January 27, 2005
The Past Is In The Present
There are several good commentaries up today on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. (mostly via RCP) Here's a sample from Jeff Jacoby's intensely personal column:
By the time the Soviet Army reached Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945 -- 60 years ago today -- my father was no longer there. Ten days earlier, the Nazis had evacuated about 67,000 of the death camp's inmates, dispatching them on brutal forced marches to the west. My father, then 19, was in a group sent into Austria. He ended up at the concentration camp in Ebensee, near Mauthausen. Liberation there didn't come until May 9, with the arrival of US soldiers from the 80th Infantry Division.My father had entered Auschwitz the previous spring, together with his parents, his two brothers, and two of his three sisters. They, too, were gone by the time the camp was liberated. Unlike my father, they didn't leave on foot. They ''left" through the chimney. For the overwhelming majority of the more than 1.1 million Jews who were sent to Auschwitz, there was no other way out.
Aharon Applefeld, a Holocaust survivor, writes in a N.Y. Times op-ed of building psychological and distance "barriers" from the horror: (full text of Times article at "continue reading" link below)
Some entered hell as pious people and came out of it just as pious. That position deserves respect. But most survivors - myself, and especially the young - were outside the realm of faith, and from the first stages of the liberation, we were engaged with the question of how to go on living a life with meaning. The temptation to forget and be forgotten and to assimilate back into normal life lurked for every survivor. We can barely grasp and internalize the death of one child. How can we grasp the death of millions?For the sake of sanity, the survivors built barriers between themselves and the horrors they had experienced. But every barrier, every distance, inevitably separates you from the most meaningful experience of your life, and without that experience, hard as it may be, you are doubly defective: a defect imposed on you by the murderers and a defect you perpetrated with your own hands.
Comparing the recent tsunami, a "natural" disaster, with the man-made Holocaust Richard Cohen says in both cases we struggle to answer the question of "what sort of God is this?" that permits mass death and suffering. Cohen says of the tsunami...
...it was impenetrably scientific, something geological, about volcanic pressures and tectonic plates -- and breathtakingly swift, to boot. Maybe God had just turned His back.The Holocaust, in contrast, was not an instantaneous event. It lasted years. It consumed about 6 million, 10 million, who knows how many million people, Jews and non-Jews, but 1 million Jewish children -- infants, too. This had nothing to do with oceans and lava and tectonic plates and stuff only scientists could really understand. Auschwitz was the diligent work of man, a constellation of camps and factories, all of it worked by slaves, all of them marked for death. Auschwitz was essentially about murder, about what people did to people. A human being could go from physician or musician or mother or child to ash in the course of a couple of hours. Geology had nothing to do with it. The mysteries are not scientific. They are theological.
More chilling even than photos like these is the realization that the state of Jew-hatred today is such that millions would rejoice at a repeat of this horror, this time perhaps under a nuclear mushroom cloud. Jacoby says that the murder of Jews "was an end in itself: The reason for wiping out the Jews was so that the Jews would be wiped out." No better justification is offered by those who would liquidate them today.
Suzanne Fields' column quotes Elie Wiesel:
"The past is in the present, but the future is still in our hands."
Related links:
UPDATE 1/29: I discovered a series of posts beginning in 2003 by Bigwig, who blogs at Silflay Hraka. They concern a discovery made by his father of some old photographs of the 1945 Allied liberation of Ohrdruf, a Nazi labor camp. I suggest you scroll to the bottom, to the original "Unseen History" post, and work your way back up.
(Full text of New York Times article is presented below, since the Times archives articles after a couple of days - Ed.)
January 27, 2005 OP-ED CONTRIBUTORPosted by dan at January 27, 2005 02:37 PMAlways, Darkness Visible
By AHARON APPELFELD
Jerusalem
In January 1945, 60 years ago today, the wheels of destruction in Auschwitz stood still.
The few people left alive describe the prevailing silence as the silence of death. Those who came out of hiding after the war - out of the forests and monasteries - also describe the shock of liberation as freezing, crippling silence. Nobody was happy. The survivors stood at the fences in amazement. Human language, with all its nuances, turned into a mute tongue. Even words like horror or monster seemed meager and pale, not to mention words like anti-Semitism, envy, hatred. Such a colossal crime can be committed only if you mobilize the darkest dark of the soul. To imagine such darkness apparently needs a new language.
