Tag Archives: Holocaust

Meet Oskar Schindler

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

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“In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and — in the lapel of the dinner jacket — a large ornamental gold-on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine. ‘Watch the pavement, Herr Schindler,’ said the chauffeur. ‘It’s as icy as a widow’s heart.’ In observing this small winter scene, we are on safe ground. The tall young man would to the end of his days wear doublebreasted suits, would — being something of an engineer — always be gratified by large dazzling vehicles, would — though a German and at this point in history a German of some influence — always be the sort of man with whom a Polish chauffeur could safely crack a lame, comradely joke.

But it will not be possible to see the whole story under such easy character headings. For this is the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms… Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.

‘Virtue’ in fact is such a dangerous word that we have to rush to explain; Herr Oskar Schindler, risking his glimmering shoes on the icy pavement in this old and elegant quarter of Cracow, was not a virtuous young man in the customary sense. In this city he kept house with his German mistress and maintained a long affair with his Polish secretary. His wife, Emilie, chose to live most of the time at home in Moravia, though she sometimes came to Poland to visit him. There’s this to be said for him: that to all his women he was a well-mannered and generous lover. But under the normal interpretation of ‘virtue,’ that’s no excuse.

Likewise, he was a drinker. Some of the time he drank for the pure glow of it, at other times with associates, bureaucrats, SS men for more palpable results. Like few others, he was capable of staying canny while drinking, of keeping his head. That again, though — under the narrow interpretation of morality — has never been an excuse for carousing. And although Herr Schindler’s merit is well documented, it is a feature of his ambiguity that he worked within or, at least, on the strength of a corrupt and savage scheme, one that filled Europe with camps of varying but consistent inhumanity and created a submerged, unspoken-of nation of prisoners.”

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Excerpted from the intro to Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark (later retitled to Schindler’s List). When asked, years later, why he’d acted the way he did during the holocaust, Schindler apparently replied, “I could never abuse something with a human face.”

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Not Praying in Auschwitz

16 Thursday Apr 2015

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Primo Levi

“Like Amery, I too entered the lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience in the lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my non-belief. It prevented, and still prevents me from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice: Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were the children sent to the gas?

I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death: when, naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go to the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working.

For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, not when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected that temptation: I knew that otherwise, were I to survive, I would have been ashamed of it.”

__________

From Primo Levi, succumbing to a null theodicy in his last book The Drowned and the Saved.

A few months after his liberation and return home to Turin, the twenty-six-year-old Levi wrote a poem titled “February 25, 1944,” the day he first walked through the iron gates marked Arbeit macht frei:

I would like to believe in something,
Something beyond the death that undid you.
I would like to describe the intensity
With which, already overwhelmed,
We longed in those day to be able
To walk together once again
Free beneath the sun.

The crux of the poem is, to me, that wrenching last word of the third line. In Italian, however, overwhelmed reads like “to be submerged” or “to be drowned” (essere sommersi). Free is more like “to be saved” (essere salivate). Hence the book’s title.

Where Was Man?

17 Monday Nov 2014

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William Styron 324

“Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie’s life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: ‘At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?’

And the answer: ‘Where was man?’”

__________

From the epilogue of Sophie’s Choice by William Styron.

The Dignity of Every Life: Viktor Frankl’s Powerful Speech to a Concentration Camp

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in History, Speeches

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Viktor Frankl

In the middle of Viktor Frankl’s tour de force chronicle of his survival of the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, there is a particular moment when existence at Dachau goes from dark to pitch black. It is the winter of 1944, several months after the D-Day invasions and thus the point in which Hitler’s Third Reich, sensing the writing on the wall, ratchets up the noxious gears of its Final Solution. The markers of this period are evoked by arresting phrases like Robert Jay Lifton’s “wild euthanasia” and Nicholson Baker’s “human smoke,” and can be seen crystalized in Schindler’s List, when an initially puzzled Liam Neeson sees ash fall from a clear sky as he wanders amidst children playing in a bourgeoisie town square.

For Frankl and his work group, these portents are worsened by the fact that they are being incrementally starved after refusing to identify a fellow prisoner suspected of stealing potatoes from a camp store house. Several days into this deprivation, the men have gone from emaciated to skeletal, as have their hopes for survival. As they lie on their dark bunks one evening, Frankl, only thirty-nine years old and one of the most respected men in the group, is asked by the barracks leader to give a speech.

The following is Frankl’s recollection of his words. It is one of the most beautiful and life-affirming speeches I’ve read, and one of several scenes I would have most wanted and hated to witness in the entire human drama of World War Two. Without fantasy or sentimentality, Frankl testifies to the force of life amidst terror and reaffirms the innate dignity of each human being in the face of whatever degradations he has suffered. I highly recommend a few moments of reading and reflection. The passage starts just as Frankl is called from his bunk:

__________

Concentration Camp

“God knows, I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons — to offer my comrades a kind of medical care of their souls. I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever.

