“So isn’t this story supposed to be about a Polish
archbishop,” asked Lady, “but all I seem to be getting is the long, involved
story of a pianist? What’s up?”
“What’s up, indeed,” I told her. “I had no idea that I’d
have to grapple with the most serious event of the last century. Though really,
historically, I didn’t have to. Wesolowski was actually born a few years after
World War II; I suppose I could skip the thing entirely, if I wanted….”
“Well, why drag it in?”
“You have a point,” I said. “The Holocaust was horrific,
make no mistake about it. And from a writer’s point of view, it’s both a
fertile minefield and an absolute swamp. I mean, after you get done detailing
the horrors of Auschwitz, what else has the heft, the weight? The swinging
60’s? Rock ‘n Roll? No, for a novelist, the slogan over the gates to Auschwitz
isn’t ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ or ‘Work Makes You Free,’ but rather ‘Abandon
Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.’ Though come to think of it, ‘Abandon Hope’ was
also a lot more appropriate for all those Jews, dissidents, Communists, Gays
and Gypsies than ‘Arbeit…..’”
“Dissidents, Communists, Gays and Gypsies?”
“They got herded up as well. Oh, and the mentally defective.
But there’s no denying the suffering of the Jews, and the fact that it really was
intended to be the actual extermination of an entire people. Oh, and the top
Nazis were quite clear—if they could make it happen, they could also ensure
that it would never be known. An entire people wiped out, and no mention made.
A page lost to history. Or rather, a chapter, or one of its many tomes….”
“Did they think they could get away with it?”
“Why not? To my mind, it’s extraordinary what they did
get away with. And still are, in fact. Has anyone ever talked about complicity?
Let’s start with the Germans, though the same could be said with any of the
populations—Poles, Czechs, Austrians—who had concentration camps built around
them. Look, let’s face it: everybody knew. It was no secret: here’s Wikipedia on
the subject:”
The press announcement said that "the first
concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5,000
persons. All Communists and – where necessary – Reichsbanner
and Social
Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be
concentrated there, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual
functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons."[10] Dachau was the first
regular concentration
camp established by the German coalition government of National
Socialist Workers' Party (Nazi Party)
and the Nationalist People's Party (dissolved on 6 July 1933). Heinrich Himmler, then Chief of Police of Munich,
officially described the camp as "the first concentration camp for
political prisoners."[10]
“Press announcements? Official statements by Himmler?”
“Right—it was no secret. True, to my knowledge, no Nazi came
out and said that they were gassing Jews. No, it was the old story: there was a
real fear of Communists, and Hitler used that fear. So once it became OK to
throw the ‘political prisoners’ into a camp, then it was easier to start down
the list of public prejudice. Gay people, or as they were known, sexual
deviants. Do you want those around your kids? And what about mentally retarded,
or developmentally disabled, or intellectually challenged, or whatever I’m
supposed to call them this year? Anyway, do you really want them to be
having children? And then the Gypsies—well, they were thieves, most of them! Or
so the story went, and that was the point. And it was a reign of terror, at
that point, because Hitler very quickly squelched dissent. So it’s easy for me
to say that I’d write a blistering post in my blog if anyone built a
concentration camp in neighboring Cataño….”
“…come to think of it….”
“Please stifle that thought,” I told her.
“I didn’t mean that there should be one, only that in fact
it is one….”
“Here’s the point—if I write about it, will anything happen
to me? My Cuban boss once put it neatly: if you can hear footsteps at 3 AM
outside your house, and then roll over and go back to sleep, well, you live in
a free society. But what if you can’t? What if you’ve packed your bag, put it
next to the back door, and planned in whose house you would seek shelter? And
what about your wife, your children? The baby? Surely they will be safe: it’s
only you they seek…. Or is it? Because your wife, too—well, at university she
attended some meetings. She signed some petitions. And so the baby will come
too, and you’d better hope she’s sleeping soundly, as you scuttle down the
streets to your safe house….”
“Marc, that’s ghastly….”
“Absolutely. So in Nazi Germany you had an entire infrastructure
being built, because it wasn’t just the camps. Though even so, it’s a little
hard to wrap your head around it: those barracks didn’t get built by elves
working overnight. And what about the camp victims who were forced to work in
the factories, and then herded back to the camps for the night? Oh—and the
trains that rolled in, jammed with people, and then rolled out, empty? And
then, most horrifically, well….have you ever burned a chicken bone, at a
barbecue?”
“I can’t say that I have….”
“Raf, for reasons I’ve never understood, used to do it. And
I can tell you, the stench is vile….”
“Can we please,” she said, “I mean, I know where you’re
going.”
“That was it,” I said. “You and I are complicit, too. That’s
the thing about the Holocaust—it brings just as much shame and guilt to
everyone as it brought horror to its victims….”
“Well, I don’t know about that….”
“The German people told us, ‘we didn’t know,’ and the world
judged them as mendacious. But we also knew, outside of Germany. There were
reports of the camps, and there was discussion: should we bomb the camps? We
were bombing cities, bombing factories, shouldn’t we bomb the camps? Look, even
Wikipedia gets into the question:
Michael Berenbaum has argued that it is not only a historical question,
but "a moral question emblematic of the Allied response to the plight of
the Jews during the Holocaust."[1] David Wyman has asked:
"How could it be that the governments of the two great Western democracies
knew that a place existed where 2,000 helpless human beings could be killed
every 30 minutes, knew that such killings actually did occur over and over
again, and yet did not feel driven to search for some way to wipe such a scourge
from the earth?"[2]
“So it was out there: by 1942, the UN had declared a Joint
Declaration by Members of the United Nations Against Extermination of the Jews.
