Legends of Our Time (24 page)

Otherwise how to explain the Roosevelts, the Churchills,
the Eisenhowers, who never expressed their indignation? How to explain the silence of the Pope? How to explain the failure of certain attempts in London, in Washington, to obtain from the Allies an aerial bombardment of the death factories, or at least of the railway lines leading to them?

One of the saddest episodes of that war, not lacking in sad episodes, had as hero a Polish Jewish leader exiled in London: to protest the inaction of the Allies, and also to alert public opinion, Arthur Ziegelbaum, member of the “National Committee to Free Poland,” put a bullet through his head in broad daylight in front of the entrance to the House of Commons. In his will he expressed his hope that his protest would be heard.

He was quickly forgotten, his death proved useless. Had he believed his refusal to live among men voluntarily blind would move them, he had been wrong. Ziegelbaum dead or Ziegelbaum living: to those hearts of stone it was all the same. For them he was only a Polish Jew talking about Jews and living their agony; for them he might just as well have perished over there, with the others. Arthur Ziegelbaum died for nothing. Life went on, so did the war: against the Axis powers, which continued their own war against the Jews. And the world stopped up its ears and lowered its eyes. Sometimes the newspapers printed a small item: the Ghetto of Lodz had been liquidated, the number of European Jews massacred already exceeded two or three million. This news was published as if these were normal events, almost without comment, without anguish. It seemed normal that Jews should be killed by the Nazis. Never had the Jewish people been so alone.

The more I search, the more reasons I find for losing hope. I am often afraid to reopen this Pandora’s box, there are always the newly guilty to emerge from it. Is there no bottom to this evil box? No.

I repeat: hatred is no solution. There would be too many targets. The Hungarians put more passion than did the Germans into the persecution of Jews; the Rumanians
displayed more savagery than the Germans; the Slovaks, the Poles, the Ukrainians: they hunted down Jews cunningly, as if with love. Perhaps I should hate them, it would cure me. But I am incapable. Were hatred a solution, the survivors, when they came out of the camps, would have had to burn down the whole world.

Now almost everywhere I am told: you mustn’t bear a grudge against us, we didn’t know, we didn’t believe it, we were powerless to do anything. If these justifications suffice to assuage people’s consciences, too bad for them. I could answer that they did not want to know, that they refused to believe, that they could have forced their governments to break the conspiracy of silence. But that would open the door to discussion. It is too late, in any case: the time for discussion is past.

Now, I shall simply ask: is it any surprise that the Jews did not choose resistance? And die fighting like soldiers for the victory of their cause? But what victory and what cause?

Let me reveal a secret, one among a thousand, about why Jews did not resist: to punish us, to prepare a vengeance for us for later. We were not worth their sacrifice. If, in every town and every village, in the Ukraine and in Galicia, in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia, Jews formed endless nightly processions and marched on to eternity as if carrying within themselves a pure joy, one which heralds the approach of ecstasy, it is precisely to reveal to us the ultimate truth about those who are sacrificed on the margins of history. In staying alive, at that price, we deserve neither salvation nor atonement. Nor do we even deserve that lesson of solemn dignity and lofty courage which, in spite of everything, in their own way, they gave us by making their way toward death, staring it full in the face, point blank, their heads high in the joy of bearing this strength, this pride within themselves.

Let us, therefore, not make an effort to understand, but rather to lower our eyes and not understand. Every rational explanation would be more esoteric than if it were
mystical. Not to understand the dead is a way of paying them an ancient debt; it is the only way to ask their pardon.

I have before me a photograph, taken by a German officer fond of souvenirs, of a father who, an instant before the burst of rifle fire, was still speaking calmly to his son, while pointing to the sky. Sometimes I think I hear his dreamy voice: “You see, my son, we are going to die and the sky is beautiful. Do not forget there is a connection between these two facts.” Or perhaps: “We are going to die, my son, yet the sky, so serene, is not collapsing in an end-of-the-world crash. Do you hear its silence? Listen to it, you must not forget it.” It occurs to me that were I to ask him a question, any question, that same father would answer me. But I bury my eyes in what remains of him and I am silent.

Just as I am silent every time the image comes to my mind of the Rebbe in Warsaw who stood erect, unyielding, unconquerable, before a group of SS; they were amusing themselves by making him suffer, by humiliating him; he suffered, but did not let himself be humiliated. One of them, laughing, cut off his beard, but the Rebbe stared right into his eyes without flinching; there was pain in his expression, but also defiance, the expression of a man stronger than evil, even when evil is triumphant, stronger than death, even when death assumes the face of a comedian playing a farce—the expression of a man who owes nothing to anyone, not even to God.