So I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of. I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society — all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future…

Then I spoke about the future. I said that to the impartial the future must seem hopeless. I agreed that each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival. I told them that although there was still no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about one in twenty. But I also told them that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour. Even if we could not expect any sensational military events in the next few days, who knew better than we, with our experience of camps, how great chances sometimes opened up, quite suddenly, at least for the individual. For instance, one might be attached unexpectedly to a special group with exceptionally good working conditions—for this was the kind of thing which constituted the ‘luck’ of the prisoner.

But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. Again I quoted a poet — to avoid sounding like a preacher myself — who had written, ‘Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.’ (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades (who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours — a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God — and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly — not miserably — knowing how to die.

And finally I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case. It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning. Those of us who had any religious faith, I said frankly, could understand without difficulty. I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that.

The purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life, then and there, in that hut and in that practically hopeless situation. I saw that my efforts had been successful. When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends limping toward me to thank me with tears in their eyes. But I have to confess here that only too rarely had I the inner strength to make contact with my companions in suffering and that I must have missed many opportunities for doing so.”

_____

From Viktor Frankl’s psychological chronicle of the Holocasust Man’s Search for Meaning.

Related reading:

  • Cornel West’s testimony: “… Every person has a sanctity. Not just a dignity the way the Stoics talked about, but a sanctity: a value that has no price…”
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s moving “Who Am I?” letter from a German prison
  • A section from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel speech, “A World Split Apart”

Viktor Frankl

Hitler’s Laziness

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in History

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Adolf Hitler

“Adolf Hitler – remarkably, in a man whose father was the son of an illegitimate housemaid – had grown up with the middle-class confidence that he need never earn a living…

Had his father, a customs official in various border towns between Austria-Hungary and Germany, lived to see the publication of Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle), he might well have asked, ‘What Struggle?’… Alois, whose early life had marked a real struggle to leave poverty behind, and to acquire respectability and savings through boring government service in customs offices, had urged young Adolf to find paid employment. The boy had preferred to lounge about, to wear dandified clothes, to attend the opera and to imagine that one day he would become a famous artist. Hitler never had any paid employment, so far as one can make out, except when manual work was forced upon him as a temporary necessity when he was living in men’s hostels and dosshouses on the outskirts of Vienna…

Hitler’s indolence was to remain one of his most mysterious characteristics. Many would assume that a man who, in his heyday, strutted about in uniforms, and who presided over a militaristic dictatorship, who expected not merely his intimates but everyone in the country to click their heels and salute at the mere mention of his name, would have been up in the morning early, taking cold baths and performing Swedish exercises. By contrast, like many depressives, he kept strange hours, and spent most of his days on this planet sitting around doing nothing much, dreaming his terrible dreams, and talking interminable nonsense. […]

By the time he became Chancellor, the pattern of life did not markedly change. He rose late, spent most of the day chatting, and would nearly always round off the evening with a film. Adjutants tried to find him a new film to watch every day. His earlier fondness for high culture began to diminish. He enjoyed ‘light entertainment’, and if women, such as his girlfriend Eva Braun, were present in the evenings, political conversation was banned – as was, of course, that cardinal sin, smoking.”

__________

From A.N. Wilson’s three-hour read Hitler.

I’m on a World War Two kick. A few weeks ago, after putting down Martin Gilbert’s indescribable The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, I wanted to move on to something easier to both read and stomach. I like A. N. Wilson’s columns — and I wasn’t going to dive into Ian Kershaw’s two-part, two-thousand-page Hitler: A Biography — so I started on Wilson’s short life of the monster. At fewer than 200 pages, it’s a highly rewarding text, one in which all heavy historiographical lifting and dry research is filtered through Wilson’s very readable prose. I usually hate that descriptor — readable — as it’s so often just a lazy euphemism for what is lazy or facile writing. But Wilson’s work is polished, seamless, and never overworked: it’s readable in the best sense of that bad word. Ivory Tower egotists might still pick at his scholarship — Wilson is a newspaper columnist who doesn’t speak or read German — but this seems to me misplaced. There’s room for an almost infinite number of books on the shelf.

While I was reading Wilson’s book, I occasionally tracked along in Kershaw’s more extensive work, which sheds more light on the immeasurable extent of Hitler’s lethargy. Perhaps the best account of this comes in Kershaw’s account of the night of the D-Day invasion:

That evening, Hitler and his entourage viewed the latest newsreel. The discussion moved to films and the theatre. Eva Braun joined in with pointed criticism of some productions. ‘We sit then around the hearth until two o’clock at night,’ wrote Goebbels, ‘exchange reminiscences, take pleasure in the many fine days and weeks we have had together. The Führer inquires about this and that. All in all, the mood is like the good old times.’ The heavens opened and a thunderstorm broke as Goebbels left the Berghof. It was four hours since the first news had started to trickle in that the invasion would begin that night. Goebbels had been disinclined to believe the tapping into enemy communications. But coming down the Obersalzberg to his quarters in Berchtesgaden, the news was all too plain; ‘the decisive day of the war had begun.’

