Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust (Contributions to the Study of Religion)

Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust

Recent Titles in Christianity and the Holocaust—Core Issues The Stones Will Cry Out: Pastoral Reflections on the Shoah (With Liturgical Resources) Douglas K. Huneke Christianity, Tragedy, and Holocaust Literature Michael R. Steele From the Unthinkable to the Unavoidable: American Christian and Jewish Scholars Encounter the Holocaust Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, editors Holocaust Education and the Church-Related College: Restoring Ruptured Traditions Stephen R. Haynes Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican Harry James Cargas, editor Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust Victoria J. Barnett The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust: Radical Theology Encounters the Shoah Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth, editors Confessing Christ in a Post-Holocaust World: A Midrashic Experiment Henry F. Knight Learning from History: A Black Christian's Perspective on the Holocaust Hubert Locke History, Religion, and Meaning: American Reflections on the Holocaust and Israel Julius Simon, editor

Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust Sidney M. Bolkosky

Contributions to the Study of Religion, Number 69 Christianity and the Holocaust—Core Issues Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, Series Editors

Greenwood Press Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bolkosky, Sidney M. Searching for meaning in the Holocaust / Sidney M. Bolkosky. p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of religion. Christianity and the Holocaust—core issues, ISSN 0196-7053 ; no. 69) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-30764-^1 (alk. paper) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Influence. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945}—Psychological aspects. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Personal narratives—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. D804.3.B655 2002 940.53'18—dc21 2001040589 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Sidney M. Bolkosky All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001040589 ISBN: 0-313-30764-4 ISSN: 0196-7053 First published in 2002 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Copyright Acknowledgment The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from the Voice/Vision interviews provided by Dr. Sidney M. Bolkosky. Reprinted by permission of The Voice/Vision Holocaust Oral History Project at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Contents Series Foreword

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Preface

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Acknowledgments 1 Introduction

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2 The Search for Meaning

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3 The Devil

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4 In Search of the Simple Answer

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5 Of Parchment and Ink

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6 "Angels, God's Emissaries Would Look Like Germans"

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7 Hidden Children

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8 Conclusions: Reflections on Meaning

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Bibliography

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Index

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Series Foreword The Holocaust did not end when the Allies liberated the Jewish survivors from Nazi Germany's killing centers and concentration camps in 1945. The consequences of that catastrophic event still shadow the world's moral, political, and religious life. The series, Christianity and the Holocaust—Core Issues explores Christian complicity, indifference, resistance, rescue, and other responses to the Holocaust. Concentrating on core issues such as the Christian roots of anti-Semitism, the roles played by Christian individuals and groups during the Holocaust, and the institutional reactions of Christians after Auschwitz, the series has a historical focus but addresses current concerns as well. While many of the series' authors are well-known, established Holocaust scholars, the series also features young writers who will become leaders in the next generation of Holocaust scholarship. As all of the authors study the Holocaust's history, they also assess its impact on Christianity and its implications for the future of the Christian tradition. Can one speak about "the meaning of the Holocaust"? To do so, writes Sidney M. Bolkosky, author of Searching for Meaningin the Holocaust, "implies some understanding of the event; a meaning derived from the examination of its history. But what could such a meaning be?" —for victims, the perpetrators, the bystanders, or the rescuers? And, "Did we need the Holocaust to learn that?" For many years Sid Bolkosky has been working with survivors, helping them to tell their stories, trying to listen sensitively to what they have to

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say. He has been reticent to address the subject of Christianity and the Holocaust, but he can no longer avoid doing so, not because he is more knowledgeable about Christianity and the Holocaust but because themes of religion run through the survivor narratives. They do so, writes Bolkosky, "in unconventional ways, frequently bearing surprising messages about Christianity and Judaism, about God and history." What does it all mean? Bolkosky agrees with Elie Wiesel: "Auschwitz represents . . . the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning." According to Bolkosky, one must not look for meaning or for lessons to be learned from the Holocaust. There is only memory, and there is silence, which "produces its own eerie dialogues with voices from the victims as well as from the perpetrators." Where does that leave us, then? Why research and study about the Holocaust if, in the end, we are faced with meaninglessness? Because, writes Sid Bolkosky, "Somewhere in the midst of that dialogue lives the possibility of a fuller appreciation of tortured silences and perhaps an acceptance of the abysmal implications of the Holocaust without insisting on meaning." No "meaning," but "abysmal implications." While Bolkosky does not believe there are lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, he does believe that we must learn about the History of the Holocaust "because the past constitutes part of the present." And, if we do not want that past to become our future, we had better pay attention to it, not because of any meaning it may hold for us human beings, but because of its implications for the present—and for our common future. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth

Preface To speak of the "meaning" of the Holocaust implies some understanding of the event; a meaning derived from the examination of its history. But what could such a meaning be? That human beings torture and kill each other? That hatred and violence are part of the human condition? Did we need the Holocaust to learn that? Or does it tell us that care and kindness, humane treatment and empathy ought to be the course of civilized lives? Did we need the Holocaust to learn that? Do we learn "lessons" from the victims? From the rescuers? From the perpetrators? From the victims we learn of loss, one by one, person by person, child by child, family by family, so that we can have an appreciation for the depth and essence of the Holocaust. And from the perpetrators? The machinery of the Holocaust encompassed not only the SS and the Nazi party but was continental in scope, a European involvement that was total. After nearly six decades of scholarship and research, we must now include among the perpetrators the 1.5 million railroad bureaucrats and workers; the more than 10,000 physicians; the police forces all across Europe; the postal services that delivered notices of deportation; the church hierarchies that turned over records of who was "Aryan" since the category was determined by religion; the architects who built places like Auschwitz and Treblinka; the mechanics and electricians; the chemists of DEGESCH, the company that produced Zyklon B, the lethal gas used in gas chamber to kill prisoners, other countries' railroads, publicly and privately owned like the Dutch railroad, which transported Dutch Jews like Anne Frank and her family from Amsterdam to

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Westerbork, where they would be put on German trains to Auschwitz or Mauthausen. We should include, too, I think, the police who arrested people like the Franks, the warehouse employees who stored Jewish possessions until they could be distributed to German families of soldiers, the dieticians who devised diets calculated to use up calories in three months, and the lawyers and civil servants who wrote and adjudicated the laws isolating and then eliminating Jews from sight and from life. In the context of Christian Europe, with its long history of anti-Jewish action, should not the list also encompass Christian clergy who gave over baptismal records to German authorities with which to identify Jews, who supported the racial identification of a Christian Aryanism, exhorted their congregants to support and enthusiastically endorse the theory and practice of violent racial antisemitism? Finally, what do we say about those clergy who remained silent, watching, from every capital and region of Europe, from Berlin to Rome, Czestachowa to Amsterdam, small towns in Belgium and France to villages in the Carpathian Mountains? And what is the lesson in that? That indifference, under such circumstances, becomes lethal and criminal—the sin of the 20th century, according to Elie Wiesel? That individuals and governments shared then, as they share now, in this sin? At least since 1994, with the opening and then the sustained popularity of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; the extraordinary success of Steven Spielberg's Schindler 's List, and numerous other films that won various awards; and the proliferation of Holocaust survivor oral history projects, the increased interest has been nothing short of astonishing. The meaning of this surge of attention to the Holocaust is elusive. What does such mindfulness of the subject mean and why has it prompted considerable consternation in numerous veterans of Holocaust studies and in scholars—from psychologists to literary critics—who have grown disquieted over the proliferation of interview projects and the popularization of the event? I consider myself among this worried group. Some of my own concerns stem from what Alvin Rosenfeld has called the Americanization of the Holocaust.1 Where once Holocaust historians spoke of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, now newspeople, filmmakers, novelists, and literary critics, as well as survivors, speak of rescuers, martyrs, and heroes. Certainly the Holocaust becomes more palatable if we talk about heroism and rescue than if we focus on death and persecution, on humiliation and inhuman behavior. Better, for example, to speak in

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Spielberg's film of 1,200 saved Jews in Krakow than the 55,000 who were not saved in that city. All of us long to believe in Anne Frank's famous diary entries about peace and tranquility returning after the approaching thunder engulfs her and the most often-quoted comment that begins with "in spite of everything" and ends with her hope in good triumphant. From the Holocaust, it seems, we might find confirmation of the "triumph of the spirit" or a meaningful legacy that might enliven our future, make it more vigilant, assure us that a holocaust will never happen again. Survivors who speak of their ordeals do not, as a rule, voice visions of redemptive peace and tranquility. Nor do they describe themselves as clinging to hope for mankind in the heart of darkness, or of goodness victorious. They speak reticently, in a language that they know remains inadequate to communicate the reality of the Holocaust: "Auschwitz— what is that? How can I explain it to you," breathed one woman.2 The word, the name, carried such density for her, so many associations that have no apposite experiential context for listeners from the rest of the world, that she frustratedly wept over that inability. Few if any survivors speak of an end to that cruelty so that "peace and tranquility will return again." Survivor testimonies, in short, like Wiesel's Night, or other written memoirs, do not leave listeners or readers feeling better. Unlike popular media presentations, such testimony does not reassure or buoy us. We are left with sadness—profound, empty, and problematic in terms of educational goals, indeed, in terms of how we should think or feel at all. For 20 years I have been unavoidably reflecting on how Holocaust survivors sometimes speak and, more importantly, how we might listen to them. This has involved wrestling with how to raise consciousness about the difficulties and pitfalls of both speaking and listening. I think that expectations of meaning, theme, theory, purpose are intrinsically bound up with these issues and should be confronted honestly, with an informed appreciation of the nature and history of the Holocaust, but free of preconceived notions of therapeutic or cathartic results. Primo Levi decried the simplification of the Holocaust; he wrote about it in The Drowned and the Saved. His fear should provide us with our principal caveat: In order to confront the questions of the Holocaust as honestly and directly as possible, we need to forego simplification and guard against reducing complicated questions and answers to simple ones. That means vigilance against the trivialization or attenuation of any aspect of the epoch.

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Because of my work with survivors, I have been reticent to address the subject of Christianity and the Holocaust. Rarely have my interviewees confronted that issue directly. Almost none of them encountered religiously grounded antipathy, yet most seemed to take Christian antisemitism for granted. The hatred that came from neighbors, then from Germans, invariably manifested itself genetically, racially based, or simply unquestioned and even unspoken. Yet, upon reconsideration of many of those interviews, themes of religion run like a twisted river through the narratives. Indeed, it swells, sometimes to a confused and often angry torrent. They are here, in this volume, in unconventional ways, frequently bearing surprising messages about Christianity and Judaism, about God and history. How much meaning they yield remains problematic. Years ago, in an essay called "A Plea for the Dead," Elie Wiesel wrote that "Auschwitz represents . . . the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning." In that essay he recalls that his father told him, in that unholy place, that thinking was no longer of any use.3 Charlotte Delbo, perhaps the most eloquent of survivor poets, in a poem named "Springtime" repeated again and again the question "Why have I kept my memory? Why this injustice?" Her conclusion: "And we have lost our memory. None of us will return. None of us should have returned."4 These voices ought not be denied: despite their renunciations, Wiesel thinks and Delbo remembers—the twin curses for the survivor. For the rest of us, memory and thinking persist, what they will bring or prevent none of us may say. And if the world is not the idealistic dream that people think Anne Frank's diary presented in her famous phrase about goodness, it is not Auschwitz either. Our only hope rests in thinking, more specifically, thinking through other people's eyes, and remembering. NOTES 1. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "The Americanization of the Holocaust" (Ann Arbor: The Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, 1995). 2. Cyla W., UM-Dearborn "Voice/Vision" Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive. 3. Elie Wiesel, "A Plea for the Dead," in Legends of Our Time (New York: Avon Books, 1968), 213-237. 4. Charlotte Delbo, "Springtime" in Auschwitz and After, trans, by Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 109-113.

