From the Kingdom of Memory (16 page)

What have I learned in the last forty years? Small things. I learned the perils of language and those of silence. I learned that in extreme situations, when human lives and dignity are at stake, neutrality is a sin: it helps the killers, not the victims.

I learned the meaning of solitude: we were alone—desperately alone. Leaders of the free world knew everything and did nothing—nothing specifically to save Jewish children from death. One million children perished. If I spent my entire life reciting their names, I would die before finishing the task. Children … I have seen some of them thrown into the flames … alive. Words? They die on my lips. I have learned the necessity of describing their deaths.

I have learned the fragility of the human condition. The killers were not monsters. They were human beings. Good parents. Obedient citizens. Some had college degrees and a passion for the arts or philosophy. Did their education prevent them from committing murder? Evidently not.

A great moral essayist, the gentle and forceful Abe Rosenthal, having visited Auschwitz, once wrote an extraordinary piece of reportage about the persecution of the Jews called “Forgive them not, Father, for they knew what they did.”

I have learned that the Holocaust was a unique and uniquely Jewish event—albeit with universal implications. Not all victims were Jews; but all Jews were victims. Dachau’s first inmates were German anti-Nazis; but Treblinka and Belzec and Ponar and Babi Yar were designed to serve as a sacrificial altar for the entire Jewish people.

I have learned the guilt of indifference. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Jews were
killed by the enemy but betrayed by their so-called allies, who found political reasons to justify their indifference.

But I have also learned that suffering confers no privileges: it depends upon what one does with it. This is why survivors have tried to teach their contemporaries how to build on ruins. How to invent hope in a world that offers none. How to proclaim faith to a generation that has seen it shamed and mutilated.

T
HE SURVIVORS
had every reason to despair of society; they did not. They opted to work for humankind, not against it.

A few days ago, on the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, Americans watched with dismay as the Soviet Union and East Germany distorted both past and present history. Mr. President, I was there. I was there when American liberators arrived and gave us back our lives. What I felt for them will nourish me to the end of my life.

Mr. President, we are grateful to this country for having offered us haven and refuge. Grateful to its leadership for being friendly to Israel—for we are grateful to Israel for existing. Grateful to Congress for its continuing philosophy of humanism and compassion for the underprivileged. As for yourself, Mr. President, we are grateful to you for being a friend of the Jewish people, for trying to help the oppressed Jews in the
Soviet Union and for your continuing support of the Jewish State.

Mr. President, am I dreaming? Is this but a nightmare? This day was meant to be a day of joy for me, my family and our friends. Why then is there such sadness in my heart?

Allow me, Mr. President, to touch on a matter which is sensitive. I belong to a traumatized generation; to us symbols are important. Following our ancient tradition which commands us to “speak truth to power,” may I speak to you of the recent events that have caused us much pain and anguish?

We have met four or five times. I know of your commitment to humanity. I am convinced that you were not aware of the presence of S. S. graves in the Bitburg cemetery. But now we all are aware of that presence. I therefore implore you, Mr. President, in the spirit of this moment that justifies so many others, tell us now that you will not go there:
that
place is not your place. Your place is with the
victims
of the S. S. We know there are political and even strategic considerations—but this issue, as all issues related to that awesome Event, transcends politics, and even diplomacy. The issue here is not politics but good and evil, and we must never confuse them. I have seen the S. S. at work; I have seen their victims.

There was a degree of suffering and loneliness in the concentration camps that defies imagination—cut off from the world, without refuge anywhere, sons
watched helplessly as their fathers were beaten to death; mothers watched their children die of hunger. And then there was Mengele and his selections—terror, fear, isolation, and torture.

M
R
. P
RESIDENT
, you seek reconciliation. So do I. I, too, wish to attain true reconciliation with the German people. I do not believe in collective guilt—nor in collective responsibility. Only the killers were guilty. Their sons and daughters are not. I believe we can, we must, work together with them and with all people to bring peace and understanding to a tormented world that is still awaiting redemption.

Testimony at The Barbie Trial
^*

Y
OUR
H
ONOR
, gentlemen of the bench, gentlemen of the jury, I thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I will try to speak about some of the nameless absent—but not for them. No one has a right to speak in their name. If the dead have something to say, they will say it in their own way. Perhaps they are already saying it. Are we capable, are we worthy, of hearing them?

May I say immediately that I feel no hatred toward the accused? I have never met him; our paths have never crossed. But I have met killers who, like him, along with him, chose to be enemies of my people and of humanity. I may have known one or another of his victims. I resembled them, just as they resembled me: Within the kingdom of malediction
created by the accused and his comrades, all Jewish prisoners, all Jews, had the same face, the same eyes; all shared the same fate. Sometimes one has the impression the same Jew was being killed by the enemy everywhere six million times over.

No, there is no hatred in me: there never was any. There is no question of hatred here—only justice. And memory. We are trying to do justice to our memory.

Here is one memory: the spring of 1944. A few days before the Jewish Pentecostal holiday—
Shavuot
This was forty-three years ago, almost to the day. I was fifteen and a half years old—my own son will turn fifteen in three days. A profoundly religious child, I was moved by messianic dreams and prayers. Far from Jerusalem, I lived for Jerusalem, and Jerusalem lived in me.