Hitler went to bed not long after Goebbels had left, probably around 3 a.m. When Speer arrived next morning, seven hours later, Hitler had still not been wakened with the news of the invasion…

According to Speer, Hitler – who had earlier correctly envisaged that the landing would be on the Normandy coast – was still suspicious at the lunchtime military conference that it was a diversionary tactic put across by enemy intelligence. Only then did he agree… to deploy two panzer divisions held in reserve in the Paris area against the beachhead that was rapidly being established some 120 miles away. The delay was crucial. Had they moved by night, the panzer divisions might have made a difference.

Viktor Frankl on How Love Survived the Nazi Death Camps

28 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by in History, Psychology

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Auschwitz

“As we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’

In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoner’s existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered…

A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing — which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance…

Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.'”

Viktor Frankl

__________

From Viktor Frankl’s psychological chronicle of the Holocaust Man’s Search for Meaning.

Frankl was a successful 37-year-old neurologist and therapist on the day he was deported from his home in Vienna to the Nazi ghetto Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Two years later, in October 1944, Frankl and his wife Tilly were transported to Auschwitz, then processed as slave laborers, split up, and sent off — Victor to a worksite bordering Dachau and Tilly to Bergen Belsen in Germany, where she soon died. Frankl would not come to know of her fate until after American soldiers liberated his camp in April, 1945, nor was he aware then that his mother Elsa, father Gabriel, and only brother, Walter, had also met the same fate at Aushwitz and Theresienstadt.

Last week I began flipping through Martin Gilbert’s much acclaimed historical survey The Holocaust. I like to think I have some of what Orwell called “a power of facing” unpleasant facts, and that my stomach is tough enough to digest even gruesome or taboo truths about the world. I’ve never walked out of a movie or play, or had to shelf a book, for the sole reason that it was just too horrifying to handle. Gilbert’s text, however, broke this streak; by the time I had reached about the two-hundredth page – less than a third of the way into this oppressive text – I felt so enervated that I had to put it down. I don’t think I’ll ever read it again.

It is, nevertheless, an excellent book – rigorously sourced, clearly organized – and in my brief reading of it (I didn’t even get to the really bad stuff) I alighted on two discrete lessons about the Holocaust. Number one: the Holocaust is something we cannot discuss without euphemism. To say someone “lived” in a ghetto or “died” in a concentration camp is to wash over essentially every splinter of truth which made up those experiences. If the scenes in Gilbert’s Holocaust are rated NC-17, then Schindler’s List, in all its terror, looks naïvely PG.

Part of the reason for this discrepancy between the reality of the Holocaust and its representation stems from the fact that, by definition, those that got it the worst are not the ones who survived to tell us their stories. Moreover, as the above excerpt from Frankl attests, the lucky few who made it past the Spring of 1945 are a minority who, through some combination of fortune and resilience, came out the other side. This is a highly unrepresentative sample, given that the traits which often carried you through to that fateful spring – cunning, adaptability, inconspicuousness – also would color your witness to the events themselves. Moreover, the luminaries that possessed the fortitude to then write about this trauma are an especially tenacious and incandescently perceptive minority of that minority – a tiny sliver who defended not only their lives, but also their humanity. Just as Solzhenitsyn and Yevgenia Ginzburg are not emblematic of the faceless millions churned through the charnel pit of the Gulag, Victor Frankl (and Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, etc. etc.) are not “average” human beings in any sense of the term. They are the most exceptionally principled and shrewd of an already-exceptional group of survivors.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn gives this graphite-hard instruction for surviving in a prison camp:

So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared? What do you need to do to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?

From the moment you go into prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At its very threshold you must say to yourself, ‘My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die — now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.’ Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble.

Only the man who had renounced everything can win that victory. But how can one turn one’s body to stone?

It’s a brutal reflection from a man who somehow managed to eventually pull his spirit of humanity back through this cold, purposely-mangled interior-of-ice. Frankl took the opposite approach – he accentuated his warmest impulses, though crucially this was only an interior process – yet he speaks about how many survivors took the Solzhenitsyn route. His prescription for surviving a concentration camp: turn to fire or ice inside. Those who went lukewarm were gone in hours.

“What is to give light must endure burning.” – Viktor Frankl, neurologist, psychologist, father of existential psychology, holocaust survivor. Frankl, who survived until 1997, was born this week in 1905 in Vienna, Austria.

Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl and Wife

Viktor Frankl and Wife

Racism, Israel, and a Public Lavatory in Budapest

21 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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z

Charlie Rose: In traveling last week through Hungary and Eastern Europe, what did you discover about anti-Semitism today?

Yair Lapid: That it exists. Listen, in Hungary, there’s Jobbik, which is an Anti-Semitic party – the party that has tried to push a bill mandating a countdown, a limit to how many Jews there are in Hungary. This is in 2013. They have 11% of the seats in the Hungarian parliament.

Yet when you live in America, you don’t feel it too much; especially in New York, which is still the largest Jewish city in the world. But when you are [in Europe] you feel it.

While I was there, I took my son to visit a weird place. I took my son to visit a public lavatory. Why?

Because in February 1945, my father was this thirteen-year-old kid in the Budapest ghetto, and he was living in a basement the size of this stage with 400 other people.

And by February, the Russians were approaching Budapest. So the Nazis along with the Hungarian Fascists started to take the Jews in death convoys to the Danube River. There they ordered the Jews to dig holes in the ice, and then they would shoot them into the Danube. And the Danube was red.

One early morning, they gathered the people from my father’s block. It was a death convoy of about 600 people, and they began to march them towards the Danube. At a certain point along the way, a Russian plane flew low over this convoy, causing turmoil – shouting and screaming. And my grandma was there – my grandfather was already dead in Mauthausen concentration camp – but my grandma was there, and she pushed my father into this little public lavatory and said, ‘You have to pee now.’…

And he did ‘cause he was a good kid, and she closed the door behind them.

And from this convoy of 600 people, 598 were dead under the ice of the Danube River by sundown.

But my father and my grandmother were standing, by themselves, in the middle of the street, next to this little public lavatory, and they were freed – they could go anywhere. The whole world was open to them. Here in America, the Midwest: there were thousands of miles that no one had settled. Or Australia from Melbourne to Perth, which you can fly over, and for five hours you won’t see a single soul.

Soon Paris was liberated and London was free, and yet my father – a thirteen-year-old Jewish kid – had no place to go to.

And many years later, he and I went to Budapest together, and we were walking down the street, when suddenly he stopped and he began to cry. I didn’t understand, because the street was empty and there was only a public lavatory. And he said, ‘This is it. This is where I was reborn. This is where you were born.

And this is the place I realized that I would survive and soon need a place to go.’

And this is why we need the state of Israel. Because we always need a place to go.

Yair Lapid

__________

From Charlie Rose’s October 7th interview with Israeli Minister of Finance Yair Lapid at New York’s famed 92nd St. Y.

In the above photograph: Lapid posing in his home office in Tel Aviv following an Associated Press interview.

Lapid is a fascinating political figure who, in his recent foray into government, stands as a model for what kind of leader a functioning democracy should attract. After a successful career as a writer and television personality, Lapid felt compelled to “put his money where his mouth was” and found his own political party, Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”). This decidedly moderate party, which stands between the left-wing Israeli labor party on the one hand, and Netanyahu’s center-right Likud and Naftali Bennett’s conservative Jewish Home on the other, won 19 seats in the Knesset in the last election and is now the second-largest party (behind Likud) in the Israeli parliament.

Lapid, who maintains close ties with his counterparts on both sides of the ideological spectrum, steered Yesh Atid to partner in the governing coalition. He was then nominated to be the Israeli Minister of Finance, and just last week the Israeli government posted an “enormous budget surplus”.

Lapid’s meteoric rise and sustained popularity among the Israeli people may seem anomalous to us in the United States, where so often public figures (especially those from the entertainment industry) make ill-advised forays into politics, only to look plastic, inept, or overwhelmed when under the hot lights and mics of the media. Yet as you can see illustrated handsomely below, Lapid projects a suave authenticity and acuity that are both rare, reassuring, and compelling.

Survival In Auschwitz

08 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in Biography, History

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Holocaust Survivor Tattoos

“Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”

__________

From Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.

I tried but failed to find a full text of the book to post here. So pick up a copy for yourself. Just don’t start it late at night, because you won’t get to sleep.

While I believe Levi’s unflinching moral outrage and existential cynicism are legitimate, even admirable, I think they should be counterbalanced by Elie Weisel’s somber reflection that, “after Auschwitz, I did not lose faith in God. I lost faith in mankind.” These takes on the Holocaust are divergent ways of grappling with Rabbi Akiva’s paradoxical epigram that “all is foreseen by God, yet free will is given.”

Kristallnacht, the attacks which intensified the rabid persecutions leading to the Final Solution, broke out 75 years ago tomorrow. Something on which we should all spare at least a moment’s reflection in the next few days. The German novelist W. G. Sebald remarked, in a hyperbolic but effective line, that, “no serious person ever thinks about anything else but the Holocaust.”

The above shot is one of my favorite photos, now hanging in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, “Diaspora” by Frederic Brenner.