Acknowledgments From the moment I entered the home of myfirstHolocaust survivor interviewee, I have thought that any person—student, scholar, historian, filmmaker, interviewer, writer, museum designer, playwright—who enters the realm of the Holocaust exploits the victims. Those who listen to Holocaust testimonies or speak or write about them engage in the same activity of exploitation. Even the survivors themselves, if they speak and/or write, become aware of this painful observation, this activity that compounds the problems of speaking, writing, or listening. No motive is commensurate with the activity: not "educational purposes," or "memory," or fighting Holocaust deniers. We use the testimonies of witnesses and that, by definition, implies exploitation. Given that, I think perhaps we can salvage the integrity of the testimonies, the witnesses, the victims who survived and those who did not and of the history of the Holocaust by listening, writing, speaking, and thinking about them with deeper sensitivities to the difficulties that invade personal memories. This should only enhance our appreciation of the history of the Holocaust. The question of meaning in or of the Holocaust arose from despair, from listening and from thinking about the reality of the testimonies. John Roth and Carol Rittner seemed to intuit that and have given me latitude to write from my experience and perceptions as both historian and Jewish listener of Holocaust survivors. Writing about this subject and these people resurrected some feelings and anxieties that assailed me when I first began working with oral histories. Nightmares returned, along with sleepless nights and apprehensions. I remembered how isolat-

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ing and lonely this work must be and finally, again, turned to my good friend and scholar, Hank Greenspan. Even before he read the manuscript he lent sympathetic ears. No one has written more sensitively and knowledgeably about listening to Holocaust survivors and I reaped the benefit of his genius. Interviewing survivors has never gotten easier over my 20 years of doing it. If each interviewee experienced doubts and reservations, not to mention physical and psychological disabilities, just before and often after my visit, I, too, hesitated at doorways, considered turning around and leaving. Only on the rarest of occasions have I felt that a survivor benefited from the interview, never cathartically, sometimes after long hours of introspective consideration. Because of my work with so many of the hidden children in Detroit, they invited me to join the Hidden Children/ Child Survivor Association as a kind of honorary member. From the depths of depression, I found them supportive and caring. Their patience and tolerance, their indulgence of my one morning of doubt made the conclusion of this book possible. I cannot fully express my gratitude to Rene Lichtman, Erna Gorman, Stefa Kupfer, Irene Sobel, Ina Silbergleit, Morris and Miriam Rubenstein, Esther Posner, and Adya Zakalik, all of whom were at the Hidden Children meeting on that day. Dr. Fred Lessing graciously offered three perspectives with his reading: as a former professor of philosophy he brought academic acumen; as a psychologist he showed considerable insight; and as a hidden child he expressed compassion and understanding. He and his wife, Dr. Roz Lessing, read the manuscript quickly and thoroughly. My colleagues, for whom I am grateful each day, helped me where and when they could. Always encouraging, if sometimes puzzled at my choice of career path, they listened to the listener and offered their professional advice in the most generous of ways. Erik Austin of the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research was, as always, a rock to cling to, a dear friend who had become an expert on the Holocaust. Historians Gerry Moran, Elaine Clark, Joe Lunn, Camron Amin, Greg Field, and Dennis Papazian listened patiently, frequently offering suggestions that proved useful. Even though his field is political science, Michael Rosano did the same. Historian and good friend Mary Kay Carter assiduously read the manuscript and offered intelligent and critical comments quickly, compassionately, and without sentimentalism. I appreciate each of them more than I can say.

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Survivors and colleagues have become a family to me. They have joined my wife Lori, my children Gabriel and Miriam, and Benjamin, my son-in-law, in significant ways. But it was to these four that I turned again for comfort and direction. They have filled my life with music for 25 years, and have consistently healed my heart when it seemed broken. In this specific, very personal way, death was overcome by love and music.

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Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust

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1

Introduction My friend Janek went to school with me and together we played soccer. I was very good, even at a young age. We practiced a lot together. I even went to his house a few times even though he wasn't Jewish. But then I finally asked him why he never came to my house. "My mother won't let me," he said. [Pause] She was afraid we would kill him for his blood to use at Pesach, you know, for matzo. [Pause] So we weren't such good friends any more. I didn't understand what he meant, but I knew it was antisemitic.1 Sam O., survivor

As he recalled an incident from his childhood in Krakow, the voice of this survivor sounded perplexed; over the years the voice had grown a bit angry and disgusted. That day began his education into the paranoid world that accuses an international Jewish cabal of undermining Western civilization and of Jewish ritual murder; from that day he remained convinced that Christians everywhere are antisemitic. Perhaps non-Jews do not believe Jews will kill their children for their blood anymore, but he believed some shrouded superstition persisted, and both his belief and the superstition will never subside. How, then, does one speak of "Christianity and the Holocaust" in any rational way to a survivor with such memories? I have begun this introduction with a comment from a victim of the Holocaust who survived because it seems a logical and generative place to open a discussion of any aspect of that epoch. This intersection of mem-

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ory and history, each informing the other, prompts questions, presents readers (and listeners) with a quandary of how to assimilate the information it offers, how to listen and what, if any, meaning such testimony might imply. In this rare comment about Christianity, the survivor has revealed his own puzzlement, his hesitation to draw some conclusion, his failure to fathom the rationale behind the superstition that separated him from his non-Jewish classmate. From a historical perspective, of course, the origins of Christian anti-Jewish feelings lay in religion. Jews appeared as the eternal rejecters of the Messiah, the deniers, or the murderers, of Jesus—"the decisive Jewish sin."2 Antisemitism—that misnomer, the term coined in Germany in the 19th century to distinguish between religious and racial differences—spread like an infection across Christian Europe throughout the Middle Ages, fostered more and more by superstition and legend. Animosity toward Jews can be found from John the Gospeler to Saint John Chrysostom, from Paul to Augustine of Hippo, from Luther to 20thcentury bishops; its forms became increasingly explicit and virulent. According to Chrysostom, for example, the Jews were not ordinary members of the human race but people who "danced with the Devil," were congenitally evil, sacrificed children to demons, "committed outrages against God himself." He admonished his fellow Christians in 4thcentury Antioch that the synagogue was worse than a brothel, more dangerous than a den of thieves and full of "filthy wild beasts"; "the Devil's house," to be despised by good Christians, as were "the souls of the Jews." 3 Chrysostom preached that Jews were "fit for slaughter," citing Jesus in Luke ("these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them before me" [Luke 19:27]).4 The founder of the Reformation, the ultimately revered Martin Luther, intensified the fire, after his failed and disappointed attempts to draw Jews to his own fold. Almost echoing Chrysostom, here are some of his more infamous passages about Jews: [The long-suffering of the Jews] is proof that the Jews, surely rejected by God, are no longer his people, and neither is he any longer their God. This is in accord with Hosea 1:9, "Call his name not my people, for you are not my people and I am not your God." Yes, unfortunately, this is their lot, truly a terrible one. They may interpret this as they will; we see the facts before our eyes, and these do not deceive us.

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St. John the Baptist took them to task severely . . . saying, "Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham" but a "brood of vipers" [Matt. 3:7]. Our Lord also calls them a "brood of vipers"; furthermore, in John 3:39 he states: "If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did.. .. You are of your father the devil." It was intolerable to them to hear that they were not Abraham's but the devil's children, nor can they bear to hear this today. On the Jews and Their Lies consists of a series of remarkable and repugnant exegeses. In almost Talmudic interpretations of the texts of both the Hebrew and Christian bibles, Luther established his case against contemporary Jews: a once noble and blessed people, they have taken for granted their privileged position. With linguistic as well as theological scrutiny, Luther claimed to bring to bear evidence from Jewish texts to condemn contemporary Jews of blasphemy, criminal behaviors, evil conspiracies, and murderous or near-murderous practices. The Jews, he insisted, were guilty by their own standards, abandoning their own laws, defaming their own heritage and lineage. The result, confirmed, he argued, by history, appeared irrefutable: God had abandoned them and any claims to chosenness had eroded after 1,500 years of disastrous yet deserved suffering. Luther offered his conclusions as dire warnings to Christians and to Christianity. Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and vehming his eyes on them. Therefore, dear Christian, be on your guard against the Jews, who, as you discover here, are consigned by the wrath of God to the devil, who has not only robbed them of a proper understanding of Scripture, but also of ordinary human reason, shame, and sense, and only works mischief with Holy Scripture through them. Therefore they cannot be trusted and believed in any other matter either, even though a truthful word may drop from their lips occasionally. . . . Therefore, wherever you see a genuine Jew, you may with a good conscience cross yourself and bluntly say: "There goes a devil incarnate." [What should be done about the presence of the Jews among Christians?] First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not bum, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues.

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In the first place, we will believe that our Lord Jesus Christ is truthful when he declares of the Jews who did not accept but crucified him, "You are a brood of vipers and children of the devil [cf. Matt. 12:34]. . . . He knows that these Jews are a brood of vipers and children of the devil, that is, people who will accord us the same benefits as does their father, the devil, and by now we Christians should have learned from Scripture as well as experience just how much he wishes us well. I have read and heard many stories about the Jews which agree with this judgment of Christ, namely, how they have poisoned wells, made assassinations, kidnapped children, as related before. I have heard that one Jew sent another Jew, and this by means of a Christian, a pot of blood, together with a barrel of wine, in which when drunk empty, a dead Jew was found. There are many other similar stories. For their kidnapping of children they have often been burned at the stake or banished (as we already heard). I am well aware that they deny all of this. However, it all coincides with the judgment of Christ which declares that they are venomous, bitter, vindictive, tricky serpents, assassins, and children of the devil who sting and work harm stealthily wherever they cannot do it openly. . . . That is what I had in mind when I said earlier that, next to the devil, a Christian has no more bitter and galling foe than a Jew. There is no other to whom we accord as many benefactions and from whom we suffer as much as we do from these base children of the devil, this brood of vipers.5 Drawing upon Matthew, Luther repeats the word "vipers" and identifies Jews as "serpents and assassins." They are deadly and dangerous, the archetypal incarnation of evil itself; they are "children of the devil," damned and accursed, imperiling the souls of good Christians. But if Jews endanger the soul, Luther nevertheless turns to secular authorities to deal with such menacing evil. The tone of his writing shifts from its academic and ecclesiastical framework to a mounting hysteria, until he turns to pragmatic and physical solutions to the problem of "serpents and assassins." His advice rings throughout the centuries and there can be little doubt that its influence reached into the 20th century with terrifying, literal results. As historian Norman Cohn has noted: "Jews have traditionally been seen as mysterious beings, endowed with uncanny, sinister powers." 6 The origins of such attitudes may be in the period from the 2nd through the 4th centuries after Christ when the Church and the synagogue competed for converts. With superstitious rumors and fear-driven concepts from the Middle Ages strengthened by such a figure as Luther, beliefs that Jews were children and consorts of the devil who practiced ritual

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murder became nearly routine. Built upon a foundation of far-fetched suppositions, the myth nevertheless found widespread credence for its simplistic answer to puzzling questions that plagued people during times of travail. It offered an ensemble of crude yet believable reasons for hard times and evil. William Nicholls sees this ensemble as composing the essential belief for the emergence of antisemitism.7 We have entered the murky realm of myth here, a realm based on popular tradition and memory. Those who have examined the power of myth often have concluded that it offered its believers a sense of order and meaning. The "myth" of the Jew as ritual murderer may have offered some simplified explanation for evil, for disorder in life, or for medieval misery.8 What drove the conviction, because of its essential irrationality and virulence, remains speculative. Its deadly results, however, while not yet as vast as mass murders to come, laid the foundation for those later, more widespread massacres. Not much provocation or rationale seemed needed for anti-Jewish violence to erupt. Persistent into the 20th century, routinely believed by non-Jews like the survivor's friend, that fallacy shaped relationships, and fostered fear in both groups, before it materialized as murderous. The myth of ritual murder began rather concretely in England in the 12th century, but the propagators of the myth reached further back for its legitimization. Ritual murder of a child, like ritual murder of a lamb— perhaps the paschal lamb, the lamb to be sacrificed at the Passover, like Jesus—crowded together in the popular consciousness. Ultimately that identification incarnates redemption, but first there is punishable sin. The meaning can be graphically and plainly observed in Claude Lanzmann's monumental documentary film, Shoah: posing for a photograph on the steps of a church, stood a sole Jewish survivor of nearby Chelmno, surrounded by Polish townspeople. After hearing serial, eyewitness descriptions of what befell the Jews of the village, Lanzmann bluntly asks the mayor of his constituents "Why do they think all this happened to the Jews?" With joy and good will, the mayor regales Lanzmann with the meaning of the Holocaust as he heard someone else hear the rabbi of the next town put it: Mr. Kantarowski will tell us what a friend told him. It happened in Myndjewyce, near Warsaw. . . . The Jews were gathered in a square. The rabbi asked an SS man: "Can I talk to them?" The SS man said yes. So the rabbi said that around thousand years ago the Jews condemned the innocent Christ to death. And when

