Alan G. Gross

Department of Rhetoric
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
agross@maroon.tc.umn.edu

 

 

Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

 

Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

 

Zuckerman, Yitzhak. A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Barbara Harshav, ed. and trans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

 

I am looking at a photograph of a double line of children–girls before, boys behind–waiting patiently for their mikvah or ritual bath. All the boys are dressed in suits and all wear hats, mostly men’s felt hats with brims. One boy in the rear foreground turns toward the photographer, Roman Vishniak, who takes the picture with a hidden camera. (These are orthodox Jews who object to photography on religious grounds.) It is a sunny day in 1937 in Carpathian Ruthenia in an area that was to become a part of Hungary two years later.

 

By 1945, by the time these boys and girls would have reached their late teens, they were, in all likelihood, dead at the hands of the Hungarian fascists or the Nazis. Their survival was possible, too; Lucy Dawidowicz estimates that thirty percent of the Hungarian Jews survived the war (403). But the point is that the war did not merely disrupt, it dislocated their lives, whatever the event. Even had they happened to survive, they would have had no lives to return to. Jewish life on the European Continent, which had survived fifteen hundred years of anti-Semitism, did not survive five years of Nazi rule. Thus the collection of which the photograph I have described forms a part, is entitled, appropriately, A Vanished World.

 

The significant distant between disruption and dislocation can be measured by comparing the recent Steven Spielberg film, Schindler’s List with an incident recounted in Langer’s Holocaust Testimony. In the film, the ending is managed so as to give the impression that the Jews freed by the allies were in fact free, that is, after an extended episode of incarceration, they experienced the pleasure of anticipation that a return to their normal pre-war lives would mean. This would have been especially true of the Schindler Jews, who had been protected during the war by their eccentric industrialist-benefactor. In reasonably good health, and reasonably well-fed, they are poised on the threshold of their new lives. In such a state, naturally, they bestow upon their erstwhile benefactor the gratitude he deserves. At the film’s end, real-life Schindler Jews who have happened to survive enact the Jewish ritual of placing small stones on his tombstone, a gesture of respect, even of homage.

 

The reality of the Schindler Jews is another matter altogether. In the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale there exists the testimony of the son of two actual Schindler Jews, Menachem S. In 1943, his parents, fearing the worst, smuggled the five-year-old out of a Polish labor camp in the hope that he would survive the war under the protection of some Polish Christian family. His parents promised to retrieve him after the war, a promise that they managed to keep, since they survived under Schindler’s protection. Nevertheless their reunion defeats all of our expectations of a happy ending. Both parents are emaciated; the six-foot tall father weights only eighty-eight pounds; his rotted teeth hang loosely from his gums.

 

Menachim S. sees little resemblance between these people and his memory of his parents and, not surprisingly, he does not recognize them. In a scene ironically and accidentally reminiscent of Odysseus’s recognition by his old servant at his return, Menachim S. holds up the picture of his mother given to him at their parting. Recognition, however, does not ensue. “I just couldn’t believe,” he says, “that they were my parents.” For some time he calls them Mr.and Mrs. S, rather than father and mother.

 

Lawrence Langer, whose account of the incident I have so far been paraphrasing, gets the meaning of this episode exactly right, one more insightful analysis in a masterpiece of analysis:

 

The bizarre spectacle of an adult speaking of a seven-year-old child remembering his five-year-old self as an unrecapturable identity reminds us of the complex obstacles that frustrate a coherent narrative view of the former victim’s ordeal from the vantage point of the present. . . . Memory functions here to discredit the idea of family unity and to confirm an order of being–or more precisely, a disorder of being–that appears to the witness to have been the unique creation of the Holocaust experience. (111-112)

 

This contrast between Hollywood and reality reveals just how Spielberg has betrayed the memory of Holocaust survivors like Menachem S. He has concealed beneath the veneer of a conventional narrative of separation and reunion the uncomfortable truth that the conditions of captivity rendered such conventional narrative impossible.