I Sometimes Think There Are Two Israels

08 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in History, Politics, Religion

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Saul Bellow

“When I was a graduate student in anthropology, it was my immature ambition to investigate bands of Eskimos who were reported to have chosen to starve rather than eat foods that were abundant but under taboo. How much, I asked myself did people yield to culture or to their lifelong preoccupations, and at what point would the animal need to survive break through the restraints of custom and belief? I suspected then that among primitive peoples the objective facts counted for less. But I’m not at all certain now that civilized minds are more flexible and capable of grasping reality, or that they have livelier, more intelligent reactions to the threat of extinction. I grant that as an American I am more subject to illusion than my cousins. But will the Israeli veterans of hardships, massacres, and wars know how to save themselves? Has the experience of crisis taught them what to do? I have read writers on the Holocaust who made the most grave criticisms of European Jewry, arguing that they doomed themselves by their unwillingness to surrender their comfortable ways, their property, their passive habits, their acceptance of bureaucracy, and were led to slaughter unresisting. I do not see the point of scolding the dead. But if history is indeed a nightmare, as Karl Marx and James Joyce said, it is time for the Jews, a historical people, to rouse themselves, to burst from historical sleep. And Israel’s political leaders do not seem to me to be awake. I sometimes think there are two Israels. The real one is territorially insignificant. The other, the mental Israel, is immense, a country inestimably important, playing a major role in the world, as broad as all history – and perhaps as deep as sleep.”

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From To Jerusalem and Back by Saul Bellow.

Bernard-Henri Lévy on Israel, Palestine, and the Competition of Victimhood

27 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by in History, Interview, Politics, War

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Bernard-Henri Lévy

“Bernard-Henri Levy never said: ‘God is dead, but my hair is beautiful.’ Still, he admires the satirist who put the words in his mouth. ‘It’s very clever if you think about it,’ he says with a small smile. ‘It was completely made up and yet it has been repeated endlessly.’

Today the French philosopher’s hair is beautiful and defiant — standing out from his head in leonine waves – and his trademark outfit (a black Charvet suit and white shirt, unbuttoned to the navel) has a Gallic shrug of its own (‘Oui – et alors?’).

Levy has barely slept. ‘I’ve never needed much sleep,’ he says. ‘I prefer to work at night.’

This could be because the 63-year-old writer, intellectual and defender of the world’s oppressed has less noble pursuits during daylight hours. After all, it was the man, not his satirist, who said: ”You can’t make love all day.”

‘Literature and lovemaking demand the same energy,’ he says. ‘And since one cannot make love all day, one must write for some of it.’

Was his childhood difficult? ‘No, no. Easy. Gifted. Blessed. With nearly all that you can desire in life.

When did his consciousness of politics arise? ‘Vietnam War.’

His father? ‘When he was seventeen, he involved himself in the Republican camp of the Spanish Civil War. Then, when he was eighteen, he volunteered for the French Army at the beginning of the anti-Nazi war. Then he came, after the defeat of the Free French…’

On whether he regrets this: ‘No. Number one, it was my father’s business, not mine. Number two, he did not remain so close. He withdrew just after the war. Maybe when I was born, ’48, ’49. But he kept his sensibility all his life; even when he became a wealthy man, he kept this philosophy.’

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Interviewer: What is the state of anti-Semitism today? Is it coming? Going away? Doing both at the same time?

Bernard-Henri Lévy: It’s doing both at the same time. Going away in its old shape. And coming back in its new shape. As always. Anti-Semitism has no fixed pattern; it does not present itself always in the same form. It’s like a virus which changes. What are the workings of its changes, what is its logic is tied, simply, to what is acceptable. It is as if anti-Semitism — without giving it an intelligence, which it doesn’t have — is searching for the precise words or intellectual schemes for allowing itself to be heard, to be supported by the most people. It is as if it were searching for the words which might help it advance, not under the flag of pure evil, but under the flag of an evil aiming sort of in a good direction.

When some Christians were anti-Semitic, they did not just say, ‘We hate Jews.’ They said, ‘We hate Jews because, unfortunately, they committed the great crime, which was to kill Christ.’ When Voltaire was anti-Semitic, he did not say, ‘I hate Jews because there is something in their essence which deserves hate;’ he said, ‘I hate them because they invented Christ.’

And this is the sort of tricky way of assembling a big number of people around the speech of hatred. Barring that, you would have very few anti-Semites. So today, all the old processes of legitimacy are dying, are more or less dead. Not so many Christians really think that I killed Christ. Not so many followers of Voltaire really think I am guilty of having invented Christianity. Fewer and fewer believe in the racist identity of the Jews, of which people like me would be the bearers.