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they did that, they cried out: "Let his blood fall on our heads and on our sons' heads." Then the rabbi told them: "Perhaps the time has come for that, so let us nothing, let us go, let us do as we're asked." Incredulous, Lanzmann asks: "He thinks the Jews expiated the death of Christ?" To which the response: "He doesn't think so, or even that Christ sought revenge. He didn't say that. The rabbi said it. It was God's will, that's all!"9 The good mayor thus presents an argument to explain the suffering of the Jews that for all intents and purposes recalls Luther's attack and ironically anticipates some post-Holocaust Orthodox Jewish theologians. These last indict their unfortunate brethren who, they claim, suffered God's wrath for the abandonment of such practices as properly keeping the Sabbath. Whatever the specifics, the victims bear the responsibility. Antisemitism carries a twisted and complicated history. From its religious roots it evolved, as European culture did, in secular directions and its ideology and forms of expression mirrored its society. As Luther's exhortations demonstrate, however, the secular and religious intertwined nearly immediately. Authoritative force meant state power, except in the frequent cases of anti-Jewish riots or pogroms. Luther, at least, called upon the proper authorities to deal with "vipers and assassins" accordingly. As western civilization grew more secular in the 18th- and 19thcenturies, anti-Jewish ideas also metamorphosed while still grounded in popular religious superstition and prejudice. As the focus shifted from religious to secular trappings, anti-Jewish attitudes now claimed that Jews carried sociocultural traits that distinguished them from the rest of European society. Some surprisingly unenlightened Enlightenment thinkers virtually missionized the secularization and assimilation of Jews.10 Opposed to any form of religious "infamy," as antimodern and archaic, they slashed at the practice of Christianity as well as of Judaism. Those modernizing antisemites transformed religious myths into socioeconomic and even political ones, attributing certain secular proclivities and customs to Jews. If earlier voices had called for the removal of Jews and the eradication of Judaism, these modern ones summoned different, apparently more civilized or humane methods of integrating Jews into Christian society. Such methods may well have amounted to the same result: the destruction of Jewish identity, if not the physical destruction of Jews themselves. The less violent, more subtle, "enlightened" approach

Introduction

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seemed to herald a new stage in the history of Jewish-Christian relations, especially in Germany where Jews in flight from the violent pogroms of Eastern Europe encountered the German Enlightenment and found a relatively safe home. German Jews, with such beginnings, would become the world's most assimilated Jews, identify themselves as German and insist that they were Jews in religious belief alone, but Germans in every other way.11 Most eastern European Jews, however, continued to be perceived and to perceive themselves as separate from the mainstream culture. Ever the quintessential "Other," Jews in Eastern Europe for the most part maintained traditional habits, religious laws, and language (Yiddish and Hebrew) and grew dangerously mysterious to the overwhelming majority of the population. By the mid-19th century, with the rise of various forms of pseudoscientific theories of race and heredity, antisemitic ideologues brought the final terminology to the discussion of Jewish identity and place in Christian Europe. Jews, they claimed, were a race, complete with inherited physical and sociocultural characteristics. Throughout the Middle Ages, if Jews would convert they could become acceptable in Christian terms. They could become acceptable in the early modern and enlightenment periods by recasting their external appearance and eschewing religious identity. But racial antisemitism closed all avenues for acceptability. The inherent logic of this new breed of hatred led to death.12 Does this history prefigure the Holocaust? One historian of Germany wrote, with some sarcasm, that German history was predetermined with the victory of Alaric the Goth over the Roman armies. The same historian declared that the "monument of German civilization was the death camp of Auschwitz."13 He and others have suggested that a straight line can be drawn from Luther to Hitler: only a matter of time, not of choice, in Germany. Daniel Goldhagen's work, which purports to definitively identify the singular and indisputable German component of the Holocaust, echoes the anti-German themes of his predecessors. But neither Goldhagen nor earlier writers attributed the murder of the Jews to German Christianity. Returning to the survivor from Krakow, even he, in his anger and sorrow, will not condemn the religion: in his eyes, Christians not Christianity bear the responsibility for the Holocaust. Yet, a distinct patina of suspicion and apprehension remains in both Jews and non-Jews. In any of the magnificent gothic cathedrals of Germany, Cologne's, for example, it

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Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust

is not difficult to imagine German peasants experiencing an almost mystical awe beneath breathtaking stained-glass windows. The preponderance of such monumental depictions focuses on Jesus as sufferer— sufferer at the hands of vindictive Jews. Couched in overwhelming splendor, the message to uneducated and perhaps superstitious Christian believers was hardly subliminal. Some of Europe's most glorious creations, then, trumpeted a message that at least fueled anti-Jewish feeling. How does one estimate the impact of the role played by religious superstition and its attendant antisemitism on the Holocaust? While Cologne's patron saint, St. Bernard, heralded the murder of the Jews during the crusades as vital to Christian dramaturgy, Germany's clergymen in their cathedrals did not proclaim murderous calls to believers in June 1941. Nor did the remnants of scurrilous mythologies lay the actual groundwork for genocide. Yet some histories of antisemitism attribute the Holocaust to Christian antipathy that might well have included hatred of Jesus the Jew as well. If millennia of hatred of Jews did not explicitly produce the Holocaust, it could not have helped but provide at least the basis for Christian indifference that stalked Europe as an almost material presence. From Pope to pastor, official Christendom's silence grew to deafening proportions. What the Holocaust may have meant to the Vatican and Christian prelates, not to say Christians all across Europe, remains speculative. Richard Rubenstein and John Roth chronicled the sad, complicitous history of Christianity into the 20th century, but it is to the schoolboy Janek and Mr. Kantarowski, the mayor's friend (from Lanzmann's film), that we should turn for a clearer, more prosaic and more informative glimpse into what ideas Christian consciousness held about Jews in 1941. And Sam O. may know far more intimately and immediately the consequences of those ideas and the voices that uttered them. One historian of religion, Susannah Heschl, has written about the irony of trying to explain or understand antisemitism. Fundamentally irrational, it cannot, she suggests, ultimately be gauged by a rational process. Charting its history from religious to social or economic, psychological or political motives or rationalizations, in the end, should not matter because of that decisive ground of irrationality. Whether manifested as what Nicholl calls "mass paranoia," or the results of economic depression, according to a rationalist argument the origin is itself bereft of reason. Similarly, the virtual avalanche of biographies, especially psychobiographies, of Hitler and other Nazi leaders during the

Introduction

9

1970s and 1980s broadly ranged from intelligently insightful to ludicrous. Despite the usefulness of examining Hitler's childhood, perhaps uncovering an overactive Oedipal urge, repressed antifather anger and totemic guilt, or identification with the victim and excessive reaction formation, all of which may or may not offer some rational amplification of historically informed conclusions, a historian remains incredulous and awestruck at the Holocaust. Any explanations that ensued from such study finally seem inadequate, incomplete somehow, to explain the Holocaust. Berel Lang, seeking literary, philosophical meaning, confesses similarly that the extraordinary character of the Holocaust compounds the "problematic status of evil itself. . . even in less extreme appearances, evil seems always to leave a remainder after its apparent social, economic, or psychological 'causes' have been named."14 The murder of the Jews, after over five decades of thoughtful consideration that has encompassed every imaginable discipline and mode of research, produces a similar intellectual emptiness. Racial hatred, propaganda, the nature of bureaucracy, the function of routine, linguistic analysis, and historical development of the civilized habit of objectification—all are not enough. Those who search for "meaning" in the Holocaust, or some moral lesson, perhaps have overlooked a primary scrutiny to which Omer Bartov called attention in the Holocaust journal Dimensions: "rather than evaluating the lessons of the Holocaust," he wrote, "what deserves scrutiny is the very need for such lessons and especially the urge to derive a message of home and affirmation, courage and dignity, from one of history's darkest periods."15 In that same issue of Dimensions, Lawrence Langer noted the "eager search for lessons to be learned from the mass murder of European Jewry" is that the Holocaust "threatens our faith in the stability of social and moral institutions." It probes the virtue and value of hallowed institutions, traditions, and beliefs. It calls into question the very meaning of modern religious belief and of the civilized project itself. It forces us to confront the prospect that the "deep layer of solidarity among all that wears a human face"16 failed miserably, if it ever existed at all. For if the Holocaust has no meaning, no clear lessons, then the anodyne suggestions about the future in light of the past, the palliatives about the usefulness of education, must all be suspect and kindled by wishflil expectations rather than truth. Who can possibly fathom the meaning of the death of 1.5 million children in crematoria and in killing fields, or the starvation and enslavement of thousands more? Focus on heroic actions, resistance, or even

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Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust

hiding yields what Langer called "a way of finding at least minimal meaning"11 in the Holocaust. Such a quest eluded some of the great scholars of the Holocaust: Raul Hilberg, for example, eschews any such activity. Christopher Browning ended his unparalleled historical work, Ordinary Men, without definitive conclusions. The ending quietly reveals solitude, sadness, and inconclusiveness. Primo Levi's final work is similarly inconclusive. That, finally, becomes the central point of this text: that meaning grows more elusive as one learns more about this epoch; that it frustratingly confounds and rebuffs traditional scholarly or academic forms of order and decorum. The very act of writing implies the prospect of some message—even if it is to deny the efficacy of any lesson, or to call for silence. Survivor testimonies and written accounts alike offer a dialectic between speaking/writing and silence, that, paradoxically, like speaking the unspeakable, render these intellectual points weakly moot. What "meaning" one attributes to the Holocaust then appears perhaps artificial, at worst fatuous and mendacious and at best tentative, perhaps in good faith but flying in the face of evidence, of real life. Rather than search for such meaning, we might better yield to silence. NOTES 1. All survivor quotes come from the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Project at the University of Michigan-Dearborn Mardigian Library. 2. John Roth and Richard L. Rubenstein, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987), 48. 3. John Chrysostom, Discourses Against Judaizing Christians, trans, by Paul W. Harkins (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1979), 4.7.4; see also 1.5.1,1.4.1, 1.3.1., 1.3.5, and 1.4.2. 4. Ibid., 1.2.4-6. 5. Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, from Luther's Works, Volume 47: The Christian in Society IV(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 268-293. 6. Nonnan Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 21. 7. William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate (Northvale, N.J., and London: Jason Aronson, 1993), 237-240. 8. See R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1987), esp. 36-39. 9. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 99-100.

Introduction

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10. See Sidney M. Bolkosky, The Distorted Image: German Jewish Perceptions of Germans and Germany, 1920-1935 (New York and Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975). 11. Ibid. 12. George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 13. A. J. P. Taylor, From Sarajevo to Potsdam (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 144. 14. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 81. 15. Orner Bartov, "The Lessons of the Holocaust," Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 13-20. 16. Lawrence Langer, "Moralizing the Holocaust," Dimensions, Vol. 12, No. 1,3-6. 17. Ibid., emphasis added.