 

What could have permitted such a desecration of character? To some, it may matter that the victims of the Holocaust were diaspora Jews, trained to survive by passivity. They should have known, they should have struggled actively against their oppressors. For those who say this, these sentences translate into: I would have known, I would have struggled to maintain my sense of self. In Surplus of Memory, Yitzhak Zuckman, a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, shows the flaw in this self-serving view. Of foreknowledge of the Holocaust, he says:

 

We read in Mein Kampf that Hitler would destroy the Jews; we read his speech in the Reichstag. But we didn’t take it seriously. Even today, who would consider every expression of anti-semitism? We saw it as rhetoric, not as the expression of something he intended to carry out. The idea was iberleben–we’ll get through this. (69)

 

On the question of the link between traditional Jewish passivity and the Holocaust, Zuckerman does not mince words:

 

When I talk to young people, . . . I explain that you can turn people of any nation, any race or religion into “Jews”–make them behave just like Jews. My comrades and I were lucky that we were always on the other side of the barricades. But those who fell into the hands of the Germans–and this time it was the Poles–behaved just like the Jews had. In a short time, in weeks, the Germans turned them into loathesome, humiliated, fearful people; and keep in mind, the Poles weren’t starved for years like the Jews in the ghettoes. (526)

 

If Zuckerman is right, we have discovered something, not about diaspora Jewry, but about our ability to make our fellow human beings so wretched that, while they do not cease to live, their lives cease to have meaning. If Zuckerman is right, Habermas’s view of the Holocaust becomes immediately relevant:

 

There [in Auschwitz] something happened that up to now nobody considered as even possible. There one touched on something which represents the deep layer of solidarity among all that wear a human face; notwithstanding the usual acts of beastliness of human history, the integrity of this common layer has been taken for granted. . . . Auschwitz has changed the continuity of the conditions of life within history. (quoted in Friedlander 3)

 

If Zuckerman and Habermas are correct, we have learned from the Holocaust that a life robbed of meaning is possible, and that the task of creating a world in which that theft is impossible may be beyond our powers. If Zuckerman and Habermas are correct, the examination of the effects of dislocation on the surivivors of the Holocaust tells us something about the difficulty of this daunting task. This difficulty is evident both in private and in public memory:in the testimony of surviving Jews and the the monuments we have built commemorating the experience to which they testify.

 

For the Jews, it is generally agreed, captivity meant passivity because those in the Nazi grip were granted virtually no freedom of action. They ceased to have their own story; they were forced, rather, to act out the story their captors had written for them. It is a story in which human beings were reduced to the moral status of sheep marked for slaughter. By actions for which they must be held responsible, the Nazis turned people into machines for survival, into men and women who cannot be held responsible for their actions.

 

Since the causes of the passivity of the prisoners of the Nazis were the conditions of captivity themselves, they cannot really be overcome: “any brave fighter,” says Zuckerman, “was liable to wind up in Treblinka. So the distinction many people make between the fighters and the masses ‘who went like sheep to the slaughter’, was artificial, absurd, and false” (261-262).

 

In his brilliant allegorical novel, Badenheim 1939, Aharon Appelfeld dramatizes the gradual descent into passivity that leads the Jews to their destruction. At the novel’s end,

 

An engine, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars, emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. Its appearance was as sudden as if it had arisen from a pit in the ground. “Get in!” yelled invisible voices. And the people were sucked in. Even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the headwaiter with his dog–they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. Nevertheless Dr. Pappenheim found time to make the following remark: “If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go.” (147-148)

 

That there is no Jewish story after captivity–no coherent, morally satisfying narrative–is a problem for anyone who wants to represent these victims and their victimization. Raul Hilberg’s masterly historical account of the Holocaust and Spielberg’s popular film share this problem. It is Schindler’s list; it is Schindler who has control. Hilberg entitles his book The Destruction of the European Jews, a passive construction that reflects in its grammar the central fact of the camps. The Jews have no story, or rather they have only one story, the Nazis’ story about them.

 

The actions and lives of the incarcerated Jews are, in a strict sense, meaningless. From the point of view of the Jews, nothing that they do, or can or cannot do, makes sense. In Survival at Auschwitz, Primo Levi makes the point in a memorable anecdote:

 

Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum? I asked him in my poor German. “Hier is kein warum (there is no why here),” he replied, pushing me inside with a shove. (29)

 

The German means that there is no whyfor Levi (or for any prisoner.) The Jewish search for meaning in camp life is bound to fail.