But we are facing the installment of a new scheme, with new arguments, new reasons, new logic, trying to make anti-Semitism again acceptable, relatively, according to the general mood of the times. In the chapter you allude to, I try to identify the words with which anti-Semitism must express itself in order to gather under its flag a reasonable number of people, which is a real danger, of course.

What are some of those ways?

There are three: which are denial of the Holocaust, the competition of victimhood, and the demonization of Israel. If you put the three together, you have the portrait of a people, a community, who are guilty of three crimes. Which is the crime of being crooks, moral crooks, inventing or exaggerating their own martyrdom, doing that in order to overshadow others’ martyrdom, and the whole thing in the interest of an illegitimate and deeply guilty state, which is Israel. If you can put it into the brain of some people that Jews are people who exaggerate their martyrdom, who therefore [minimize] the martyrdom of other people, all this with the sole selfish aim of saving Israel, you give to some people some new motives, arguments, reasons for feeding the old hatred.

We’ve certainly seen at least one leader in the Middle East, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, attempting to deny or voice doubts about the Holocaust. Are you finding denials of the Holocaust in the United States and in Europe?

Of course.

In relatively mainstream places?

Mainstream, no. Fortunately, it’s not mainstream. But you have either denial or minimization or banalization. You have some pseudo-scientific historical studies in California, Paris, and London, which say that the gas chambers didn’t exist. And so, yes, you have that in America. The godfathers of this delirium were French, but the focus of the generalization is probably California today, the biggest source of that.

Is this what Ahmadinejad drew on for his Holocaust deniers conference last year?

Ahmadinejad relied on some of these people. So you have this in America. Competition of victimhood: we are fed up with the Holocaust; please, there are other things to think about. This idea exists in Europe, of course; it is what Palestinians say — what a lot of people in the Arab world say. And you have that in America and in France. If you listen to some of the radical groups, the African-American groups like that of Farrakhan, it is more or less what they say. Competition of victimhood. You have to choose, Jews or Blacks. You cannot support both. You have to choose your victims. You have to choose your cause.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Let me read one quote from your manuscript for Left in Dark Times. You were writing that Jews had nowhere to go during the Holocaust since Nazis wanted to wipe the very trace of them from the earth. You go on to write, on the other hand, that ‘a Cambodian could, theoretically at least, flee Cambodia; a Tutsi could flee Rwanda, and outside Rwanda, at least ideally, would be out of the range of the machetes; the Armenians who managed to escape the forces of the Young Turk government were only rarely chased all the way to Paris, Budapest, Rome, Warsaw.’ Does that not verge on competition of victimhood?

Competition of victimhood means there is limited space in your brain or mine available for sorrow, and therefore if you use it for the Palestinians, there is nothing left for the Jews, if you use it for the Tutsis, there is nothing left for the Cambodians, and so on.

No. Of course not. It verges simply on trying to understand the specificity of historical events. What is the peculiarity of one event, the singularity of another one, what allows the comparison, what is out of the comparison. It’s the task of the intellectual, of the historian. I hate competition of victimhood. But I also hate the idea of a big, huge, and empty concept of suffering, one in which you would put an accident, the Holocaust, the genocide of the Tutsis, a murder across the street, an accident on the road, all in the same bag.

So at some point, we do have to compare degrees of the victims?

You have to compare different things. So the Cambodian genocide is different from the Tutsi genocide, which is different from the Armenian, which is different from the Holocaust.

It’s true that in terms of military resources, the democrats cannot intervene, cannot help all the victims of all the atrocities of the world. This is a truism. It is not competition of victims; it is realism. You cannot—America, France, Germany, Spain, the few democracies in the world—cannot help at the same time the Burmese, the Chinese, Darfuris, and so on. It’s policy. Policy is the art of the possible, what is doable, and so on. Nothing to do with competition of victims.

Competition of victims says something else. Competition of victims relies on the idea that what is scarce is not a scarcity of resources but is the scarcity of the ability of mankind to cry, to sympathize, and to have sorrow. The theory of the competition of victimhood means there is limited space in your brain or mine available for sorrow, and therefore if you use it for the Palestinians, there is nothing left for the Jews, if you use it for the Tutsis, there is nothing left for the Cambodians, and so on.

And this is completely untrue; it is the contrary. The military resource, that—of course—you are probably right. But the capacity for sorrow, the pity capital, these work in a different way. The more you feel sorrow for the Tutsis, the more you will be able to feel for the Jews. The more for this, the more for that. The proof of that is that it is always the same; those who mobilize themselves for Darfur, those who get immediately what is happening in Rwanda, those who see the red light in Burundi, they are always—no exception—those who know exactly what happened with the Holocaust.

I see it in myself. I would probably not have become aware so quickly of what was happening in Bosnia if I didn’t have the memory—and more than the memory: the concern—of what happened in the Holocaust. It’s true. I know that it would have taken me much more time to catch what was going on in Darfur if I’d never had Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Jewish experience in mind. So it is not this or that. It is that because of this. This is why this argument of competition of victims is just untrue and stupid.