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T h e Search for Meaning The Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Society on Aging in March 1997 included a presentation titled "Providing Care to Survivors of the Holocaust." As clinical social workers, the two presenters offered a series of "clinical interventions" on how to ease the burden of survivors who wished to speak of their experiences. After the injunctions to "listen carefully and emphatically" and "don't judge," they urged clinicians to "help them [survivors] find meaning in their survival."1 Similarly, Steven Spielberg's Visual History of the Shoah Project recommended that their volunteer interviewers read an article by journalist Mary Rothschild, which insists that interviewing survivors will "make sense of the insanity that happened in Europe to the Jewish race."2 In his engaging novel Waterland, Graham Swift discussed the function of "stories," histories both personal and universal, which, he wrote, provide order, structure, and "meaning"—stories that "make things not seem meaningless."3 Perhaps nowhere in recent historiography has that somewhat jaded or even cynical perspective confronted the modern era than in discussions of the "meaning" of the Holocaust. Virtually every group involved may offer significant opinions: perpetrators have their varieties of explanations; so do bystanders and even rescuers; and so, too, most poignantly and importantly, do survivors, the victims. Beneath each of these perspectives lies a quest for some meaning, an explanation that might draw some reasonable, graspable rationale for why the Holocaust occurred. Scholars, too, have searched for the same thing: a rational hypothesis to explain a seemingly irrational course of events. One might expect that no subject would produce less contro-

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Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust

versy: what could be more definitively evil than the murder of the Jews, the ultimate victimization of an essentially innocent and helpless population by an overwhelmingly malevolent force? Yet scarcely a word can be uttered without evoking deep and even profound controversy. This phenomenon erupted in the protracted and infamously celebrated debate over Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's work, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Yet, while the level of public attention and vitriol may have escalated in that altercation, there remains little new in its intensity or, for that matter, in its content. And beneath it rests the determination to reject what appears to some as a series of facile answers to fundamental questions about mass murder, history, genocide, racism and antisemitism. Some of Goldhagen's critics fear that those questions only yield constitutively stochastic or random conclusions.4 In the frankest possible terms, meaning seems to me to elude any purely rational examination of these events, especially when viewed through the prism of survivor testimonies. Certainly different "lessons" or "meanings" emerge from different groups, indeed, from different individuals within each of those groups. In his final work, for example, Victor Frankl—father of a school of psychotherapy, psychological or even spiritual guru, and Holocaust survivor—sought not just meaning, as he had in his remarkably successful Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl's work may remain the urtext, the archetype for the quest for meaning. Near the end of his life, borrowing heavily from that early work, he posited the prospect of Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning? More than a psychoanalytical study, that volume emerged as a religious work in which Frankl wrote about "another dimension" that was not accessible to reason or intellect and therefore impossible for science and rational thought to comprehend. He revealed this religion as intimate and intensely personal and in effect drew his followers into battle with nihilists, proclaiming: "it is equally conceivable that everything is absolutely meaningful and that everything is absolutely meaningless " As he had in Man's Search for Meaning, a book taught in high schools and colleges virtually around the world, Frankl buoyed students' (and teachers') spirits by his astoundingly uplifting ending. Frankl seemed to embody hope for those who read his work and many of his readers projected his feelings onto Holocaust survivors as a group. Apart from the rather obvious faux pas of generalizing about survivors, that phenomenon conjoins the question of meaning to a myriad of questions about survivor testimony.

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Do survivors seek and/or find meaning in their own experiences or in the Holocaust? Do they think or talk about it at all? We should be gaining more evidence to answer such questions, as Holocaust survivor oral history projects around the world seem desperately engaged in collecting as many interviews as possible, perhaps because of the fear of losing untold stories, perhaps trying to match the Spielberg Visual History of the Shoah Project. A few of those projects have opted to return to survivors previously interviewed, reinterviewing more than once and asking some new questions. Exploring some of the old inquiries as well, we who have undertaken such tasks have engaged not only in "gathering testimony," but in conversations or dialogues with survivors to delve more deeply into what courses their lives have taken in the last 20 years.6 On such return trips, I again talked with survivors about why they chose to give testimony or to bear witness. The word "testimony" itself implies layered possibilities, deriving from attesting to evidence. The Latin word for "witness" is the same as for "testis," sharing its root with "testimony," and it means giving evidence of virility or truth. It implies, as it did in Biblical times in the ancient Middle East, the most serious of vows. To bear witness, therefore, is to speak from one's center, to offer evidence of truth, and invokes the concept of a covenant-like testament between speaker and listener. To speak under such circumstances, subliminal as they may be, implies a profound responsibility on the part of both speaker and listener and the survivor-testifier carries a burden of nearly unspeakable proportions. Why, then, do survivors even attempt to do this? Alvin Rosenfeld referred to Primo Levi's writing as eerily victimizing, perhaps even "implicated in Primo Levi's death." The books, Rosenfeld wrote, "are both testimony and reflection, a vivid evocation of the past and a continuing meditation on it by a survivor witness."7 Testimony, witnessing, and speaking approximates this description of Levi's writing: A difficult process at best, painful to dredge up what is probably always present anyway, now often done in front of an audience. And therein lie some dangers, I think. We all know that survivor testimonies personalize the historical event of the Holocaust and bring it to a level perhaps more understandable and graspable by listeners, especially by students, than less personal media. Their voices also serve the important function of balancing information from other voices. As early as 1957 Benzion Dinur warned of the danger of reliance only on evidence from the criminals, the

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perpetrators—primarily written documents, of course. That particular focus, critical, of course, nevertheless "suffices to underline the significance of the personal evidence of survivors... ."8 Most fundamentally, witnessing or testifying—talking—means telling stories, somewhat like historians. But one of the differences between survivor "tales" and historians' accounts has to do with form: histories, the stories historians tell, are placed in some sort of order, given a shape or structure; they go somewhere, have a beginning, middle, and end. Survivor testimonies may not have any of these; they are often anecdotal. Their strength, I believe, rests in that quality. When spontaneous, they frequently are unchronological, more like a stream of consciousness, as one memory touches off another, triggering, as the term goes, multiple associations that may rush in so fast that they become almost unspeakable. All this lends them a fragmentary quality. Although the work seems conclusively discredited, that fragmentary phenomenon was nevertheless captured and described in Benjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. A powerfully related autobiographical account about separation of the author as a child of 3 years old from his parents during the massacres of Jews in Riga, Fragments seems to emerge from the child's mind as he writes about Poland, Maijdanek, and at least one other camp before coming to Auschwitz. Miraculously surviving, Wilkomirski wrote that he arrived as an orphan in Switzerland in 1947, where he was promptly adopted by a Swiss doctor and his wife. "Not since Anne Frank's diary had a child's view of the Holocaust touched so many readers," wrote Elena Lappin, former editor of the Jewish Quarterly, whose literary prize Wilkomirski won, along with a National Book Award, beating out Elie Wiesel and Alfred Kazin.9 It is therefore shocking that Daniel Ganzfned, a Swiss Jewish author, in two consecutive issues of the Swiss weekly, Weltwoche, exposed Wilkomirski as a fraud. Ganzfried had discovered documentary evidence that Wilkomirski had been born in Biei, Switzerland, in 1941 and had been adopted by a childless Swiss couple in 1957. The ensuing, acrimonious debate carried some surprises as one faction argued that the poignant and stark prose rendered the veracity of the author moot and others reacted with outrage, insisting that such a hoax fed the cases of the worst of the Holocaust deniers. Denounced, Wilkomirski faded from view, yet leaving a book that nevertheless moved readers and that left some Holocaust scholars near-breathless for its peculiar and uncanny insight into child survivors.

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Wilkomirski wrote that what he claimed were his own memories "are a rubble field of isolated images and events. Shards of memory . . . which still cut flesh if touched today. Mostly a chaotic jumble, with very little chronological fit; shards that keep surfacing against the orderly grain of grown-up life and escaping the laws of logic."10 Despite the debunking of this particular author's "credentials" as a survivor, he managed to convey a quality well known to those who listen to survivor narratives. That fragmentary ensemble, a virtual pastiche of remnants, residues of memory and the past, occurs both as a function of and a stimulus to an acute sort of honesty. If it seems incoherent, such honesty invaluably communicates a hitherto recondite truth: the fundamental uncertainty of each speaker about the reason they speak. Some survivors with whom I have discussed this feel they have a mission: to educate, to fight deniers, or to convince students who might have had doubts planted by those deniers. Some simply feel a need to speak—both fulfilling an obligation to lost families and perhaps achieving some small catharsis. And I think most at least begin with a hope, fervent and even despairing sometimes, that the telling will offer some meaning, a point, even a lesson. They may speak, in other words, to snatch some vestige of reason from a realm of memories in which reason seemed utterly defeated. In such attempts to find or create meaningfromtheir Holocaust experiences, the choice of form often determines much of the content. For those who become veteran lecturers, expounding in public provides a medley of possible private and public meanings. Indeed, the act of speaking to a group implies moving from private to public discourse. It creates a persona, perhaps an enlarged version of the private, but often something new, ^public persona. And what does that imply? Has the survivor, or the survivor's story, changed because they appear in Steven Spielberg's Visual History of the Shoah collection? The stories remain sometimes emotional, deeply personal, and often there is a struggle to convert them into public talks. Like any public speaker, each survivor discovers techniques to combat the difficulties of such a conversion. For some who construct that conversion, education has been fundamental. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, movies like Schindler 's List, and the plethora of courses and academic lectures has opened new doors and, in some cases, closed the most important ones to their listeners. For example, one survivor whose original interviews focused on his experiences and the specific ordeals of his own family, conveyed profound sorrow and profound anger. Over the years he has spoken

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Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust

with increasing regularity to groups ranging in size from 10 to 500, from middle school children to veterans of World War II. And now, while he conveys clearly enough the stories of his lost parents and brother, the terror of Auschwitz, and the shame of being forced to conduct business on the Sabbath, he also speaks about how many tons of hair the Germans collected at Auschwitz and how many trains left there. In short, his talks have taken on a more historical tone and with that, to some degree have distanced him from the private tragedies. He has explained to me, in his most candid manner, that this information has facilitated talking. To speak historically is often to set up a defense against the private story. Some survivors, like this one, begin to intuit what "works," what a "good" story is. That means, presumably, discerning what moves students or others who may be in an audience. And the term "audience" itself implies entertainment. If the story is boring, despite its possible truth and importance, it may not hold attention. So a survivor may learn from experience what takes hold of an audience and structure his or her talk to revolve around those moments. To what end, though, might this be done? Frequently a survivor will try to idealize prewar life. Conceivably the speaker recalls the idealization as truly accurate, both an individual story and an apotheosis of Jewish life before the Holocaust. Here, for example, is an account of Bernard O.'s memory of his boyhood in Krakow. One of four children, his family lived in a two-room apartment, in severely cramped quarters. His father, a traveling salesman, barely eked out a living. Yet here is his description of life in the 1930s: I was recalling yesterday for the first time what my father's voice sounded like. Saying the brichot. I did not understand what it meant. But I was recalling the actual voice and I could almost do it [pause] . . . in the memory. I remember and so that was again emotional, [longpause and crying]

This account, charming, emotional, and warm, has an obvious point as it announces, along with several other anecdotes, his memory of a loving, enfolding family life. The fullness of the silence at the end of this brief anecdote conveys some sense of choices Bernard O. must make—what to tell, how much, which words to use. His pauses, silence, and weeping communicate more than words here, a depth of memory and emotion nearly ungraspable, overlaid with the end of more than Friday nights spent listening to the brichot (blessings). Yet, for all its poignancy, it stands in sharp contrast to the description given by his brother who re-