And that was picked up on the front page of The New York Times. So as from that
moment on, the world had a responsibility. We were all on record. And you could
argue that people like my parents, good Midwesterners buying their Liberty
bonds and feeling patriotic, were more guilty than the Germans themselves. It’s
called ‘moral proximity,’ and does it exist? Especially now, when the world is
so much smaller?”
“Moral
what?”
“If
a little kid gets lost in your store, do you have the moral responsibility to
comfort her, and look for her parents?”
“Of
course!”
“If
a little kid gets lost in a store in China….”
“Don’t
be ridiculous!”
“OK—that
feels black and white, right? That’s easy. Now then, if a little kid loses an
arm in a Nike factory in China, where he and all the other little kids are
working as virtually slave labor….”
“I
get the picture….”
“So
we in the West knew, but did anyone force the debate? The whole point was to
win the war—understandable, but it was never about the concentration camps. And
in fact, would the United States ever have entered the war without Pearl Harbor
being bombed? So it was OK that the Nazis were committing atrocities all over
Europe, but it was only until the Japanese attacked us that it was time
to act? Another question of moral proximity….”
“Well,
I still don’t see why your parents were guiltier than the Germans at the
time….”
“Because
sticking your neck out in Nazi Germany was a lot harder than sticking your neck
out in Madison, Wisconsin. Oh, and another question: if my parents were going
to stick their neck out and shout about anything, what about the internment of
Japanese-Americans? After all, we rounded up over a 100,000 people and put them
in camps? Or they could have given a shout out to Franz Biebl, a German
prisoner of war who got interned at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan. He
got stuck there for two years, from 1944 to 1946….”
“Marc?
Aren’t we a little digressive today? Anyway, who was Biebl?”
“A
choral composer, chiefly known for his ravishingly beautiful Ave Maria. But
here’s the point: as somebody once said, anti-Semitism is a very light sleeper.
Which means that while the average Briton or American would never themselves
have thrown Jewish babies into the ovens, they never raised their eyebrows at
jokes about the Jews, or at expressions like, ’Jewed me out of….’”
“Meaning?”
“To
bargain hard, or even to cheat. So there was always the sense of the Jew being
the ‘other,’ and in Britain, as well as in many other parts of the world, to be
a ‘good Jew’ was to be as invisible as possible. Be as British or American as
possible, don’t wear anything distinctively Jewish or act distinctively Jewish.
Pretend that going to the synagogue is no more different than attending the
Methodist, rather than Anglican, church.”
“And
is that so bad?”
“Ah,”
I said, “the old question. We gay people get it every June, when our friends
ask us, ‘look, why don’t you do something about the drag queens in the
outrageous costumes with the feathers and the sequins at the Pride March? Not
to mention all those leather guys with the whips and chains! I mean, I don’t
have a problem with it, but other people…..”
“Well,
they have a point, don’t they?”
“Maybe,”
I told her. “But then again, it was the drag queens that started the whole
movement, when they fought the cops at Stonewall. And really, if we had just
all played by the rules, worn our nice Sunday best, and played bridge during
the week and golf on the weekends, do you really think anything would have
changed? You know the old joke: when does a gay man become a fag?”
“Nope….”
“When
he leaves the room. So there had been a lot of mostly latent anti-Semitism for
centuries before the war, and then when the Holocaust occurred, well, the focus
was on winning the war, and not on the horrors of the concentration camps. And
then, there were people walking around with numbers tattooed on their forearms:
as a writer, I wonder about that. For the survivors, it must have been a daily
question: cover it up? Single yourself out as a victim? Wear it as a reminder
of something you’d like to forget? Wear it as a visual reminder or challenge to
others: this was done to me, let none of us forget or pretend that it
didn’t. And the people who saw it, as I did, once or twice in my life….”
“You
saw people with Nazi tattoos?”
“Yes,
and one of them was a prominent rabbi in the town I grew up in. He was elderly,
and I met him in a hospital, so his tattoo was quite clear, though it was
blurry and had always been of poor quality. That, of course, was hardly the
point. But no, it was there, and I was helping him to the bathroom, and there
the number was, blue ink on his forearm. And yes, I felt guilty, even though I
was an American, and born more than a decade after the war had ended….”
“But
why, Marc, why?”
“It
was an assault on humanity, and humanity failed,” I told her. “Was Hitler evil?
Undoubtedly. Did the Germans commit atrocities? Unquestionably. But to put the
blame on Germany and Hitler is too easy. Even today, the Holocaust keeps
challenging us.”
“Well,”
said Lady, “do you really believe that we should have bombed the camps? Marc,
those were people in there!”
“People
who had no idea whether they would be alive the next day,” I told her. “If 2000
people could be killed in 30 minutes, well, wouldn’t it be better to ask the
question: shouldn’t we put that death machine out of order? If we had bombed
Auschwitz, wouldn’t we ultimately have saved more lives that we had sacrificed?
Wouldn’t it be like amputating an infected limb, rather than killing the
patient?”
“OK,
I get that,” said Lady. “Geez, Marc, do you have to be so morbid? It is, after
all, my birthday!”
And
so it is! Happy birthday, Lady!
And
was that why, from somewhere dark and sweet and primordial, from the death
camps and the wounded and the dead, and the hungry on all sides and the
frightened…somewhere, I tell you, we heard the Ave Maria, of Biebl, and were
the questions answered?
No.
But
were we soothed?
Ahh!