This theory of competition of victimhood is running slowly through America, too. And one of the reasons I am so much in favor of Obama is that his tenure might be, will be a real end to this tide of competition of victimhood, and especially on the specific ground of the two communities, Jews and African Americans, who were so close in the 1960s. And some parts of them have felt the need to separate. The Obama election would reconstitute the grand alliance. And this is the duty of our generation.

Do you suppose this is partly why some right wingers have tried to smear Obama’s record on Israel? You told me in January that you asked around in Chicago about Obama, as you did about all the candidates and players in the election.

Absolutely. Of course. Chicago is one of the cities where I feel very comfortable in America. I go there from time to time. I have some friends in the Jewish circles in Chicago. They have no doubt; they know Obama well. They have no doubt about his commitment, his record. And myself, I just do what you have to do as far as a politician is concerned. I listen. I read what he says. I cannot find a single sentence where he goes against Israel. And the more recent declarations should fill us with joy when he says he is a supporter of Israel.

To go from the present (and perhaps future) of the Democratic party to its past: Jimmy Carter is a different story for you. You’ve strongly condemned his recent trips to the Middle East.

Jimmy Carter is precisely this type of person who believes that if you have sorrow for one, you can’t have sorrow for the other…

Are you saying he meets with Palestinians, but not with Israelis?

No, but he belongs to this category of people who believe that you have a capital of sorrow, and to have sorrow for the Palestinians means there is nothing left for Israel. He is guilty of—there is no other name for it—fascism when he says that Hamas…

(His wife comes; she is leaving for the airport. He introduces her, walks her out, and returns shortly.)

Where were we?

Jimmy Carter.

For forty years, I’ve been in favor of the Palestinian state. A sovereign one. I wrote that for the first time in 1969, forty years ago. But, I am able to recognize, and one should be able to see differences among Palestinians (as among any people) between the democrats and the fascists. The problem with Jimmy Carter is that he is unable to do that. When he treats Hamas as responsible people, Hezbollah as respectable people—both as regular interlocutors—he is just blinding himself and trying to blind us to this main difference, without which we are in dark times. Hamas is a fascist party. They rely on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they believe in it, they have it in their chart, they have a cult of martyrdom, they have a religion of the blood, a conception of the race and anti-Semitism, by the way, which are the components of a new form of fascism, a new version, which just by its being Arab does not make it innocent. You can have a French fascism and an American fascism; you can have an Arab fascism.

The problem may be that some Americans hear “Islamo-fascism” for the first time from partisans with a very right-wing agenda. What your book does, what Paul Berman does, and what others have done is to point out that this is a very concrete tie.

It is not a slogan. It’s a concept.

BHenriLevy

It’s a fact, according to your book, according to Berman.

It’s a fact. I gave all the historical evidence on one side, ideological evidence on the other, of this tie. It is not a fatal tie. I don’t believe in eminent guiltiness. I don’t believe that there are blessed people or damned people. No angels and no beasts. You have in Islam, like in France, like in Europe, a battle, a very fierce fight, between those who want equality for women, anti-racism, the triumph of human rights, and those who want the values which have been built and popularized by the fascists. It’s a battle.

When I was a very young man, I was told, You should not criticize the Soviet Union because the French Right does it, too. So what. I’m going to bless the killings of millions of people in concentration camps on the frivolous motive that I have some stupid right-wing Frenchman who agrees with me? He will be forgotten. Bush is the same. Bush is nothing. I take rendezvous with you in two years, and nobody will care about Bush. I take rendezvous, and Bush will be opening his library. You will see, it will be a non-event. So I’m not going to sacrifice, I’m not going to let die, I’m not going to betray all these heroic women, courageous young men who fight for democracy because Bush seems to want to help them also. Maybe he does, by the way. I don’t care. Bush is nothing. He was something. He is nothing now.

Here’s what Carter said, “If you sponsor an election or promote democracy and freedom around the world, then when people make their own decision about their leaders, I think that all the governments should recognize that administration and let them form their government.” He said later that, to show their good faith, no terrorist acts have been claimed by, committed by, or attributed to Hamas since August 2004. He also said careful engagement could help them become peaceful. But, even if you disagree, how do you fix the long-standing problem in the area without engaging Palestine’s elected leaders?

Number one: not committed terrorists acts? What about shelling Sderot? I visited Sderot, which is a city near Gaza, a ghost city, [and it was] shelled and bombed all day long by Hamas. Shells and rockets thrown by Hamas-controlled patrols every day. Number one.

Number two: To be elected is a proof of what? It is not a reason to treat them as reasonable people.

