From the Kingdom of Memory (15 page)

Again we must admit our naiveté. We thought we had vanquished the beast, but no: it is still showing its claws. At best, what a gathering such as this could do is to shame the beast into hiding. If we here succeed—and I hope and pray that we shall—in rising
above politics, above the usual recriminations between East and West, above simplistic propaganda, and simply tell the world what both liberators and liberated have seen, then something may happen; the world may choose to pay more attention to what hangs as a threat to its very future.

If we succeed—and I hope and pray that we shall—in putting aside what divides us—and what divides us is superficial—if we dedicate ourselves not only to the memory of those who have suffered but also to the future of those who are suffering today, we shall be serving notice on mankind that we shall never allow this earth to be made into a prison again, that we shall never allow war to be considered as a solution to any problem—for war
is
the problem. If we succeed, then our encounter will be recorded as yet another of our common victories.

If we do not raise our voices against war, against hate, against indifference—who will? We speak with the authority of men and women who have seen war; we know what it is. We have seen the burnt villages, the devastated cities, the deserted homes, we still see the demented mothers whose children are being massacred before their eyes, we still follow the endless nocturnal processions to the flames rising up to the seventh heaven—if not higher.…

We are gathered here to testify—together. Our tale is a tale of solitude and fear and anonymous death—but also of compassion, generosity, bravery, and
solidarity. Together, you the liberators and we the survivors represent a commitment to memory whose intensity will remain. In its name we shall continue to voice our concerns and our hopes not for our own sake, but for the sake of humankind. Its very survival may depend on its ability and willingness to listen.

And to remember.

Trivializing Memory

W
ITTGENSTEIN SAID IT
: Whereof one cannot speak, one must not speak. The unspeakable draws its force and its mystery from its own silence. A nineteenth-century Hasidic teacher put it his own way: The cry unuttered is the loudest.

If this is true of language as a means of communication in general, it is even truer of literature and art that try to describe, without ever succeeding, the final reality of the human condition during the Holocaust. Is proof needed? It has come in the recent spate of fictionalized accounts of that tragedy in the mass media.

Let us repeat it once again: Auschwitz is something else, always something else. It is a universe outside the universe, a creation that exists parallel to creation. Auschwitz lies on the other side of life and
on the other side of death. There, one lives differently, one walks differently, one dreams differently. Auschwitz represents the negation of human progress and casts doubt on its validity. Then, it defeated culture; later, it defeated art, because just as no one could imagine Auschwitz before Auschwitz, no one can now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz. The truth of Auschwitz remains hidden in its ashes. Only those who lived it in their flesh and in their minds can possibly transform their experience into knowledge. Others, despite their best intentions, can never do so.

Such, then, is the victory of the executioner; by raising his crimes to a level beyond the imagining and understanding of men, he planned to deprive his victims of any hope of sharing their monstrous meaning with others. In the tale of a survivor that appeared some twenty years ago, an S.S. officer tells a young Jew, “One day you will speak of all this, but your story will fall on deaf ears. Some will mock you, others will try to redeem themselves through you. You will cry out to the heavens and they will refuse to listen or to believe.…”

But not even the killers ever imagined that there could come a time when the merchants of images and the brokers of language would set themselves up to speak for the victims.

The Holocaust has become a fashionable subject, so film and theater producers and television networks have set out to exploit it, often in the most vulgar
sense of the word.
The Night Porter, Seven Beauties
, the docudrama
Holocaust, Sophie’s Choice
, and
War and Remembrance
(I speak of the films, not the books),
Murderers Among Us
, and the recent
Ghetto
, which played on Broadway for several weeks, and previously, to great acclaim, in Germany. These are only some of the most familiar examples over the years. An authentic documentary like
The Final Solution
, by the four-time Oscar winner Arthur Cohn, cannot find a distributor, but people fall all over themselves for cheap and simplistic melodramas. They get a little history, a heavy dose of sentimentality and suspense, a little eroticism, a few daring sex scenes, a dash of theological rumination about the silence of God, and there it is: let kitsch rule in the land of kitsch, where, at the expense of truth, what counts is the ratings.

W
HY THIS
determination to show “everything” in pictures? A word, a glance—silence itself communicates more and better. How, after all, can one illustrate famine, terror, the solitude of old people deprived of strength and orphans robbed of their future? How can one “stage” a convoy of uprooted deportees being sent into the unknown, or the liquidation of thousands and thousands of men, women, and children? How can one “produce” the machine-gunned, the gassed, the mutilated corpses, when the viewer knows that they are all actors, and that after the filming
they will return to the hotel for a well-deserved bath and a meal? Sure, this is true of all subjects and of all films, but that is also the point: the Holocaust is not a subject like all the others. It imposes certain limits. There are techniques that one may not use, even if they are commercially effective. In order not to betray the dead and humiliate the living, this particular subject demands a special sensibility, a different approach, a rigor, strengthened by respect and reverence and, above all, faithfulness to memory.