 

A chief consequence of this absence of meaning is the decoupling of action from its usual consequences. According to the testimony of one survivor, he left his daily ration of bread in the care of a companion while he went off to the toilet. The companion ate the bread and the man complained. “Look, I asked him to look after my piece of bread, and he ate it up.” The Kapo [the inmate supervisor] said: “You took away his life. Right?” He said: “Well, I’ll give it back this afternoon, the ration.” He [the Kapo] said: “No, come outside.” At this point the Kapo orders the offender to lie on the floor, places a board across his neck, and stomps on it, breaking his neck (quoted in Langer 27). To grasp the “meaning” of this episode, we must imagine a world in which stealing bread is a fatal offense, murder a casual act without consequences.

 

In this world in which acts and their consequences are so mismatched, filial piety fares no better than complaint. Arriving with his family at Auschwitz, Abraham P. finds that his parents and youngest brother are sent to the left, to death, while he and two older brothers and a younger brother are sent to the right. Abraham P. recalls:

 

I told my little kid brother, I said to him, “Solly, geh tsu Tate un Mame [go to papa and mama].” And like a little kid, he followed–he did. . . . I wonder what my mother and father were thinking, especially when they were all . . . when they all went to the [gas chamber]. I can’t get it out of my head. It hurts me, it bothers me, I don’t know what to do. (quoted in Langer 185-186)

 

This disproportion disables normal moral judgment. Ordinarily, we would expect a mother to care for and to comfort her children in distress; normally, we would label as self-sacrifice the gesture of a stranger who ignores danger to comfort a child in trouble. But in the world of the camps, what looks like callousness may be helpless terror, and what looks like heroism may be despair. On the ramp at Auschwitz where, upon arrival, the first “selections” were made, a ten-year-old girl refused to go to the left (toward death). She kicked and stratched and screamed to her mother, who was standing by on the right, among those temporarily spared. She pleaded with her not to let the Nazis kill her. One of the three SS men holding the young girl down approached the mother, asking her if she wanted to accompany her daughter. The mother refused the offer. Was the SS man showing compassion? Did the mother lack compassion? Merely to ask these questions is to show the inadequacy of our moral vocabulary in this instance. In making sense of a world that makes no sense, onlookers on concentration camp life are as disadvantaged as participants.

 

During a selection at Birkenau Mrs. Zuckner, another mother, held fast to the hand of a little girl she knew, a little girl destined for the gas chambers. Mrs. Zuckner’s daughter, Esther, recalls, “This was the last time I saw my mother. She went with that neighbor’s child. So when we talk about heroes, mind you, this was a hero: a woman who would not let a four-year-old child go by herself” (Hartman 242). Was Mrs. Zuckner a heroine? We must tread delicately here so as not to dishonor her memory. But, equally, we must not do the unknown mother on the ramp the injustice of making her responsible for her conduct. The truth is we do not know how to judge in these cases, to distribute praise or blame when human beings are reduced to choices such as these. We could only know, perhaps, if we came to be in a similar situation, and we can only hope that we never do.

 

As Langer says, we view Holocaust testimony “expecting to encounter heroes and heroines, [but] we meet only decent men and women, constrained by circumstances, reluctantly, to abandon roles that we as audience expect (and need) to find ingrained in their natures” (25) We can see this need operating in the following interview, presented verbatim with interpolations by Langer in square brackets:

 

INTERVIEWER: You were able to survive because you were so plucky. When you stepped back in line . . .

 

HANNA F: No dear, no dear, no . . . no, I had no . . . . It wasn’t luck, it was stupidity. [At this, the two interviewers laugh deprecatingly, overriding her voice with their own “explanation,” as one calls out, “You had a lot of guts!”]

 

HANNA F.: [simultaneously] No, no, no, no, there were no guts, there was just sheer stupidity. (63-64)

 

In his commentary, Langer points to the contrast between the heroic thesaurus rifled for such terms as pluck and guts and Hanna F.’s impoverished thesaurus containing only the single word, reiterated, stupidity. He points out that the interviewers exhibit an anxiety over Hanna F.’s judgment so extreme that they deny Hanna F. her own experience.

