himself thought absolutely not: first came the Land of Israel, then the Diaspora. The Yishuv’s houses, factories, schools, must take priority.
One afternoon during the trial of Eichmann, a young Israeli poet, Haim Gouri, left the courthouse on an impulse. He went to the archives to look through the old Tel Aviv newspapers of 1943-1944. He came back shocked. “I don’t understand,” he said to me. “If you knew the things that were bothering us here, while that was going on in Europe.… Front page headlines: Municipal elections at Hedera—or some other place.… And stuck away in a corner of an inside page, an item of a couple of lines: The Germans have begun the extermination of the Jews in the Ghetto of Lublin, or Lodz.…”
It was of course not the people’s fault, but the fault of their leaders who evinced a surprising lack of initiative, of political maturity, and of cou
rage. Nahum Goldmann acknowledged as much not long ago during a meeting in Geneva of the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress. The major Jewish organizations seemed incapable of surmounting their internal bickerings in order to achieve unity of action. The Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People during the entire time it existed was boycotted by U.S. Jewish leaders. But if these leaders had their good reasons for not wishing to collaborate with this one or that one on the outside—and I daresay they did have their good reasons—why didn’t they set up their own Committee of Rescue, one which could represent all the organizations? This they did not do.
Therefore, it seems to me, for the trial to have been conducted on its right moral plane—the plane of absolute truth—the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner (or Ben Gurion himself as witness), should have bowed his head and cried out in a voice loud enough to be heard by three generations: Before judging others, let us look into our own errors, our own weaknesses. We never attempted the impossible—we never even exhausted the possible.
It might be said that with the advent of the Nazi regime in Germany, humanity became witness to what Martin Buber would call an eclipse of God. As if from a mighty curse, strong men and weak men, cowards and those who had been wont to see clearly, were to find themselves guilty in an association with Evil, if from no other cause than that they were living inside the same moment in history. All actions became sullied. Generous spirits fell asleep, distinguished sensibilities were dulled, powerful voices were silenced. The general apathy created the climate in which the criminals on all sides could proceed quietly and efficiently, without disturbance of any kind, and without affected shame.
When the German surrender came, the civilized world uttered a great cry of horror but still shrank from coming to any closer grips with the problem. It wasn’t I: this was the popular refrain, and especially in what had been the Third Reich. Elsewhere, people were content to shed a tear, and declare, “We had nothing to do with it.”
To be sure, Karl Jaspers set himself the task of investigating the “German guilt,” but with the specific intention of thereby demonstrating the universal guilt. As a result, his investigation succeeded in allaying many fears in occupied Germany, in reassuring many uneasy minds. Did this not show, on the part of the German philosopher, a flagrant lack of humility? The non-Nazi world had to be allotted its share of the guilt—but this should have been the task and the duty of the intellectuals of New York or of Stockholm. The world, indeed, had more than a few lessons to learn—but not from a German professor.
In Western Europe, the reaction was to be found mainly in works of literature. Sartre, Camus, Gabriel Marcel, going to Malraux for their theme, stressed action and commitment: everything which happens around us, they proclaimed, involves us directly and necessarily. Yet, in these writings, the question was still not probed deeply enough. The hero of the modern novel, absorbed in expressing his protest, overlooks the nuances. A man was good or bad, a resister or a collaborator, or indifferent. The lines were drawn, the camps strictly defined. Whoever had blown up a train could sleep the sleep of the just, or of the proud, or of the happy. The others were, in this degree or that, vile, salaud. The sense of guilt played very little part in the determination of the European youth to build a new future out of the ruins around them. The arts—with the exception of painting—seemed to have hardly any interior connection with the terrible events which should have furnished their inspiration. No new philosophy was engendered, nor any new religion: the earth had trembled and men had stayed the same.
It is reported that André Gide once told an anti-Semitic story. And when one of his disciples, blushing, reproached him: “You, too, Master?”—Gide started to cry. “I did not know that I was,” he said. That was before the war. Afterward, Gide did not cry. He had given up being witty at the expense of the Jews, so he no longer needed to feel guilty.
It is by a strange irony of fate that the only ones who were, who still are, fully conscious of their share of responsibility for the dead are those who were saved, the ghosts who returned from the dead. They do not feel this through any concept of original sin; they are Jews, they do not believe in original sin. The idea that rules them is more immediate, more agonizing, a part of their very being.
Why did you not revolt? Why did you not resist? You were a thousand against ten, against one. Why did you let yourselves, like cattle, be led to the slaughter?
