IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOLOCAUST
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20).
I.
Most historical events inevitably diminish in impact with
the passage of time. Not so with the Holocaust, which, certainly in my own
case, the impact has grown in scale and horror as I have grown older, and others
have told me of a similar response. That this should be is so is not hard to
fathom. The steady process from petty indignities to the mass delegitimization,
increased humiliation, ostracization, and eventual murder, the attempted
genocide, of an entire race of people happened on the European continent, in
one of the most literate and cultured nation states, within living memory. Men,
women, and children were rounded up, marched into nearby woods or wasteland,
and shot, to be thrown into ditches they had been forced to dig. Later the
process involved herding jews into ghettos, starving, and then stuffing them
into cattle trucks and transported to industrial killing plants, their hair,
gold teeth, spectacles, and what few possessions that had not yet been stolen,
collected for recycling. Those not caught in this net were hunted down
assiduously, in the hope that eventually none would remain on the European
continent. Those outside German control could wait for later.
Of course, the sheer scale of the killing makes it difficult
to comprehend the crime in human terms. To paraphrase Stalin’s cynical reflection,
one person’s death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Therefore, it is
essential to view the events from 1933 to 1945 through the prism of the lives
of individuals, the ordinary people, shop assistants, librarians, the educated
and the illiterate, rich and poor, the parents and their children, religious
and secular. People like us, marked out to be slaughtered like cattle, ticked
of lists to be shot or gassed, possibly experimented on beforehand.
When considering these events, the extraordinarily sensitive
issue of survivor’s testimony is raised. Precious, essential to our grasping
the tragedy of lives destroyed, but also distorting and shaping our
understanding of events in ways that ironically filters out the dark truth. The
survivors were a miniscule fraction of those sent for slaughter. The reality
being that if herded onto a cattle wagon you would shortly be dead at best you
would last months, but your life was over.
When we listen to the tragic testimony of those who survived
the camps, we are apt to fantasize that we too would have survived. We would
not, even if we survived the ‘selection,’ we would soon be dead of disease,
starvation, and exhaustion. To put or chances in context the gas chambers at
Treblinka, a pure death factory, had the capacity to kill one to two thousand
people per hour. Each transport delivered between five to seven thousand people.
It is estimated that around 700,000 and 900,000 people were murdered[1]
at Treblinka alone.
Even if, by some miracle we survived, survival
would invariably have had to be secured by fantastic luck, or more likely at
the expense of others, even if that were only the felt experience, since your luck would be another’s misfortune.[2]
The innocent perished, the canny survived. Primo Levi understood this better
than most, and perhaps never forgave himself for surviving.
It was the perpetrators who survived, only a tiny proportion
facing anything resembling justice. Those who did stand trial were striking for,
in Hannah Arendt’s famous pronouncement on Eichmann, their ‘banality.’
The classic example
is Hans Frank, the brutal overlord of truncated Poland, with absolute power
over life and death who oversaw the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto and the transportation
to death camps of millions of Jews. Well read, an able piano player given to
sentimentality, he wept over music but not over the fate of the jews or poles over
whom he enjoyed absolute power. At Nuremberg he sought to shift all responsibility
onto others, and, claiming to have found God, was accepted into the Catholic
church. It is difficult to find words to describe this disgusting and pathetic little
man. In other circumstances one could imagine him as a small-town lawyer with a
musical hobby. Utterly banal, utterly unremarkable, he found himself in a
position to conduct mass murder and embraced the opportunity.
ii.
The Holocaust haunts the modern imagination, it even haunts
the imagination of the deniers and revisionists, - otherwise why so much
trouble.[3]
It represents a horror that challenges human comprehension and threatens
notions of civilisation and sanity. It represents a reality about the human
condition that we find difficult to bear, prompting denial, repression, and a
sort of collective supressed depression.
Occurring when and where it did it also challenges
conceptions of modernism, of progress. The mechanisms of mass production and the
industrial revolution and advancements in science and technology were harnessed
to the mass slaughter of human beings.
Perhaps the deadliest longer-term aspect of the Holocaust
has been its refusal to yield up any answers, any solutions. Nor does the
mantra of ‘never again’ seem to have any purchase, as Rwanda and Bosnia so
terribly testify.
As the Holocaust recedes from contemporary memory, I suspect
its power to haunt and distress will not diminish, I certainly hope not.
NOTE: This is not a review, but reflections created by
reading the book.
[1]
Though one suspects the Nazis preferred the term ‘processed.’
[2] It
should go without saying that no culpability rests with the victims of Nazi
sadism. Deliberately reduced to a savage state,- though even in these circumstances
many retained their dignity, - people survived as best they could, most, of
course, despite these strategies, did not.
[3] I
realise that this is obviously a controversial point, and I am certainly not
suggesting that the likes of David Irving are haunted by some sort of historical
guilt, not at least on any conscious level. I think there obsession with pouring
doubt on the historical facts of the holocaust may be more a process of trying
to salvage an ideology which they seek to resurrect.