You see, memory is more than isolated events, more even than the sum of those events. Facts pulled out of their context can be misleading. Take
Ghetto
. The author of this controversial production, Joshua Sobel, of Israel, insists that the play is based on fact. So what? By isolating certain facts, by giving them more prominence than so many others, and by illuminating them from a particular angle, he makes his play lie.

Ghetto
is about a theater company in the Vilna ghetto that produced plays and concerts with the encouragement of Jacob Gens, the chief of the Jewish police, and the consent of the Germans. The author’s intention? To show, on one hand, the will to live, the thirst for culture among Jews at the very threshold of death, and on the other, the moral ambiguity of some of their own leaders. It is a laudable idea, but the play shifts direction in mid-course.

What do spectators remember when they leave
the theater? The moral dilemma that faces Jacob Gens: May one sacrifice some human beings in order to save others? No. They remember the Jews, most of whom in this play allowed themselves to be defeated or seduced by the enemy. Bewildering scenes, nauseating in their collective degradation: orgies, depravity, sadistic exhibitionism, black-marketeering, prostitution, collaboration. With some notable exceptions, it is total decadence everywhere, debauchery and mockery at every level. Gens, a complex person, possesses astonishing dignity and courage, and yet he virtually becomes the Nazis’ accomplice. His policemen become the Nazis’ official instruments: it is they who hound the Jews, they who drive them to their deaths.

Is this a fair and true picture of the ghetto? Filmed as it is, full of ugliness, decadence, and moral abdication, it may be that it reflects a certain reality, but is that reality not a very limited one? It suffices to read the history of the Vilna ghetto, or to see a poignant film like
The Partisans of Vilna
, to realize how false and nasty a picture
Ghetto
paints for us. The religious vocabulary has a phrase for it:
Hilul hashem
—blasphemy or profanation, an act that strikes at all that is sacred.

W
E ARE
, in fact, living through a period of general desanctification of the Holocaust. In West Germany, historians are explaining away Hitler’s crimes by lumping
them with Stalin’s; Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s official spokesman recently said that Germans have had enough of feeling guilty and that the Warfen S. S. of Bitburg were only good German soldiers. In France, a man called Le Pen considers the Holocaust “a detail.” Anti-Israeli propagandists compare Israeli soldiers to Nazis, and in France, as in the United States, and everywhere else, for that matter, shameless “revisionists” go so far as to deny the very existence of the death camps.

As for philosophers and psychiatrists, some of them have long been intrigued by simplistic theories that attribute to the victim a death wish or a secret need to dominate, to victimize, to oppress—in other words, to resemble the executioner. In the course of scholarly colloquia, one sometimes hears more about the guilt of the victims and the psychological problems of the survivors than about the crimes of the killers. Didn’t an American novelist recently suggest that the suicide of my friend Primo Levi was nothing but a bout of depression that good psychoanalytical treatment could have cured? Thus is the tragedy of a great writer, a man who never ceased to battle the black angel of Auschwitz, reduced to a banal nervous breakdown.

Who could have imagined it? There are still living survivors, and already their past has been turned into a kind of no-man’s-land where false certainties and arrogance rule. Newcomers to this history appoint
themselves experts, the ignorant become critics. They give the impression of knowing better than the victims or the survivors how to name what Samuel Beckett called the unnameable, and how to communicate the uncommunicable. In the field of the audiovisual, the temptation is generally reductionist, shrinking personalities to stereotypes and dialogue to clichés. All is trivial and superficial, even death itself: there is no mystery in its mystery. It is stripped naked, just as the dead are stripped and exposed to the dubious enjoyment of spectators turned voyeurs.

Why this sudden explosion of nudity as a backdrop for the Holocaust? What by any rule of decency ought to remain unexposed is exposed to shock the television viewer. Naked men. Naked women. Naked children. And all of them made up with ketchup and paid to “fall” into the “mass graves.” How can one explain such obscenity? How can anyone justify such insensitivity? In the Jewish tradition, death is a private, intimate matter, and we are forbidden to transform it into a spectacle. If that is true for an individual, it is six million times more true for one of the largest communities of the dead in history.

But then, the “experts” will ask, how do we transmit the message? There are other ways to do it, better ways to keep the memory alive. Today the question is not what to transmit, but how. Study the texts—such as the diaries of Emanuel Ringelblum and Chaim Kaplan; the works by the historians Raul Hilberg,
Lucy Davidowicz, Martin Gilbert, Michael Marrus. Watch the documentaries, such as Alain Resnais’s
Night and
Fog, Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah
, and Haim Gouri’s
81st Blow
. Listen to the survivors and respect their wounded sensibility. Open yourselves to their scarred memories, and mingle your tears with theirs.

And stop insulting the dead.

Bitburg
^*

M
R
. P
RESIDENT:

This medal is not mine alone. It belongs to all those who remember what S.S. killers have done to their victims.

It was given to me for my writings, teaching, and for my testimony. When I write, I feel my invisible teachers looking over my shoulders, reading my words and judging their veracity. While I feel responsible to the living, I feel equally responsible to the dead. Their memory dwells in my memory.