And number three, there are ways to deal with people like Hamas. Ways which weaken them, or ways which reinforce them. You have ways to legitimize them, ways to de-legitimize them. As far as I know, the visit of Carter to the area did not make peace advance one foot. Hamas did not make one step in favor of recognition of Israel first.

President Carter said on Charlie Rose that some high-level officials told him that Hamas would recognize Israel within the 1967 borders.

The fact that Carter said it is not very interesting. I would like Mr. Meshaal, the chief of Hamas, to say that. And which borders? The return to the 1967 borders? Nearly everybody agrees with that. It is more or less the position of Israel.

Carter was not alone in noting how the security wall, which goes outside those borders, outside Israeli borders into Palestine, means that it is not, in fact, the current position of Israel.

Obama said he will speak with enemies of the United States. That’s not a problem. Since war is such a horrible thing, it has to be the very last resort—so, of course, he should speak.

No, no, the wall includes 6, 7, maybe 8%, maximum, of the Palestinian territory. It’s not so far. It’s a negotiation, as far as I know. Israel did not conquer the occupied territories—this is admitted by all historians. Israel was attacked and in the process of defending [themselves], they advanced and occupied the territories. Okay. They said they are ready to give back, let’s say, 90%. It’s a lot, as a basis of negotiation—with people who want your annihilation. It’s a lot. When Germany had Alsace-Lorraine—they said 0% [was what they would] give back. It had to be decided by force. Today, you are a state which was attacked, which—in the process of defending itself occupied a few kilometers… and which is already ready to give back most of it, frankly before negotiating—92, 93, let’s say 90%. Then the negotiation begins. The 92 may become 95%. There can be some exchange of territories, and so on and so on.

One of the things that Obama has been criticized for by his opponents is for his statements that he would sit down with the United States’s “enemies” and do exactly what you warn against above—Carter with Hamas—and perhaps legitimize leaders now considered our enemies. Is this problematic for you?

It’s not quite clear what Obama said on this topic, which is Iran, number one. Number two, going to Tehran, greeting Ahmadinejad, telling him he’s a great man, encouraging him to continue, [this] would be one thing. Going to Tehran, telling Ahmadinejad that he will be out of the [group of] civilized nations if he enriches his uranium, addressing oneself to the civil society of the Persian nation in order to separate them from the regime, [this] would be another thing. I don’t know what Obama will do. Obama said he will speak with enemies of the United States. That’s not a problem. Since war is such a horrible thing, it has to be the very last resort—so, of course, he should speak. But to say what? My feeling is that Obama is not the sort of man who would treat Ahmadinejad as a democrat. I may be wrong. I don’t think so.

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Excerpts from an interview about Israel, Palestine, and Victimhood with the world’s coolest public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy.

BERNARD-HENRI LEVY

Anti-Semitism Is Not a Mere Prejudice

20 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by in History, Politics, Speeches

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Christopher Hitchens

“But the Jews of the Arab lands were expelled again in revenge for the defeat of Palestinian nationalism in 1947–48, and now the most evil and discredited fabrication of Jew-baiting Christian Europe—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—is eagerly promulgated in the Hamas charter and on the group’s Web site and recycled through a whole nexus of outlets that includes schools as well as state-run television stations.

This might license the view that the sickness [of anti-semitism] is somehow ineradicable and not even subject to rational analysis, let alone to rationalization. Anti-Semitism has flourished without banking or capitalism (for which Jews were at one time blamed) and without Communism (for which they were also blamed). It has existed without Zionism (of which leading Jews were at one time the only critics) and without the state of Israel. There has even been anti-Semitism without Jews, in states like Malaysia whose political leaders are paranoid demagogues looking for a scapegoat. This is enough to demonstrate that anti-Semitism is not a mere prejudice like any other: Sinhalese who don’t like Tamils, or Hutu who regard Tutsi as ‘cockroaches,’ do not accuse their despised neighbors of harboring a plan—or of possessing the ability—to bring off a secret world government based on the occult control of finance.

Paradoxically, then, there is something almost flattering about anti-Jewish racism. To have been confined in the ghetto for so long, and then to be held responsible for Marx, Freud, and Einstein, to say nothing of Rothschild… Yet the outcome is always the same: to be treated as human refuse and to be either deported or massacred. Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay profiling the anti-Semite has many shortcomings, but it’s hard to argue with his conclusion that such a person must necessarily carry a thirst for murder in his heart. Yet this is perhaps true of other racists as well. What strikes the eye about anti-Semitism is the godfather role it plays as the organizing principle of other bigotries. The Nazis may well have thought of Slavs and Poles as less than human, but it was the hatred of Jewry that cemented their worldview (and, horribly enough, gave them something in common with many of their Slavic and Polish victims).”

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From Christopher Hitchens’s short article Chosen.

Watch Hitchens give the annual Daniel Pearl lecture on anti-semitism below. This is one of the best speeches you’ll ever watch.