"Where were we?" "What did we go through?" "What's left of us?" the survivors wondered. Primo Levi tried to use images of Dante's hell; others turned to the works of Kafka, especially "The Trial" and "In the Penal Colony."
In the penal colony of Auschwitz, the Jew was not condemned because of his old or new beliefs, but because of the blood that flowed in his veins. In the Holocaust, biology determined a person's fate. In the Middle Ages, the Jew was killed for his beliefs. A Jew who chose to convert to Christianity or Islam was saved from his suffering. In the Holocaust, there was no choice. Observant Jews, liberal Jews, communist Jews and Jews who were sure they weren't Jews were crammed into the ghettos and camps. Their one and only offense: the Jewish blood in their veins.
The Holocaust stretched over six years. Such long years there probably never were in Jewish history. Those were years when every minute, every second, every split-second held more than it could bear. Pain and fear reigned, but even then, in the midst of hunger and humiliation, the amazement sprouted: "Is this Man?"
During the Holocaust, there was no place for thought or feeling. The needs of the hungry and thirsty body reduced one to dust. People who had been doctors, lawyers, engineers and professors only yesterday stole a piece of bread from their companions and when they were caught, they denied and lied. This degradation that many experienced will never be wiped out.
Under conditions of hunger and cold, the body, we learned in the camps, is liable to lose its divine qualities. That too was part of the wickedness of the murderer: not only to murder, but first to humiliate the victim utterly, to exterminate every shred of will and faith, to turn him into a despicable body whose soul had fled, and only then, that degradation complete, to murder him. The lust to debase the victim until his last moments was just as great as the lust for murder.
In 1945, the ovens were extinguished. Jean Améry, a prisoner of Auschwitz and one of the outstanding thinkers on the Holocaust, says in one of his essays: "Anybody who was tortured will never again feel at home in the world."
Great natural disasters leave us shocked and mute, but mass murder perpetrated by human beings on human beings is infinitely more painful. Murder reveals wickedness, hatred, cynicism and contempt for all belief. All the evil in man assumed a shape and reality in the ghettos and camps. The empathy that we once believed modern man felt for others was ruined for all time.
In 1945, the great migration of the survivors began: a sea of bodies, killed many times over and now resurrected. Some wanted to return to their countries and their homes, and some wanted to go to America, and some wanted to reach the shores of the Mediterranean and go from there to Palestine. Even then, in that strange resurrection, the first questions arose: What is a Jew? Why are we persecuted so bitterly and cruelly? Is there something hidden in us that condemns us to death? Many felt - if an individual may speak for the many - that the six years of war were years of profound trial. We had been in both hell and purgatory and we were no longer what we were.
Some entered hell as pious people and came out of it just as pious. That position deserves respect. But most survivors - myself, and especially the young - were outside the realm of faith, and from the first stages of the liberation, we were engaged with the question of how to go on living a life with meaning. The temptation to forget and be forgotten and to assimilate back into normal life lurked for every survivor. We can barely grasp and internalize the death of one child. How can we grasp the death of millions?
For the sake of sanity, the survivors built barriers between themselves and the horrors they had experienced. But every barrier, every distance, inevitably separates you from the most meaningful experience of your life, and without that experience, hard as it may be, you are doubly defective: a defect imposed on you by the murderers and a defect you perpetrated with your own hands.
God did not reveal himself in Auschwitz or in other camps. The survivors came out of hell wounded and humiliated. They were betrayed by the neighbors among whom they and their forefathers had lived. They were betrayed by Western culture, by the Germans, by the language and literature they admired so much. They were betrayed by the great beliefs: liberalism and progress. They were betrayed by their own bodies.
What to hold onto to live a meaningful life? It was clear to many that the denial of one's Judaism, which characterized the emancipated Jew, was no longer possible. After the Holocaust it was immoral.
No wonder many of the survivors went on to Israel. No doubt, they wanted to get to a place where they could leave their victimhood behind and assert responsibility over their fate, a place where they could connect with the culture of their forefathers, to the language of the Bible, and to the land that gave birth to the Bible.
This is not a story with a happy ending. A doctor who survived, from a religious background, who sailed to Israel with us in June 1946, told us: "We didn't see God when we expected him, so we have no choice but to do what he was supposed to do: we will protect the weak, we will love, we will comfort. From now on, the responsibility is all ours."
Aharon Appelfeld is the author, most recently, of "The Story of a Life." This article was translated by Barbara Harshav from the Hebrew.