 

The tension between Hanna F.’s insistence on her deflationary version of the past and the interviewers’ insistence on their inflationary one is evident also in the public memory, the way in which nations and future generations choose to remember their past. It is these tensions and the reconstructions and appropriations to which they lead that are the subject of James Young’s The Texture of Memory, his excellent book on Holocaust memorials and their meaning. Young’s presentation of Nathan Rapaport’s Ghetto Monument in Warsaw and the Jochen and Esther Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism in Hamburg provide us with a contrast that illustrates the strength of Young’s methods and the validity of his insights. They also illustrate what I take to be his chief weakness, an attitude of “scientific” objectivity, of tout comprendre, tout pardonner. However understandable on so potentially an explosive topic as Holocaust memorials, this attitude, unfortunately, also inhibits Young from carrying his best insights to their natural conclusions.

 

In his discussion of Rapaport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument, for example, although Young notices the classical proportions with which these representatives of Jewish Defense Force are sculpted, he does not notice that they do not look like the actual Jews who fought so heroically against impossible odds. Young also notices that the heroic figures in front are complemented by a bas relief of the martyrs of the Jewish people at the back of the monument, but he does not notice the significance of this placement. It was the martyrs who actually predominated, not the heroes. Moreover, those who predominated in the Ghetto were not martyrs in any real sense, but victims.

 

Young notices the irony that the Memorial is built with stones meant for a monument to Nazi victory. Its sculptor was to be Arno Brecker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. But Young fails to notice that the style of the Warsaw Monument is eerily remiscent of the style of the Nazi sculpture for which Brecker became known (Merker 246, 292). Despite the fact that Young notices the semantic fungibility of such monuments, used at one time to justify Israel’s struggle against its Arab neighbors, at another to justify the struggle of the Palestine Liberation Organization against Zionism, he does not notice the glorification of war inherent in the dramatization of military heroism, no matter how honorable the cause.

 

In contrast, the Gerzes’s Monument Against Fascism is proof against inappropriate appropriations. A tall hollow aluminum pillar covered with soft lead, it is set in a pedestrian shopping mall in a commercial suburb of Hamburg. Attached to the pillar is a steel stylus, to allow the citizens to inscribe their names. On the monument’s base is the following inscription:

 

We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12 meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice. (30)

 

Instead of an orderly list of names–a sort of self-constructed Vietnam Memorial–the monument proved to be a site for graffiti, from Stars of David to Swastikas, from “Jurgen liebt Kirsten (Jurgen loves Kirsten)” to “Auslïnder raus (Foreigners, get out!).” The artists approved of the “desecration,” and local newspaper made the crucial point: “The filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures. The inscriptions, a conglomerate of approval, hatred, anger and stupidity, are like a fingerprint of our city applied to the column” (35-37).

 

Like the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, the Monument against Fascism has been misused by onlookers, but the difference is significant: while the Ghetto Monument is incorporated into hostile fantasies with frighting ease, the Monument Against Fascism incorporates these fantasies, making them part of its trenchant message. Young does not notice this.

 

Young notices the appropriateness of this “counter-monument” to the event it commemorates: “How better to remember forever a vanished people than by the perpetually unfinished, ever-vanishing monument?” (31). But, in the economy of his exposition, countermonuments do not occupy the central place they deserve. Their analysis forms only the first chapter of a book whose organization is concentric. Young’s book moves from Germany, where the mass murders were planned to Poland, where most of the murders took place, to Israel, whose founding relates directly to the Holocaust, to America, whose Jews were untouched by the Holocaust. In the book’s economy, therefore, the commentary onthe countermonuments forms an anomolous prelude rather than a resounding climax. As a consequence, Young fails to notice the irony that the Monument Against Fascism in the heart of Germany is more deeply respectful of the Diaspora dead than the Warsaw Ghetto Monument at the center of Jewish heroism. We cannot respect the dead by misrepresenting them, no matter how flattering the misrepresentation.