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called bitter arguments with his father, his own antipathy toward religion—including Friday night dinners—antisemitic attacks from school classmates on the street, poverty and concerns about enough food for the family. And what do such conflicting anecdotes teach? Will they salvage a lost way of life, if only to pass on the memory? Will they show what it meant for a Jew to be swept up into the maelstrom of the Holocaust, what a child had to endure, what loss is about, what not to do and what to do? Will speaking make survivors feel better? It may be cathartic for some; the feedback is certainly gratifying, but it may also depress and debilitate others. In his review of Wilkomirski's remarkable "memoir," Harvey Peskin asks "Is Holocaust memory a feature of the turmoil itself or its remedy?" Perhaps daunted by that question, he then portrays survivor narratives as representing the "teller's assiduous search to know."11 This psychoanalytically directed insight may kindle another somewhat startling hypothetical question: Is every talk or interview or conversation a "search to know"? Is every talk or narrative, every memoir like Elie Wiesel's or Primo Levi's, a search for a meaning? And if that is at least in part the case, do survivors typically emulate Viktor Frankl's sanguine conclusions? After struggling through a death march from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz and then to Ravensbruck, finally winding up in a displaced persons camp without family, Agi R. recalled one of the moments, the moment of selection after arrival at Auschwitz, that has divided her life forever: An extremely tall German officer who ordered me to the left. I ran back to my mother. I wanted to be with my family [who were sent to the right]. How lucky they are to be together. And I shouldn't be with them? How does such a feeling, recalled and written down in 1965, spoken again (and again) in 1982 and later, transform itself into roseate depictions of meaning? To speak of "lessons" from or the meaning of the Holocaust to a survivor like Agi reduces the complexity of the event and, more significantly, reduces the multiplicity, the simultaneously held contradictory attitudes she encounters routinely within herself. Somewhat like Agi, yet dramatically different in important respects, David M. sometimes circumspectly, at other times directly, confronts the

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questions of meaning. To the unasked question of what he believes he learned, he answers that the lesson echoes clearly for all time: take what you can when you can at anyone's expense. So now the lesson of the Holocaust should be clear, the lesson according to David M.: "Everybody gets paid." Everyone has a price and the Holocaust reveals the meaning of life in stark relief. How does one explain this disturbing man? Sharply contrasting with Agi, for example, David M. exudes bitterness and anger, cynicism and sarcasm. He possesses a nihilism that transcends any ideological abstract view of life because of its fundamental concreteness and specificity. There is no joy, no goodness, no redeeming social value, no value whatsoever in the world, which is after all a continuation of the world of Auschwitz. That sentiment reflects what survivor Samuel Pisar had said to French President Giscard d'Estaing as they together paid homage to the dead at Auschwitz in 1989: If such horrors seem relevant today, it is because we dare not forget that the past can also be prologue, that amidst the ashes of Auschwitz we can discern a specter of doomsday, a warning to mankind of what might still lie ahead.12 In either world, Auschwitz or post-Holocaust, David M. gratified his appetites, his lust, or his hunger hedonistically through graft, greed, payoffs, and reciprocal deals. Even in Auschwitz. That bizarre phenomenon, hedonism in Auschwitz, meant taking what one could whenever the opportunity arose. He lived, he said, from moment to moment, not thinking of the future, but only of what he needed and could get that instant or in the immediate future. Pisar's remarks, like David's, avoid an inspirational prophecy; both eschew any hopeful prediction; both avert blithe and buoyant predictions. Pisar's answer to his attempt "to make sense of the tattoo on his arm" seemed to resonate with fear or anxiety. The meaning? The worst can happen. Or, in the words of another survivor, the "lesson" is to "run sooner." Even 40 years after, in 1984, this person kept a suitcase packed in his front hall closet should the need arise for Jews once again to take flight. It was a need, he believed, that might occur any time and any place. Despite the perplexity of this concise and simple value system, this unabashedly misanthropic attitude, David M.'s honesty appeared genuine; perhaps that compounded his (and my own) distress. That sincerity and probity revealed the source of his own torment. His view of the world had so depressed him that he had attempted suicide twice, wept over his

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memories, lashed out at his peers and those who offered him any assistance. He could not abide sentimentality or mendacity, whether about Auschwitz or human nature. His personal and professional life followed rigid precepts derived at least in part from his Holocaust experiences. David carried those precepts into the rest of his life like a timebomb or a disease that began spreading throughout his being, pressing against his life, crushing any gentle or tender elements that threatened to intrude into it. What caused his fleeting tears as he tried to speak of the past? What memories welled up that he would not voice during his interviews? What was he recalling but not retelling? Reluctant to speak about life before the war, he responded with monosyllabic, curt statements to questions about his family and home. Why would he not speak of his father and mother, or his siblings? Were there no friends, no warm recollections of childhood? Was his relationship with his family already problematic in 1936 or 1938? He revealed almost in passing, almost embarrassingly that his father practiced Judaism faithfully as an Orthodox Jew who hoped his son would attend a yeshivah, a Jewish university. He rejected that life even then, it seems, although he remains closed-mouthed about any confrontation over religion or his future. Only later does he retell his mother's final words, divulging that she, too, was Orthodox: "When they took my mother away [pause, weeping] . . . her last words were 'pray to, pray to, pray to God.' [Pause] The Jewish people believe so much in God, you know?" [Pause; weeps; regains control and asks to stop.] During the following session, David describes the death march during which no one helped him and implies that he helped no one: [Did anyone help you?] "If you couldn't walk they shot you." [Did any of the other prisoners help you?] "Anybody who couldn't walk, they shot." He's admitted his own isolation, his own refusal to be concerned with fellow prisoners. Moreover, he's revealed the heart of the nature of those marches, of Auschwitz and the Holocaust experience as a victim lived it: his testimony is about "how I survived," totally narcissistic, unrepentingly self-centered. Even when he described brief moments of assistance from other people—his brother, an SS guard, a German doctor—David focused on himself. Here is his account, finally, of the arrival at Birkenau: [Question: when did you separate from your brother? Suddenly begins to breathe heavily; long pause.] My mother, sisters, and brother disappeared. I knew! I knew! They took them to the crematorium. I didn't live with any illusions. I knew

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right away what was going on. [Pause] You're born to die. The time was up, that's all. It's like now—I'm just wasting time. At the end of his interview David revealed that his last illness had caused him to recall "everything in the past." He referred only to the Holocaust: "Thought of Auschwitz again . . . I remembered everything. Haunting me. Everything in the past." [Long pause; weeps and silence.] Having expatiated upon himself throughout the testimony, and revealed his antipathy for religion, he returned to both when he amplified his description of the second, horrible train transport. Typically, he began with himself after a terse reference to the pandemonium in the boxcar: And I am a strong individual. Afraid of nothing. . . . No faith in nobody no more. In God I lost faith altogether. .. . Where the hell was he? Maybe he was layin' down with a couple broads over there. When I was liberated, I said "God, don't bother me and I won't bother you." God should have a trial, like the other war criminals. Behind the cynicism lies anger, shame, and perhaps remorse. But David will not reveal it; after four sessions he falls silent and believes he has concluded. The persistent weeping and his inability to speak of his mother or other members of his family seems grounded in what he knew they did not know upon arrival (or before) at Birkenau. His knowledge separated him from everyone else: "I knew from the start [in the ghetto] that everything was forgery. The whole world was forgery. You couldn't live without smuggling or black market. The whole world." That is David's knowledge of the meaning of life—it derives from his unique comprehension of the Holocaust, has the same meaning. While some survivors—like Viktor Frankl—have tried to draw meaning from the Holocaust, others, like David M., have denied any or found only their embittered and cynical lessons. More subtle, equally depressing, have been the words of those like Primo Levi, who remained profoundly troubled by the dubious "privilege" of survival. Yet he begins his discussion of the prospects of a moral life after the Lager at a point not far from David's ground zero. In both his first and last books Levi detailed the utter degradation of life fostered not only by the outrages perpetrated by the Germans, but "by hunger, fatigue, cold, and fear." Such circumstances completely altered the "moral yardstick" of the prisoners. Beyond that, "all of us had stolen": from each other, the camp, wherever one could find anything that might serve the first principle of the camp

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"which made it mandatory that you take care of yourself first of all." Levi explicitly denied the presence of guilt and focused instead on the feelings of shame that he himself experienced and that he had observed in other survivors. The idea often comes into survivor narratives after prolonged talking. Here is Nathan O.: "In a way, we were ashamed of our experience," he whispered, a survivor of Auschwitz and several other camps, "and we maybe didn't want to open up old wounds by discussing or telling about it." Levi echoed this comment in his disturbing essay, "Shame," which appeared in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved: "those remain s lent who feel more deeply that sense of malaise which I for simplicity's sake call 'shame,' . . . or whose wounds still burn."13 In The Drowned and the Saved Levi wrote pithily of his shame, comments that Tony Judt assessed as "the shame of not being dead 'thanks to a privilege you haven't earned.' " That concept may lie at the center of Levi's first book, Survival in Auschwitz (the American translation of If This Be a Man): "what does it mean to reduce a person to 'an emaciated man, with head drooped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen?' "M From that observation derives the shame at being a human being: shame for sharing qualities with the human victims as well as with the human perpetrators. Sharing that status induces shame and more in Levi. Concluding the chapter entitled "This Side of Good and Evil" in Survival in Auschwitz, Levi wrote almost angrily and bitterly about the moral climate in the Lager. As he summarized the content of the chapter—the theft in Buna, in camp, by the prisoners and the variety of responses from SS to civil authorities—Levi put the question to the reader, bluntly and without equivocation: We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of t words "good" and "evil," "just" and "unjust"; let everybody judge, on the basis the picture we have outlined of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.15 The passage precedes the chapter "The Drowned and the Saved"(not the book), which struggles with conveying the ambiguities of life in the Lager; ambiguities that infected everyone there—perpetrators, victims, civilians, doctors, SS alike. Levi's mordant tone reaches an apogee, with its bitterness directed at the reader, because he assumed that the hypothetical

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reader sought more positive meanings; sought the simplistic representation of an utterly innocent and helpless victim assailed by utterly immoral and guilty perpetrators. In his final work, Levi seemed to have grown more adamant that this search for moral meaning in the Holocaust presented a self-deluding quest, an imagined continuation of a terribly simplifed, Manichean, eternal battle of good and evil. As scientific observer, however, Levi noted ambiguity and uncertainty, and a widespread sense of shame, especially among the victims. Just as Elie Wiesel, in Night repeated the phrase "blows rained down," as if this had become a natural phenomenon, taken for granted and without any further comment, Levi described the experience of the prisoner, what he called the "sinister ritual," essentially the same in each Lager: "kicks and punches, often in the face; an orgy of orders screamed with true or simulated rage; complete nakedness after being stripped; the shaving off of all one's hair; the outfitting in rags." That "entire ritual" promoted, he said, the "moral collapse" of the inmate and created a "bond of complicity" between the perpetrator and the victim. That "gray zone," the realm in which innocence disappeared, that corrupted everyone it touched, created the shame of which Levi wrote in his next essay in The Drowned and the Saved. Surroundings of the Lager forced the victims into "a condition of pure survival, a daily struggle against"—what became a litany in Levi's book— "hunger, cold, fatigue and blows [he adds fear later] in which the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero" (pp. 49-50, 59, 75, 79). Lest any critic too hastily rush to judgment, in "The Gray Zone," Levi invited anyone with the inclination to consider the following: Let him imagine . . . that he has lived for months or years in a ghetto, tormented by chronic hunger, fatigue, promiscuity, and humiliation; that he has seen die around him, one by one, his beloved; that he is cut off from the world, unable to receive or transmit news; that, finally, he is loaded onto a train, eighty or a hundred persons to a boxcar; that he travels into the unknown, blindly, for sleepless days and nights; and that he is at last flung inside the walls of an indecipherable inferno.16 The consequences for the survivors reached like the tentacles of some leviathan into their lives: as Levi notes, "our moral yardstick had changed" [p.75], and he at least had "deeply assimilated the principal rule of the place, which made it mandatory that you take care of yourself first of all" [pp. 78-79]. That moral yardstick included a "clean" system of judg-