Well-known psychiatrists have attempted to give some explanation in their books dealing with the psychology of the concentration camp. The mystery of the victim’s acceptance occupies them as much as the question of the executioner’s cruelty. But to attribute that acceptance—as they do—to the disintegration of the personality, or to the rising up of the “death wish,” or to something in Jewish tradition, can only be a partial explanation. The metaphysical why is still lacking. Nor is any account taken of the kind of guilt which had been implanted in the prisoners.
The feeling of guilt was, to begin with, essentially a religious feeling. If I am here, it is because God is punishing me; I have sinned, and I am expiating my sins. I have deserved this punishment that I am suffering. The revolt against God comes later—it is the final stage. First, the prisoner sacrifices his own freedom for God’s. He prefers to believe himself guilty rather than think that his God is the God of Job, for whom man is a mere example—a means of demonstrating a thesis in a verbal duel with Satan.
As each passing day took him further and further away from his freedom, the prisoner’s sense of guilt sharpened, pressed closer on his conscience. He was, in fact, only following a line of reaction which had been drawn for him by his jailers who, in the ghettos and in the camps, had known precisely—shrewdly—how to push to its extreme limit the emotion of shame and humiliation which he who is still alive normally experiences toward the dead.
I am alive, therefore I am guilty. If I am still here, it is because a friend, a comrade, a stranger, died in my place. Within a closed world, this certitude has a destructive power whose effects are easy to imagine. If to live means to accept or engender injustice, to die quickly becomes a promise and a deliverance.
The system of Lebensschein in the ghettos and of Selekzion in the camps not only periodically decimated the populations, but also worked on each prisoner to say to himself: “That could have been me, I am the cause, perhaps the condition, of someone else’s death.”
In this way the Lebensschein came to stand for a moral torture … a prison without exits. One of the witnesses at the trial was a man who had been a doctor in Vilna, and his testimony was terribly moving. Recently married, he had succeeded in obtaining a “living permit” and was working in a German factory. He was told he could save one close relative, and he went to his mother to ask her: “What shall I do? Whom shall I save? You—or my wife?” A man forced to make such a choice, to become a concrete instrument of destiny, thereafter lives in a suffocating circle of hell; and whenever his thoughts turn to himself, it is in anger and in disgust. If André Schwarz-Bart’s hero, Ernie Levy, finally decided to take the train for Auschwitz, it was neither out of love, nor out of pity, but from the conviction that humanity had come to such a pass of evil that no one could continue to live who wished to remain just.
Reduced to a mere number, the man in the concentration camp at the same time lost his identity and his individual destiny. He came to realize that his presence in the camp was due solely to the fact that he was part of a forgotten and condemned collectivity. It is not written: I shall live or die, but: someone—today—will vanish, or will continue to suffer; and from the point of view of the collective, it makes no difference whether that someone is I or another. Only the number, only the quota counts. Thus, the one who had been spared, above all during the selections, could not repress his first spontaneous reflex of joy. A moment, a week, or an eternity later, this joy weighted with fear and anxiety will turn into guilt. I am happy to have escaped death becomes equivalent to admitting: I am glad that someone else wen
t in my place. It was in order not to think about this that the prisoners so very quickly managed to forget their comrades or their relatives: those who had been selected. They forgot them quickly—trying to shut their eyes to the reproachful glances which still floated in the air around them.
Why did the Jews in the camps not choose a death with honor, knife in hand and hate on their lips? It is understandable that all of us should wonder why. Putting aside the technical and psychological reasons which made any attempt at revolt impossible (the Jews knew that they had been sacrificed, forgotten, crossed off by humanity), to answer we must consider the moral aspects of the question. The Jews, conscious of the curse weighing them down, came to believe that they were neither worthy nor capable of an act of honor. To die struggling would have meant a betrayal of those who had gone to their death submissive and silent. The only way was to follow in their footsteps, die their kind of death—only then could the living make their peace with those who had already gone.
There comes to mind another case, also presented before the court at Jerusalem: the case of the woman who, naked and wounded, had managed to escape from the ditch, the mass grave in which all the Jews of her town were mowed down by German machine-guns. That woman returned to the ditch after a little while to rejoin the phantasmagoric community of corpses. Miraculously saved, she still could not accept a life which in her eyes had become impure.
It is not known yet what the psychiatrists uncovered who examined Adolf Eichmann at great length, before and after his trial. Surely Eichmann’s victims—those who are alive, that is—ought to be examined. Only, these ghosts maintain against us an oppressive silence which they brought back with them from over there. They refuse to open up. One thing that is not known is that they are afraid of their own voices. Their tragedy is the tragedy of Job before his submission: they believe themselves to be guilty, though they are not. Only a Great Judge would have it in his power to rid them of this burden. But in their eyes no one possesses either such authority or such power: no one, either human or divine.