One Generation After (2 page)

Twenty-five years. A quarter-century.

And we pause, trying to find our bearings, trying to understand: what and how much did these years mean? To some a generation, to others an eternity. A generation perhaps without eternity.

Children condemned never to grow old, old men doomed never to die. A solitude engulfing entire peoples, a guilt tormenting all humanity. A despair that found a face but not a name. A memory cursed, yet refusing to pass on its curse and hate. An attempt to understand, perhaps even to forgive. That is a generation.

Ours.

For the new one it will soon be ancient history. Unrelated to today’s conflicts and arguments. Without impact on the aspirations and actions of adolescents eager to live and conquer the future. The past interests them only to the extent that they can reject it. Auschwitz? Never heard of it.

And yet there is logic in history. The future is but a result of conditions past and present. Everything is connected, everything
has its place. Man makes the transition from the era of holocaust silence to the era of communications with remarkable ease. Once walled in by ghettos, man now takes flight to the moon. If today we live too quickly, it is because yesterday we died too quickly. If today we endow machines with increasingly wide powers, it is because the generation before us so foolishly left its fate and decisions in the hands of man.

Spring 1945: emerging from its nightmare, the world discovers the camps, the death factories. The senseless horror, the debasement: the absolute reign of evil. Victory tastes of ashes.

Yes, it is possible to defile life and creation and feel no remorse. To tend one’s garden and water one’s flowers but two steps away from barbed wire. To experiment with monstrous mutations and still believe in the soul and immortality. To go on vacation, be enthralled by the beauty of a landscape, make children laugh—and still fulfill regularly, day in and day out, the duties of killer.

There was, then, a technique, a science of murder, complete with specialized laboratories, business meetings and progress charts. Those engaged in its practice did not belong to a gutter society of misfits, nor could they be dismissed as just a collection of rabble. Many held degrees in philosophy, sociology, biology, general medicine, psychiatry and the fine arts. There were lawyers among them. And—unthinkable but true—theologians. And aristocrats.

Astounded, the victors find it difficult to accept the facts: that in the twentieth century, man’s armor against himself and others should be so thin and vulnerable. Yes, good and evil coexist without the one influencing the other; the devil himself strives for an ideal: he too sees himself as pure and incorruptible. Inherited values count for nothing. Seeds sown by earlier generations? Lost in the sand, blown away by the wind. Nothing is certain, the present erases triumphs and treasures with hallucinating speed. Civilization? Foam that crests the waves and vanishes. Lack of morality and a perverted taste for bloodshed are unrelated to the individual’s social and cultural background. It is possible to be born into the upper or middle class, receive a first-rate education, respect parents and neighbors, visit museums and attend literary gatherings, play a role in public life, and begin one day to massacre men, women and children, without hesitation and without guilt. It is possible to fire your gun at living targets and nonetheless delight in the cadence of a poem, the composition of a painting. One’s spiritual legacy provides no screen, ethical concepts offer no protection. One may torture the son before his father’s eyes and still consider oneself a man of culture and religion. And dream of a peaceful sunset over the sea.

Had the killers been brutal savages or demented sadists, the shock would have been less. And also the disappointment.

Adolf Eichmann was an ordinary man. He slept well, he ate well. He was an exemplary father, a considerate husband. During the trial in Jerusalem, I could not turn my gaze away from him. I stared at him until my eyes burned. Naïvely, I was looking
for the mark on his forehead, believing somehow that he who sows death must perforce dig a grave within himself. I was shaken by his normal appearance and behavior.

The way he spoke and pleaded made everything chillingly clear, disgustingly banal. With cool detachment, he expressed himself in a language devoid of irony or vehemence, monotonously reciting dates, figures and reports. At first he frightened me. It occurred to me that if he were sane, I should choose madness. It was he or I. For me, there could be no common ground with him. We could not inhabit the same universe, nor be governed by the same laws.

Yet he was a man like any other.

A metamorphosis was taking place. On many levels and affecting all of humanity: executioners and victims alike. The first too anxious to become executioners, the latter too ready to assume the role of victims. How long did it take? One night, one week. Or more. A year, perhaps three. Time is a lesser factor than man’s ability to discard his inner self. To a victim of the “concentrationary” system, it no longer mattered that he had been intellectual, laborer, angry student or devoted husband. A few beatings, a few screams turned him into a blank, his loss of identity complete. He no longer thought as before, nor did he look men straight in the eyes; his own eyes were no longer the same. Camp law and camp truth transcended all laws and all truth, and the prisoner could not help but submit. When he was hungry, he thought of soup and not of immortality. After a long night’s march, he yearned for rest and not for mercy. Was this all there was to man?

People wanted to understand: the executioner’s fascination with crime, the victim’s with death, and what had paved the way for Auschwitz. Explanations alternated with theories involving everything from politics to mass psychosis; none proved adequate. It was like coming up against a dark wall. Auschwitz eluded man to the end. And beyond. Whence the anguish hovering over the postwar generation. It needed to unravel the mystery; pinpoint the attraction the abyss exerts on man and determine the nature of what pushes him to his downfall. To succeed, one would have had to question many executioners and many of the dead. The first had long since escaped, the latter were still without graves.