 

We must face the unpleasant truth that the European Diaspora was a failed experiment in Jewish accomodation. The relative absence of heroism during the Holocaust is in part a function of the combination of deception, efficiency, and murderous purpose hatched in the deliberations of Nazi leaders, shaped at the Wannsee conference, and perfected in the death camps. But is also a function of Jewish life during the European Diaspora, a philosophy of iberleben, of living through persecution. We would therefore expect that Jewish heroes, if they revealed themselves, would manifest a personal history far different from the Diaspora average.

 

This was indeed the case if the testimony of Yitzhak Zuckerman is to be believed. Surplus of Memory, his recorded testimony, is not a book but a rambling account, not history, but the raw material of history. It is not meant to be read but to be mined. Though Zuckerman’s account must be treated with the skepticism appropriate to any reminiscence, it is nevertheless a moving depiction of the birth and biography of a hero.

 

Zuckerman was no ordinary Jew. He was a Zionist, specifically a leader of the He-Halutz Ha-Tza’ir (Young Pioneer) Zionist socialist movement, one of a collection of youth movements striving to realize their ideals on kibbutzim (collective farms) in Eretz Israel (The Land of Israel, then Palestine). It was this disciplined idealism, this task of leadership, that brought Zuckerman back to the Ghetto from which he had escaped, to organize educational efforts for the young. But by 1942 it was clear that these efforts would be hopeless, that the Jews were marked for destruction. In Zuckerman’s words:

 

In July, the idea of uprising was remote for me, because I didn’t know how to build a force. The question then was only how to announce, to alarm. This was the execution of hundreds of thousands of Jews. The question wasn’t uprising or Treblinka [a death camp]. There was only Treblinka. The question was how to make the Jews resist going to Treblinka. (217)

 

From this time on Zuckerman harbored no illusions: “We knew we were going to die. The question was only when and how to finish” (266). In January of 1943, there is a prelude to the Uprising that occurred in the middle of April:

 

The January fighting taught us something. . . . The Germans were routed because their situation was worse than ours. First, they were surprised; they were organized in small platoons. They were always below, and we were always above them. . . . The first time they came with the knowledge that these Jews were like all other Jews; after all, they had seen so many Jewish youths that it didn’t occur to them that any Jews were armed. . . . So it was beyond all my expectations and I was very happy. The first time we killed Germans, we felt that this was the final battle. But there was no drama, no heroic outbursts; except for one case of hysteria, there was nothing exceptional. After that, we no longer felt like people going to death. (Zuckerman 288)

 

Zuckerman is under no illusions about the military effectiveness of the Uprising. But the Uprising has a more general significance:

 

If there’s a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The really important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youths, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising. I don’t know if there’s a standard to measure that. (xiii)

 

The literature on the Holocaust has become, understandably, a Jewish industry. Each year sees the publication of dozens of books on the subject: memoirs, fiction, history, literary criticism. We might all be excused–Gentile and Jew–if we said genug (enough is enough). Nevertheless, the best of this work that I have come across–Claude Lanzman’s Shoah, Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Langer’s Holocaust Memories–is fine by the highest standards of its various genres: film, fiction, memoirs, literary criticism.

 

Each of these masterpieces enables us to encounter and better to understand perhaps the most disreputable incident in our checkered human past. It is a story about the conditions under which the human spirit can be dismantled beyond repair. It is also a story about how this same spirit can survive (in isolated cases) despite such massive degradation. So long as we live in a world in which “Jews” continue to be created–in Bosnia, Somalia, and Ruanda, in the Occupied Territories (where Jews create “Jews”)–the literature of the Holocaust cannot, unfortunately, cease to be relevant.

 

Works Cited

 

• Appelfeld, Aharon. Badenheim 1939. Trans. Dalya Bilu. Boston: David R. Godine, 1980.
• Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945. New York: Bantam, 1986.
• Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
• Hartman, Geoffrey H., ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
• Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.
• Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
• Merker, Reinhard. Die bildenden Kánste im National sozialismus: Kulturideologie, Kulturpolitik, Kulturproduktion. Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag, 1983.
• Vishniac, Roman. A Vanished World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983.