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ment: after one survivor told his story, which included the death of his young, strong sister because she refused to give up her child as they walked toward Dr. Mengele, and included the death of his older brother, posing as a member of the Hungarian Fascist Party and exposed by a fluke accident, he agitatedly expressed his anger but tacitly seemed to accept that new yardstick: Ok, not my mother—she was too old; ok, not the baby—but why did I survive? Why not my [stronger] brother and my sister? Why did she have to hold on to that child? In a devastatingly candid admission of his shame, Levi exposes the rawest of emotions: I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another, I might have usurped, that is, in fact, killed. The "saved" of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good, the bearers of a message: what I had seen and lived through proved the exact contrary. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the "gray zone," the spies. It was not a certain rule . . . but it was nevertheless a rule. .. . The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died. (p. 82) Shame then burdened Primo Levi—a shame, or variation of it, that several survivors have labored to describe. In the end, it includes what he called "the shame of the world" [p. 85]. That shame has to do with "those who, faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it and not feel touched by it." Levi refers to the Germans who "deluded themselves that not seeing was a way of not knowing." Such self-delusion, with its awful consequences, corresponds to what Wiesel called the "sin of the 20th century"— indifference. Indifference, like a contagion, spread into the Lager, infected the victims, those in the "gray zone," and thus they share "the shame of the world" with the perpetrators. For those survivors I have discussed one might conclude that the search for meaning in the Holocaust has yielded an ensemble of horribly debilitating convictions. Shame, both individual and universal, "the shame of the world," matched by not all but many survivors, surfaces as that meaning. They had chosen silence at first, then turned to speaking and writing and, like Job, with whom Wiesel at least has identified, found themselves rebuffed, perceived as memento mori, as seeking sympathy. To the question posed by a newspaper interviewer: "how

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have you become so normal?" comes the answer: "what makes you think we're normal?" "Normal" or not, survivors had for years been silent about their experiences. One survivor has referred to a virtual "conspiracy of silence," prompted in part by the reception they received when they first told their stories to people in the United States. "Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone," said one insensitive listener. "That was then, this is now. You need to forget all that and move on," said another. And some were met with hostility, admonished not to look for sympathy. So they became silent, until the 1980s, more than a generation later. And when God appeared to Job in the whirlwind, displaying his awesome power and challenging Job to battle, Job, too, became silent, mutely wrapped in his terrible memories, questioning only himself about why he had been made to suffer such an unspeakable fate. NOTES 1. Ann Harman and Miriam Katz, "Model and Methodology for Training Professionals and Para-Professionals Working with Elderly Holocaust Survivors," ASA, 1997. 2. Mary Rothschild, "Survivors or Heroes?" Los Angeles Jewish Journal. This article was included in the training kits for volunteer interviewers in 1994. 3. Graham Swift, Waterland. 4. See the essays in Franklin H. Littell, ed., Hyping the Holocaust: Scholars Answer Goldhagen (Merion Station, Penn.: Merion Westfield Press, 1997) and Johannes Heil and Rainer Erb, eds., Geschitswissenschaft und Ojfentlichkeit: Der Streit um Daniel J. Goldhagen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1998). 5. Frankl, Viktor E., Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning (revised and extended edition of The Unconscious God) (New York: Insight Books, Plenum Publishing Co., 1997). 6.1 have taken my cue on much of the methodology of these dialogues from my friend and colleague Dr. Henry Greenspan. His recent work, Who Can Retell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998) will remain a pathbreaking study of survivor narratives. 7. Alvin Rosenfeld, "Primo Levi: The Survivor as Victim," in James S. Pacy and Alan P. Wertheimer, eds., Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1988), 123-144. 8. Benzion Dinur, "Problems Confronting 'Yad Washem' in its Work of Research," Yad Washem Studies, I (Jerusalem, 1957), 7-30. 9. Elena Lappin, "The Man With Two Heads," Granta: The Magazine ofNew Writing, 66 (Summer 1999), 7-65.

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10. Benjamn Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), 4. 11. Harvey Peskin, "The Rescue of Memory," Readings: A Journal ofReviews and Commentary in Mental Health, Volume 12, No. 4 (December 1997), 4—9. [Review of Fragments]; Odette Meyers, Doors to Madame Curie (University of Seattle Washington Press: 1997; Magda Denes, Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War (New York: Norton, 1997). 12. Quoted in Neal Ascherson, "Survivors," New York Review of Books, Vol. XXVII, No. 10 (June 12, 1980), 34-36. 13. Levi, Survival, 84-85; The Drowned, 75, 77-79. 14. Tony Judt, "The Courage of the Elementary," New York Review of Books, Vol. XLVI, No. 9 (May 20, 1999), 31-38. 15. Levi, Survival, 86. 16. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 59.

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The Devil In The Book of Job, Satan appears on earth, interacting with human beings for better or worse, while God's presence is abstractedly awesome, disengaged, and powerfully disinterested. So, too, in Goethe's Faust, or Milton's Paradise Lost, the Devil seems to appear more fascinating than God. In Elie Wiesel's The Trial of God, Satan identifies himself as "Sam" and refuses to reveal any human characteristics, remaining mysterious but engaged, substantial but unknown. He drinks, banters, and argues with the other figures in this disturbing play. He is willing to participate in this "theater" and play out the tragedy of the immanent pogrom. But Wiesel has borrowed Satan's essential traits from non-biblical sources: he dislikes emotions and prefers "facts and cool logic."1 As if reflecting the positions of survivors we have already encountered, "Sam" pushes his antagonist's questions further than the doomed group had anticipated: not just "why murder" or "why death," but "why ugliness?" That harrowing question, nearly absurd in its rudimentary simplicity, produces Satan's semi-existential avoidance of a direct answer: "If God chooses not to answer, He must have his reasons. God is God, and His will is independent from ours—as is His reasoning."2 Satan's answer approximates that of some Holocaust survivors: "Endure. Accept. And say Amen."3 He is no saint, this angel, and scoffs at those who assumed that he ever was. He is not one of the Just, either; only a rational pragmatist, one who knows reality and accepts it. Sam fits into a long literary tradition of modern satanic characters. With uncanny foresight, a series of western thinkers created characters who seemed to presage not only real life figures, but the transmogrifica-

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tion of routine behavior into evil. In an inquiry about meaning in the Holocaust, the "new" perpetrators may come closest to providing some didactic points of reference. Disturbingly and critically first presented by literateurs, their behaviors elided into that of real figures and demonstrated an alarming continuity that placed the Holocaust in a continuum of Western culture and suggested that it was not anomalous, but what Richard Rubenstein called "the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of western civilization in the twentieth century."4 Arthur Koestler's "Devil" in Darkness at Noon, a sort of culmination of the age of "logical positivism," assumes a complicated personality with characteristics that echo through the 19th and into the first half of the 20th century. Chronicling Koestler's own disillusionment with the socialist dream, his protagonist, Rubashov, endures the psychological and physical ordeal of two interrogators: Ivanov, his former comradein-arms; and Gletkin, a representative of the "new generation" who succeeds Ivanov. Unlike his predecessor, Gletkin has no past, cares nothing for history, and, like "Sam" in The Trial of God, eschews emotions. His cold professionalism triumphant, through him we explore the world of the Stalinist aparatchnik, the bureaucrat bereft of empathy or philosophy. Gletkin's primary goal is to succeed at his job, narrowly confined to the breaking of Rubashov, with no personal involvement. To borrow from Max Weber(who, predating them, did not write explicitly about the Soviet experiment or Nazis), this new generation of civil servant goes about his business "sine ira et studio," without anger or love, without sentiment.5 In a striking paradox, Koestler unfolds the character of Gletkin or the complicit guilt of Rubashov, profoundly secular men and events, using chapter epigrams that draw upon the Church fathers alongside revolutionary leaders like St. Just. A subtext of religious analogy permeates the book from the moment of Rubashov's arrest as the elderly, frightened, tenement caretaker mutters "Amen." Koestler uncovered an essential core that the two realms surprisingly shared and, in his view, from Machiavelli to St. Just, "Satan" threaded his way through the critical and determinative moments of Western history. As one of the most politically engaged intellectuals of the 20th century, Koestler's characters took on the reality of "Over There" perhaps more than most literary creations. The crafting of Gletkin may be a bit self-conscious, too deliberate and even artificial. More subtle, the work of Franz Kafka conveys the same spirit: not only the writer of the angst of

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the modern world, Kafka conveyed the feel of bureaucracy and all it entailed. Holocaust scholars like Alvin Rosenfeld and Lawrence Langer acknowledge the horrifying prescience in Kafka's writing—in "In the Penal Colony" or "The Metamorphosis" or, most disturbingly, in The Trial. Kafka, Langer writes, "lacked only the concrete threat of dehumanized extermination." Nightmarish and fantastic, his scenarios "coexist with the possible and the real."6 And Rosenfeld calls "In the Penal Colony" "an uncanny prefiguration of Holocaust literature, a premonitory text."7 In The Trial, Joseph K. epitomizes modern bureaucracy even in his name, derived from the Imperial and Royal civil service Kafka knew so well: "kaiserlich und koeniglich," or "k.u.k." (pronounced "ka und ka"), the letter K symbolizing the ensemble of characteristics of the modern bureaucrat; which opens the mysteries of Joseph K. a bit. George Steiner pointed out that Kafka's treatment of reality, apparently hallucinatory at times, derives from and is grounded in his own astute observation of local, historical circumstances: "Kafka's phantoms had their solid local roots."8 Steiner attributes a consistent anger in Kafka's works, "anger against the sadistic anonymities of bureaucracy and assembly line."9 As he describes parts of Kafka's opus, "In the Penal Colony," The Trial, Steiner concludes that Kafka was a prophet who portrayed in exact detail what would come in reality, including the "faceless boredom of the killers"; the real world would present Kafka's "fantasy turned to concrete fact."10 As unlikely as that may seem, Kafka nevertheless produced a profound symbolic reality. Joseph K. would become manifest in the likes of Adolf Eichmann, Albert Speer, or Franz Stangl—the bureaucrats of death who seemed to personify the same qualities so cryptically yet annoyingly found in Joseph K. In the end, K. is the quintessential narcissist, virtually defining the word, who can only perceive the world in terms of his own life—all relationships are calculated and grounded in a utilitarian value system. K. looks to each person he encounters for potential assistance in his case, for some use to advance his situation. He cannot think outside these narcissistic boundaries—he perceives every character only in terms of his own life, his trial. Like the thought of Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset or Koestler, Kafka seemed to perceive that 20th-century humans in Western civilization would turn in potentially deadly directions. A limited, cramped thinking gripped K., thinking partially glimpsed in Gletkin and clearly revealed in Ortega's description of the new, modern "mass man," it would appear in Hannah Arendt's portrait of Adolf Eichmann

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and in historian Joachim Fest's brief sketch of Albert Speer, whom he characterized as the most egregious example of the "self-chosen isolation of the technological mind."1 * For Eichmann, possibly the new "everyman," thinking—thinking well, "thinking through the eyes of others,"—had ceased. Like Joseph K., he recalled people and events only as they related to his own career or life. But in Eichmann, enabled with power over others, thoughtlessness, Arendt wrote, "could wreak more havoc" than all the disasters brought by the supposed human instincts of evil.12 Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt's controversial and brilliant analysis of the trial and the character of Adolf Eichmann, should be read in conjunction with Kafka's The Trial, each book expands the meanings of the other. Kafka's awful insight into his own time may offer some guidelines for the reading of real lives. If narcissism binds all these figures together, then each of their perceptions of meaning, be it of events in the super-real or surreal world of Kafka or of the differently surreal experiences of the Holocaust, may be framed in those personal contexts. As the quintessential bureaucrat, K becomes a guide for his century, pointing to motivations and to meanings for historical figures. Most of the writers I have mentioned have not explicitly turned to Weber's discussion of bureaucracy, but some of the more insightful and determinative works of Holocaust scholarship have. The great Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg may have derived some of his pathbreaking ideas from a Weberian tradition, having studied with Hans Rosenberg, himself a student of Weber's.13 Hilberg's work decisively broke with the customary approaches to an examination of the perpetrators. Instead of the incarnation of evil, or living examples of Hitlerian hypnotic persuasion or rabid antisemites, Hilberg placed the army of bureaucrats at the core of the Holocaust which became a reality in the context of routinized work. His ideas, striking a cold, almost bureaucratically bone-chilling series of reflections, culminate in an essay whose title revealingly dispels the myth that Hilberg himself was overly objective. In "Confronting the Moral Implications of the Holocaust," he wrote that "in its component parts, in the small acts that went into it, it [the Holocaust] is as ordinary as could be. It is only the configuration that stands alone in history as something unprecedented, something which has never been equaled in its magnitude."14 These reflections on the role of bureaucracy in genocide were pursued further by Richard Rubenstein and others, like Zygmunt Bauman.15