I have long since carried that expression buried within me, I have not been able to part with it, I no longer want to part with it, as though wanting always to remember there are still, there will always be, somewhere in the world, expressions I will never understand. And when such an expression lights upon me, at the dinner table, at a concert, or beside a happy woman, I give myself up to it in silence.

For the older I grow, the more I know that we can do
little for the dead; the least we can do is to leave them alone, not project our own guilt onto them. We like to think the dead have found eternal rest: let them be. It is dangerous to wake them. They, too, have questions, questions equal to our own.

My plea is coming to an end, but it would be incomplete if I said nothing about the armed assaults which, in spite of what the prosecution may think, Jews did carry out against the Germans. If I have difficulty understanding how multitudes went to their death without defending themselves, that difficulty becomes insurmountable when it comes to understanding those of their companions who chose to fight.

How, in the ghettos and camps, they were able to find the means to fight when the whole world was against them—that will always remain a mystery.

For those who claim that all the Jews submitted to their murderers, to fate, in common cowardice or common resignation, those people do not know what they are saying or—what is worse—knowingly falsify the facts only to illustrate a sociological theory, or to justify a morbid hatred which is always self-hatred.

In truth, there was among the victims an active elite of fighters composed of men and women and children who, with pitiful means, stood up against the Germans. They were a minority, granted. But is there any society where the active elite is not a minority? Such groups existed in Warsaw, in Bialystok, in Grodno, and—God alone knows how—even in Treblinka, in Sobivor, and in Auschwitz. Authenticated documents and eye-witness accounts do exist, relating the acts of war of those poor desperadoes; reading them, one does not know whether to rejoice with admiration or to weep with rage. One wonders: but how did they do it, those starving youngsters, those hunted men, those battered women, how were they able to confront, with weapons in hand, the Nazi army, which at that time seemed invincible, marching from victory to
victory? Where did they take their sheer physical endurance, their moral strength? What was their secret and what is its name?

We say: weapons in hand. But what weapons? They had hardly any. They had to pay in pure gold for a single revolver. In Bialystok, the legendary Mordecai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, leader of the ghetto resistance, describes in his journal—miraculously rediscovered—the moment he obtained the first rifle, the first ammunition: twenty-five bullets. “Tears came to my eyes. I felt my heart burst with joy.” It was thus with one rifle and twenty-five bullets that he and his companions were going to contain the vast onslaught of the German army. It is easy to imagine what might have happened had every warrior in every ghetto obtained one rifle.

All the underground networks in the occupied countries received arms, money, and radio equipment from London, and secret agents came regularly to teach them the art of sabotage: they felt themselves organically linked to the outside world. In France or Norway a member of the resistance who was caught could comfort himself with the thought that somewhere in that town as well as on the other shore, there were people who feared for his life, who lived in anxiety because of him, who would move heaven and earth to save him: his acts registered somewhere, left traces, marks of sorrow, produced results. But the Jews were alone: only they were alone.

They alone did not receive help or encouragement; neither arms nor messages were sent them; they were not spoken to, no one was concerned with them; they did not exist. They cried for help, but the appeals they issued by radio or by mail fell on deaf ears. Cut off from the world, from the war itself, the Jewish fighters participated, fully aware they were not wanted, they had already been written off; they threw themselves into battle knowing they could count on no one, help would never arrive, they would receive no support, there would be no place to
retreat. And yet, with their backs to the burning wall, they defied the Germans. Some battles are won even when they are lost.

Yes, competent elite existed even at Sobivor, where they organized an escape; at Treblinka, where they revolted; and at Auschwitz, where they blew up the crematoria. The Auschwitz insurgents attempted an escape, but in the struggle with the SS, who obviously had an advantage of superiority in weapons and men, all were killed. Later the Germans arrested the four young Jewish girls from Warsaw who had obtained the explosives for the insurgents. They were tortured, condemned to death, and hanged at a public ceremony. They died without fear. The oldest was sixteen, the youngest twelve.

We can only lower our heads and be silent. And end this sickening posthumous trial which intellectual acrobats everywhere are carrying on against those whose death numbs the mind. Do we want to understand? There is no longer anything to understand. Do we want to know? There is nothing to know anymore. It is not by playing with words and the dead that we will understand and know. Quite the contrary. As the ancients said: “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.”

But we prefer to speak and to judge. We wish to be strong and invulnerable. The lesson of the holocaust—if there is any—is that our strength is only illusory, and that in each of us is a victim who is afraid, who is cold, who is hungry. Who is also ashamed.

The Talmud teaches man never to judge his friend until he has been in his place. But, for the world, the Jews are not friends. They have never been. Because they had no friends they are dead.

So, learn to be silent.