So we turned to the victims, the survivors. They were asked to bare themselves, to delve into the innermost recesses of their being, and tell, and tell again, to the point of exhaustion and beyond: to the delirium that follows. How it had been. Had the killers really been so many and so conscientious in their task? And the machinery so efficient? Had it really been a universe with its own gods and priests, its own princes with their laws, its philosophers with their disciples? And you, how did you manage to survive? Had you known the art of survival from before? And how were you able to keep your sanity? And today: how can you sleep, work, go to restaurants and movies, how can you mingle with people and share their meals?

People wanted to know everything, resolve all questions, leave nothing in the dark. What frightened them was the mystery.

The survivors were reticent, their answers vague. The
subject: taboo. They remained silent. At first out of reserve; there are wounds and sorrows one prefers to conceal. And out of fear as well. Fear above all. Fear of arousing disbelief, of being told: Your imagination is sick, what you describe could not possibly have happened. Or: You are counting on our pity, you are exploiting your suffering. Worse: they feared being inadequate to the task, betraying a unique experience by burying it in worn-out phrases and images. They were afraid of saying what must not be said, of attempting to communicate with language what eludes language, of falling into the trap of easy half-truths.

Sooner or later, every one of them was tempted to seal his lips and maintain absolute silence. So as to transmit a vision of the holocaust, in the manner of certain mystics, by withdrawing from words. Had all of them remained mute, their accumulated silences would have become unbearable: the impact would have deafened the world.

When they agreed to lift the veil, many obstacles and inhibitions had to be overcome. They reassured themselves: This is but a difficult first step. In any event, we are only messengers. With some luck, other men will benefit from our experience. And learn what the individual is capable of doing under a totalitarian regime, when the line between humanity and inhumanity becomes blurred. And what wars are made of and where they lead. They will discover the link between words and the ashes they cover.

How guileless they were, those surviving tellers of tales.
They sought to confer a retroactive meaning upon a trial which had none. They thought: Who knows, if we can make ourselves heard, man will change. His very vision of himself will be altered. Thanks to illustrations provided by us, he will henceforth be able to distinguish between what he may or may not do, what goals to pursue or forgo. He could then forge for himself a reality made of desire rather than necessity, a freedom commensurate with his creative impulse rather than with his destructive instinct.

Twenty-five years later, after the reckoning, one feels discouragement and shame. The balance sheet is disheartening. There are even farcical aspects to the situation. In Germany, where Nazism is on the rise again, one finds former killers hiding beneath the respectability of judges, attorneys, businessmen, patrons of the arts, and even clergy. A French politician—and member of Parliament—publicly accuses the Jews of peddling their suffering. Robbed of their property and rights, the Jews in Arab countries live in constant fear. They are slandered in the Soviet Union, persecuted in Poland. And, fact without precedent, anti-Semitism has finally reached China.

Which raises the question for the survivors: Was it not a mistake to testify, and by that very act, affirm their faith in man and word?

I know of at least one who often feels like answering yes.

If society has changed so little, if so many strategists are preparing the explosion of the planet and so many people willingly submit, if so many men still live under oppression and so many
others in indifference, only one conclusion is possible: namely, that the failure of the black years has begotten yet another failure. Nothing has been learned; Auschwitz has not even served as warning. For more detailed information, consult your daily newspaper.

If the witness happens to be a storyteller, he will be left with a sense of impotence and guilt. He was wrong to have forced himself upon others, to have badgered a world wishing to take no notice. He was wrong to have thrown open the doors of the sanctuary in flames; people did not look. Worse: many looked and did not see.

Thus, writing itself is called into question. To set oneself the task of bringing back to life the hallucinatory reality of a single human being, in a single camp, borders on sacrilege. The truer the tale, the more factitious it appears. The secret must remain inviolate. Once revealed, it becomes myth, and can only be tarnished, diminished. In the end, words lose their innocence, their power to cast a spell. The truth will never be written. Like the Talmud, it will be transmitted from mouth to ear, from eye to eye. By its uniqueness, the holocaust defies literature. We think we are describing an event, we transmit only its reflection. No one has the right to speak for the dead, no one has the power to make them speak. No image is sufficiently demented, no cry sufficiently blasphemous to illuminate the plight of a single victim, resigned or rebellious, walking silently toward death, beyond anger, beyond regret. With pity perhaps.

Therein lies the dilemma of the storyteller who sees himself essentially as a witness, the drama of the messenger unable to deliver his message: how is one to speak of it, how is one not to
speak of it? Certainly there can be no other theme for him: all situations, all conflicts, all obsessions will, by comparison, seem pallid and futile. And yet, how is one to approach this universe of darkness without turning into a peddler of night and agony? Without becoming other?

About Yonathan ben Uziel, the Talmud tells us that he studied Torah with such fervor that flames encircled him—the flames of Sinai—blinding and scorching the birds who flew too close, wanting to see or be warmed. This is true also for the writer grappling with the theme of the holocaust; he will inevitably burn his fingers, and sometimes more.