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What were those vital characteristics of a superior bureaucracy that Weber seemed to think had transformed the Prussian state into the dominant power of Europe? Not envisaging anything like genocide, Weber carefully described the purpose, nature, and disposition of modern bureaucracy. He did not portray it as demonic or evil, but his unease subtly disclosed itself and the essay materialized almost as a warning. The organizational structures of modern bureaucracy, wrote Weber, produced clear technical advantages and corroborated technical superiority over all other forms of organization. Bureaucracy in the modern world facilitates action because the principle behind it demanded "precision, speed, unambiguiry . . . continuity . . . strict subordination" to the idea of hierarchy. It worked best with clear definitions of tasks, materials, and problems, all of which had to be ordered by strictly fixed rules and/or administrative regulations. "Official duties" required that "methodical provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of duties." The official assumes the task of completing a "duty" and his "vocation" enjoins him to invest his complete involvement in that goal "in return for a secure existence." Thus he constructs a "career" (emphasis in original). As it defines goals and sets tasks, methodology remains bureaucracy's principal modern innovation. The office or vocation, first of all, is increasingly separated from private life as modernization progresses. Such separation includes different behaviors, values, and ethics, even different personalities in the two realms of the bureaucrat's life. But perhaps most important, bureaucratization compels "purely objective considerations." In its daily routine, it requires an "objective discharge of business" that "primarily means according to calculable rules and 'without regard for persons.' " These final four words become the watchwords of bureaucracy, mordantly proclaiming yet another virtue, the calculability of its results—as scientific experiments cjaim. Weber placed this factor at the heart of the matter: Its [bureaucracy's] specific nature. develops the more perfectly the more bureaucracy is dehumanized, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation This is the specific nature of bureaucracy and it is appraised as its special virtue This dehumanizing, along with the separation of his life into two distinct realms (private and public), generates a bureaucrat who meets the

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main demand of his professional existence: he must have a detached and "strictly 'objective' " mentality. The modern bureaucrat may then pursue "purely objective considerations" as the "objective discharge of business primarily means . . . according to calculable rules and 'without regard for persons.' " Such mentalities shape "experts," people utterly unlike their counterparts in older systems where personal sympathy, "grace and gratitude" were powerful determinants of behavior. The advancement of bureaucratization not only depersonalizes or dehumanizes, it dehistoricizes, removing any allegiance to historical or cultural tradition. In more direct terms: ethical or moral considerations will go the way of nonobjective 17

ones. Some 45 years later, Hans Rosenberg applied those ideas to the evolution of the Prussian bureaucracy from 1660-1815.18 He barely mentioned Weber. Prussian bureaucracy, argued Rosenberg, became linked with social status, a force to shape ideas and events, as by 1806 the new generation of "the enlightened gebildeter bureaucrat" came into its own. More than their ideas, however, the "reorientation of minds, habits and aspirations" spelled out the new quest for a career. Educated and professional, they considered themselves not "royal servants" but "servants of the state."19 Most relevant to the Weberian discussion, however, was Rosenberg's observation that "in the Hohenzollern state . . . government acquired a certain impersonal quality." Indeed, anticipating the future, the poet (and politician) Novalis noted that "no state has been governed more like a factory than Prussia since Frederick William I."20 The "gebildeter bureaucrat" would evolve into what Ortega labeled the "learned ignoramus."21 This "new man" managed Europe in Ortega's own time (1930); the Gletkinesque, professional "servant of the state," dehistoricized and cut loose from allegiance to traditional values, would appear all over Europe. He intruded into daily life. In Germany Gletkin became Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolph Hoess (Commandant of Auschwitz), or even Albert Speer. The "devil" had put on a uniform or a three-piece suit and competed for office space, promotion, secretarial staff, and acknowledgment of accomplishments from figures of authority. Instead of accumulating souls, he now accumulated titles and built his career. When Raul Hilberg, once Rosenberg's student, wrote his monumental work on the murder of the Jews, the German civil service and virtually all the businesses, professions, and administrative offices that participated in the Holocaust seemed to fit those theoretical and historical analyses perfectly. He and Richard Rubenstein brought those qualities into sharp

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relief and left students of the epoch in ethical if not historical quandaries. They proposed radically disturbing answers to the question of how absolute evil had infringed itself upon everyday life. And as Rubenstein underscored the ideas in Hilberg's massive work, he crafted an argument derived from Max Weber's observations about the Western scientific revolution of rational analysis that wrought the disenchantment of the world. Ironically, the disenchantment and secularization of the universe shaped by the culture of the West "was an outcome, albeit unforeseen and unintended, of its fundamental religious traditions."22 He charted the "progress" of our civilization, which ensued from secularization: progress toward democracy, liberalism, emancipation, a better quality of life, "medical hygiene, elevated religious ideals, beautiful art, and exquisite music," and death camps.23 Rubenstein concludes that Auschwitz looms as Western civilization and its values in boldface, expressing essential cultural principles, forms, goals, underlying assumptions, and motivations. Provocative and depressing, to say the least, The Cunning ofHistory nevertheless raised the unanswerable questions that may fester at the center of the Holocaust. They are questions intrinsically Western in their focus on process, method, and the "how" of "achievement." They are questions about method and efficiency, technical and impersonal, bureaucratic and logical. Such concerns have occupied Western achievers for millennia: successful thinkers, statesmen, businessmen, and citizens. Rubenstein insisted that we look at the perpetrators of genocide and see them honestly: they appeared on his historical stage not as "uniformed thugs or hoodlums," but as "highly competent, respectable corporate executives."24 Their attention focused on venerable Western concerns: logic, consistency, method—concerns that echo from Aristotle to Hobbes and Descartes, from Machiavelli to Lenin, from Joseph K. to Gletkin. Guided by reason alone, thinks Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, these crusaders for some reason had lost their "moral ballast" and "gone awry." For Koestler, the once true believer in the secularly sacrosanct hopes for socialist revolution, the failure of that crusade totally compromised the vision and the humanitarian project it had represented in the 19th century. Examining this history through such categories eventually calls into question the entire civilized, urban, and secular project, the dreams of such Enlightenment thinkers as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Kant and Rousseau. The promise that men would become "the masters and possessors of nature" enthralled them. That promise, so nobly expressed by Rene Des-

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cartes, would later be quoted by Robespierre in his quest for absolute power to conduct what became the Terror of the French Revolution. In a grotesque twist of comparative revolutionary history, Stalin and Hitler might be seen as arguing in similar ways for distinctly less noble reasons. The sources of these distorted images shall remain problematic, but will be argued as long as the events are remembered. For Rubenstein, the Judeo-Christian tradition was the source of bureaucratic dehumanization in the West. Fully aware of the cruel irony of his analysis, Rubenstein argues persuasively that: The earliest culture in which the world was "disenchanted" was the biblical world of the Israelites. When the author of Genesis wrote "In the beginning God created heaven and earth" (Gen. 1:1), he was expressing that disenchantment.25 Shrouded in mystery, God alone remains divine as the rest of the world— organic and inorganic alike—assumes the qualities of objects; the "supra-mundane" deity creates the mundane remainder of the world and instructs Adam to "subdue" the earth and all its creations so that he may assume "dominion" over them. No creature, place, or person shares His exalted being or magical force. Primo Levi's remarkable insight regarding the corruptive nature of the lagers parallels some of the thought mentioned earlier in this chapter. No one seems free from the infectious and insidious seepage of the values that would extend from contemporary European civilization to Auschwitz. It appears that Levi's "gray zone" existed before the lager, if in considerably less palpable or physical form and with less horrifying consequences. Yet exist it did and it is, perhaps, reflected in Koestler's near final appellation for Rubashov, the protagonist, if not the hero, of the novel. An anomalous and pitiful tsarist prisoner still lives on in the Stalinist prison in the cell adjacent to Rubashov. As Rubashov prepares to leave for his execution after communicating with his neighbor, ironically his last friend, the former officer of the Tsar's Army taps out in code: "You're the devil of a fellow. . . . The devil of a fellow."26 In Treblinka, the devil wore a white uniform; and at his trial Franz Stangl rejected responsibility for the murder of some 800,000 Jews. When journalist Gitta Sereny interviewed Franz Stangl's wife about his activities before and during World War II, Frau Stangl told her that "he never said anything against Jews." 27 Stangl himself insisted that he ad-

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hered to his routine, maintaining law and order first within the T-4 or Euthanasia program in 1938—1939 and then at Sobibor and Treblinka. When Sereny first questioned him about his thoughts regarding the murder of the sick under T-4 and then of the Jews, Stangl asserted numerous times that he "was merely responsible for law and order," by which he meant "maintaining maximum security provisions."28 A policeman at heart, Stangl's self-perception seemed stuck in this administrative capacity as chief bureaucrat of Sobibor and then Treblinka, more specifically, "simply administering the 'public health' of the nation."29 Echoing Hannah Arendt's assessment of Adolf Eichmann's "criminal" flaw, his lack of thought, Sereny reports Stangl's frequent references to not thinking about what he was doing while carrying out his bureaucratic duty of maintaining law and order. His primary police duty, he alleged, began and continued as "the responsibility for these effects," the money and valuables collected from the Jewish victims. To focus on that task, he believed it was necessary to "compartmentalize" his thinking. Eventually, in the course of Sereny's series of interviews with him, Stangl admitted "Of course, thoughts came. But I forced them away. I made myself concentrate on work, work, and again work." Commitment to his office, his duty, and his career seemed to have driven him and that commitment was greased by perceiving the Jews as "cargo." "It had nothing to do with humanity—it couldn't have . . . I rarely saw them as individuals." Not as individuals, but as Stuecke, pieces, dehumanized objects on a list of items.30 The picture of the Commandant that emerges from Sereny's Into that Darkness resembles a corporate administrator in charge of a particular office to do a particular task. Franz Suchomel described Stangl as an efficiency expert whose only concern seemed to be "to have the place run like clockwork." Suchomel, the guard who had been stationed at the "funnel," where victims usually became aware of their fate as they were forced into a narrow doorway leading into the gas chamber, seemed sympathetically attuned to such an attitude. When Claude Lanzmann, director of the film Shoah, interviewed Suchomel (without his subject's knowledge), he asked the Unterscharfuehrer how it was possible to "process" 15,000 Jews per day, that is, take them from boxcar to chimney. Suchomel's answer reeks of the ethos of the new killers: "Please, Hen* Lanzmann, let's not exaggerate. It was 12,000." This cold, precise, and business-like manner of thinking captures the essence of what Hannah Arendt referred to as the "new criminal."