Though subjected to a fascist regime, the Jews of Hungary did not suffer too much. My parents ran a business, my three sisters went to school, the Sabbath enveloped us in its peace.… The war? It was nearing its end. The Allies were going to land in a day, in a week. The Red Army was twenty or thirty kilometers away. But then …

The Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944. Starting then, events moved at a headlong pace that gave us no respite. A succession of anti-Semitic decrees and measures were passed: the prohibition of
travel, confiscation of goods, wearing of yellow stars, ghettos, transports.

We watched as our world was systematically narrowed. For Jews, the country was limited to one town, the town to one neighborhood, the neighborhood to one street, the street to one room, the room to a sealed boxcar crossing the Polish countryside at night.

Like the forty-four Jewish children of Izieu (shipped to Auschwitz in 1944), the Jewish adolescents from my town arrived at the Auschwitz station one afternoon. What is this? we wondered. No one knew. The name did not evoke any memory in us. Shortly before midnight, the train began to move. A woman in our car began shouting, “I see a fire, I see a fire!” They made her be quiet. I remember the silence in the car. As I remember the rest. The barbed-wire fences stretching away to infinity. The shouts of the prisoners whose duty it was to “welcome” us, the gunshots fired by the S. S., the barking of their dogs. And up above us all, above the planet itself, immense flames rising toward the sky as though to consume it.

Since that night, I often look at the sky and see it in flames.… But that night, I could not look at the sky for long. I was too busy clinging to my family. An order rang out: “Line up by family.” That’s good, I thought, we will stay together. Only for a few minutes, however: “Men to the right, women to the left.” The blows rained down on all sides. I was not able to
say goodbye to my mother. Nor to my grandmother. I could not kiss my little sister. With my two older sisters, she was moving away, borne by the crazed, black tide.…

This was a separation that cut my life in half. I rarely speak of it, almost never. I cannot recall my mother or my little sister. With my eyes, I still look for them, I will always look for them. And yet I know … I know everything. No, not everything … one cannot know everything. I could imagine it, but I do not allow myself to. One must know when to stop.… My gaze stops at the threshold of the gas chambers. Even in thought, I refuse to violate the privacy of the victims at the moment of their death.

What I saw is enough for me. In a small wood somewhere in Birkenau I saw children being thrown into the flames alive by the S. S. Sometimes I curse my ability to see. It should have left me without ever returning. I should have remained with those little charred bodies.… Since that night, I have felt a profound, immense love for old people and children. Every old person recalls my grandfather, my grandmother, every child brings me close to my little sister, the sister of the dead Jewish children of Izieu.…

Night after night, I kept asking myself, What does all this mean? What is the sense of this murderous enterprise? It functioned perfectly. The killers killed, the victims died, the fire burned and an entire
people thirsting for eternity turned to ash, annihilated by a nation which, until then, was considered to be the best educated, the most cultivated in the world. Graduates from the great universities, lovers of music and painting, doctors, lawyers, and philosophers participated in the Final Solution and became accomplices of death. Scholars and engineers invented more efficient methods for exterminating denser and denser masses in record time.… How was this possible?

I do not know the answer. In its scope, its ontological aspect, and its eschatological ambitions, this tragedy defies and exceeds all answers. If anyone claims to have found an answer, it can only be a false one. So much mourning, so much agony, so many deaths on one side, and a single answer on the other? One cannot understand Auschwitz either without God or with God. One cannot conceive of it in terms of man or of heaven. Why was there so much hatred in the enemy toward Jewish children and old people? Why this relentlessness against a people whose memory of suffering is the oldest in the world?

At the time, it seemed to me that the enemy’s aim was to attack God Himself in order to drive Him from His celestial throne. Thus, the enemy was creating a society parallel to our society, a world opposed to ours, with its own madmen and princes, laws and customs, prophets and judges.

Yes, an accursed world where another language
was spoken, where a new religion was proclaimed: one of cruelty, dominated by the inhuman; a society that had evolved from the other side of society, from the other side of life, from the other side of death, perhaps; a world where one small piece of bread was worth all ideas, where an adolescent in uniform had absolute power over thousands of prisoners, where human beings seemed to belong to a different species, trembling before death, which had all the attributes of God.…

As a Jew, it is impossible for me not to stress the affliction of my people during their torment. Do not see this as an attempt to deny or minimize the sufferings of the populations of the occupied countries or the torture undergone by our comrades, our Christian or nonreligious friends whom the common enemy punished with unpardonable brutality. We feel affection and admiration for them. As though they were our brothers? They are our brothers.

It is impossible for me, as a Jew, not to stress that for the first time, an entire people—from the smallest to the largest, from the richest to the poorest—were condemned to annihilation. To uproot it, to extract it from history, to kill it in memory by killing all memory of it: such was the enemy’s plan.

Marked, isolated, humiliated, beaten, starved, tortured, the Jew was handed over to the executioner, not for having proclaimed some truth, nor for having possessed envied riches and treasures, nor for having
adopted a certain forbidden behavior. The Jew was condemned to death because he was born Jewish, because he carried in him a Jewish memory.

Declared to be less than a man, and therefore deserving neither compassion nor pity, the Jew was born only to die—just as the killer was born only to kill. Consequently, the killer did not feel in any way guilty. One American investigator formulated it this way: the killer had not lost his sense of morality, but his sense of reality. He thought he was doing good by ridding the earth of its Jewish “parasites.”