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Stangl's counterpart in Auschwitz was Rudolph Hoess, whom Joachim Fest charcterized as "unthinking" and exhibiting an "intolerable selfcentredness."31 His memoir reads like a catalogue of achievements accomplished against enormous odds, giving little thought to the human essence of the victims of Auschwitz. "It is tragic that, although I was by nature gentle, good-natured, and very helpful, I became the greatest destroyer of human beings who carried out every order to exterminate people no matter what." This maudlin, self-indulgent attitude in which Hoess portrayed his own suffering and discipline as more stringent than the suffering of the Jews led Fest to regard him as "the exemplary representative of that abstract approach which commits its murders methodically, with occasional private unease, but in general with patient disinterestedness."32 In one of his last letters to his wife and children, Hoess bemoaned the prospect of being conceived by the "broad masses" as epitomizing evil. Despite his denial, rejecting that conception, who or what, then, would be evil in the 20th century if not the ruler of Auschwitz? These carriers of evil appear as incarnations of what the devil had become in the secular world—efficiency experts, dedicated to law and order, preoccupied with prosaic items like the money and valuables that Stangl could not remove from his mind. Yet it is not to them I would like to turn, but to the chronicler, in this case, Gitta Sereny. Patient as she was, she had little tolerance for mendacity, hurriedly prompting Stangl with probing questions and pursuing his comments with dogged persistence. Surprisingly, in 1995, more than 20 years after Into that Darkness, she wrote a massive book on Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and then his Minister of Armaments.33 Paradoxically like the striving and middle-class Stangl, the paladin Speer seemed "both proud and ashamed" of his position and his "accomplishments."34 It seems clear that he had become the prototypical technocratic specialist who could deny responsibility for the increasingly acknowledged atrocities and murder of the Jews. Well aware of what was occurring, Speer nevertheless clung to the idea that the concentration camps "were not his business." His "business," he maintained at Nuremberg, related only to "technological and economic" tasks.35 Sereny called his moral dilemma over the necessity to confront "the repressed guilt of his terrible knowledge . . . and his need to deny" the "great dilemma of his life" from the Nuremberg Trial to his death.36 Unlike his fellow defendants at Nuremberg, Speer accepted responsibility for his acts—or seemed to. His testimony reveals a deep-seated narcissism, perhaps someone who always sought to benefit himself. His

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testimony frequently followed a distressing pattern. Assuming a nearheroic contrition, accepting the burden of responsibility, he described the monumental difficulties he faced for the construction of the stage setting for the Nuremberg Party Rally of 1934—a rally he acknowledged as a critical turning point, the first public test of the new Nazi regime's power and credibility. Culpable in that success, he appeared to suddenly warm to his subject when he turned from the project to embolden the Nazi Party with the rally and began to describe in detail the technical aspects of the job, his genius in converting a potential disaster into a smashing success not simply or even primarily for Hitler and the National Socialist Party, but for himself as testament to his skills and achievements. The testimony almost imperceptibly elided from penitence to pride of profession. If that dualism, the contriteness blended with bravado, fascinated Sereny, it appalled some earlier historians and commentators. John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, one of Speer's interrogators, noted that "He kept presenting himself as an outstanding technician and organizer. He could assume that his enemies would admire a good mind and a technological talent."37 Before his trial, Speer naively but arrogantly declared that he hoped to be "evaluated purely on the basis of my professional performance."38 Speer's earlier biographer, Matthias Schmidt, found his subject obsessed with his job, bound up by technology for its own sake and giving no thought to the fact that humans would be hurt and destroyed by it. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British journalist-historian, labeled Speer "the real criminal of Nazi Germany."39 Schmidt, like TrevorRoper, rejected the view of Speer as the apolitical, aloof technocrat. Sereny's simultaneously sympathetic and critical evaluation of Albert Speer resonates with her evaluation of Franz Stangl. In his quest for a moral lesson in the Holocaust, Tzvetan Todorov, in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, turns penultimately to Sereny, whose work he reveres. "What she teaches us is how an average human being, Franz Stangl, came to be implicated in one of the most monstrous crimes in all of human history and then how, finding himself thus implicated, he tried to justify himself both in his own eyes and in the eyes of those near to him."40 Todorov argues that Sereny, as a superb narrative author, creates a moral evaluation and expresses some hope through her analysis of Stangl. Yet here is what may be the most powerful passage in Into that Darkness. Sereny relates a scene in which she spoke with Richard Glazar, a survivor of Treblinka, late in the night, alone in his isolated country home as his family slept and the stillness hung heavily on both inter-

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viewer and interviewee. Glazar showed deep emotion for the first time as he told Sereny about an evening when all hope had disappeared. Glazar related the story of his fellow prisoner, Hans Freund, who that night spoke of his wife and child as he had not done before: "My little boy had curly hair and soft skin—soft on his cheeks like on his bottom—that same smooth, soft skin. When we got off the train, he said he was cold, and I said to his mother, T hope he won't catch a cold.' A cold. When they separated us he waved to m e . . . . " Sereny noted that Glazar had never faltered until then. "He hid his face in his hands for long minutes.... 'Did you see this?' he asked then after a while, pointing to something behind me." Glazar handed her a small glass jar half full of something. "Earth," he said, "Treblinka earth."41 While the scene continues, the conversation growing more devastating, "Treblinka earth" represents a closure of sorts, a conclusion. What morality did Sereny or Glazar evoke in that brief story? Glazar had given her a quintessential Holocaust moment: the death of a child and his mother, the utter loss of human feeling that enveloped the prisoners, the cold meaninglessness of the event. Had Todorov focused on such a passage, he might not have concluded that Sereny offers the reader any grounds for moral evaluation or hope. What, indeed, is the meaning of that story? As it is to so many survivor testimonies, the appropriate response to those words is silence. NOTES 1. Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God, trans, by Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1979), 122. 2. Ibid., 132. 3. Ibid. 4. Richard Rubenstein, The Cunning ofHistory: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 21. 5. Max Weber, "Bureaucracy," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans, and ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1947), 196-228. 6. Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 21. 7. Alvin Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), 23. 8. George Steiner, "K," in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 118-126. 9. Ibid.

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10. Ibid. 11. Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 199. 12. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 288. 13. Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory; The Destruction ofthe European Je 14. Hilberg, "Confronting the Moral Implications of the Holocaust," Social Education (April 1978). 15. Richard Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1989). 16. Weber, "On Bureaucracy." 17. See Chapter 8. 18. Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 19. Ibid., 190-191. 20. Ibid., 175, 188. 21. Ortega y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1930), 112. 22. Rubenstein, 31. 23. Rubenstein, 30, 92. 24. Ibid., 62-63. 25. Ibid, 28. 26. Koestler, Darkness at Noon, 212. 27. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 51. 28. Ibid., 82. 29. Ibid., 51. 30. Ibid., 200, 201. 31. Fest, 284, 285. 32. Ibid., 284. 33. Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 34. Ibid., 6. 35. Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970), 199. 36. Ibid., 13. 37. Matthias Schmidt, Albert Speer: The End of a Myth, trans, by Joachim Neugruschel (New York: Collier Books, 1982), 3. 38. Ibid. 39. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 240. 40. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 282. 41. Sereny, Into that Darkness, 211-212.

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In Search of the Simple Answer In October 1996, in its annual conference, the Social Science History Association included seven sessions on Holocaust scholarship and research. Its plenary meeting featured Raul Hilberg, acknowledged dean of Holocaust scholars, as the keynote speaker. The sessions indicated that the Holocaust as a subject of scholarly inquiry has been mainstreamed into the academic world. Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, was one of the participants; while this session did not focus on his work, the room was filled because of his then notoriety. The criticism of his paper, a chapter from his book, was heated, even passionate, visceral and, in two cases, arguably ad hominem. After the session, one leading scholar confided that "we [professional historians of the Holocaust] will be forever saddled with the burden of explaining this book." Not since Hannah Arendt's work on Adolf Eichmann had there been such furor over an academic book on the Holocaust. A ponderous tome, over 600 pages, it sold 60,000 advance copies and over 100,000 hardcover copies before coming out in paperback; it was on the New York Times best-seller list; it engendered at least two scholarly volumes in English and one in German devoted to debunking it; and it brought Goldhagen an estimated $11,000 per appearance and what he called (quoting Die Zeit) a "triumphal procession" in Germany.1 By these facts alone it became an extraordinary book, but what caused the furor and intensity that prompted observers to marvel at the meanness of historians' debates?

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The stunning success of the book and its author may connect to a deep longing on the part of his readers to find an answer to perplexing questions about the Holocaust; an answer that does not leave a reader in the depths of despair. Goldhagen offered an odd mixture of academic research, tinged by what at times almost sounds like a victim's rancor, and a penchant for simplistic reductionism couched in markedly nonacademic, subjective language. He might easily have represented a quest for a quick, convenient, and satisfying answer to the most complex questions of the modern era. If silence seems to be a requisite response to these questions, Goldhagen offered noise, informed and even comforting for its simplicity, but loud and brash in its essential single-mindedness. In that sense, the Goldhagen debate reduced attempts at historical explanation. Moral and religious ideas received short shrift. He offered American and then German readers a lesson about German culture as he viewed it; that lesson became for him the lesson of the Holocaust, the meaning of which could not have been clearer after reading his book. With its conclusive explanation, his work seemed to bring closure to the Holocaust debates. But both the tone and the content ofHitler's Willing Executioners antagonized respected scholars in Holocaust studies and questions about the facile nature of his thesis and conclusions, about Goldhagen's attribution of meaning to the Holocaust, and created a debate that seemed interminable. If they ever had sought it, historians like Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning had abandoned that quest for closure; and surely survivors, many of whom sought it desperately, have also acknowledged the futility of such a quest. Goldhagen claimed he wanted to "reconceive" the perpetrators, German antisemitism, and German society under the Nazis. He argued, somewhat astonishingly, that "little concerted attention" had been paid to the perpetrators. Further, most of those earlier studies, he declared, show "a poor understanding and undertheorizing about antisemitism." His fundamental thesis was meant to correct these oversights: German antisemitism was the "central causal agent of the Holocaust," which moved all Germans and created a willingness on the part of all Germans to kill Jews if they had had the opportunity. He raised such questions as: why would ordinary people kill with such enthusiasm? How could they torture and humiliate when refusal would have cost little or nothing—a fact the author claimed no one before had pointed out? The answer: because they were Germans. A peculiar brand of antisemitism—"eliminationist"—pervaded German culture and convinced

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"ordinary Germans" that killing Jews would be right and just. The Holocaust was the logical result of this unique, lethal, and singularly German eliminationist antisemitism that had been built into its political, cultural, social, and religious institutions. The German 19th-century "cognitive model" of the world, the lens of "eliminationist antisemitism" through which virtually all Germans saw the world, made them "of one mind with Hitler." Like him, they all "wanted to be genocidal executioners." With the rise of Hitler, "eliminationist" melded into a racist, "exterminationist" form and this, insisted Goldhagen, determined "German common sense." With this sweeping argument, Goldhagen created an ethical, moral, and professional dilemma for historians because to attack or criticize his thesis seemed to force them to defend the Germans. Raul Hilberg, certainly no Germanophile, like so many of the others whose work Goldhagen astoundingly dismissed, had done more to lengthen the list of perpetrators than anyone. Again and again in his memoir, The Politics of Memory, Hilberg affirmed that his superb scholarly work was and is his life, his obsession. He dismissed Goldhagen's book as "worthless." Yehudah Bauer, Hebrew University's premier Holocaust scholar, actually reprimanded the Harvard University committee that approved Goldhagen's doctoral dissertation, the heart of the book. Virtually every scholarly review was critical in serious and vital ways. From that array of historians and other intellectuals it should be obvious that to attack Goldhagen as mistaken was not tantamount to rescuing the Germans from responsibility or guilt. Those critics, including every member of the panel in New Orleans—Michael Marrus, Deborah Dwork, Ian van Pelt, James Young, and Peter Hayes—differentiated, examined more closely, asked different questions than Goldhagen had. His peculiar use of survivor testimony as a source of evidence revealed an intellectual and even structural flaw in approach if not in interpretation. While he gave plenty of examples of victim accounts to support his theory, my own experience interviewing survivors yielded subtly different, more nuanced conclusions. To the question of which group each survivor would identify as most viciously anti-Jewish, for example, I received different, even multiple answers: the Poles, no, the Hungarians, no, the Ukrainians, no, the Germans—and so it went. Had Goldhagen examined the comparative nature of Russian or Polish or Hungarian or Rumanian antisemitism? He had not, or if he had, no evi-

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dence appeared in his book. To Hilberg and others, that neglect, coupled with other reasons, made the work shoddy and vulnerable. At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) symposium held on the book, one critic noted that Goldhagen did not allow for any differentiation among Germans. Yehudah Bauer attacked Goldhagen for his lack of comparative history: Rumania's slaughter of 300,000 Jews in Transnistria, Bauer exclaimed, perpetrated by "ordinary Rumanians," derived from 19th-century Rumanian antisemitism. He accused Goldhagen of defective scholarship, in part because of his disregard for German history outside his narrow view—no discussion of largely pro-Jewish Social Democrats or Communists and no reference to elections or the difficulties the Nazis encountered even after 1933. Christopher Browning, the perceptive historian against whom much of Goldhagen's thesis was aimed, noted that he and Goldhagen were different historians looking at the same material, asking different questions and producing different interpretations. They profoundly disagreed on motivations. Goldhagen insisted on a monocausal origin of the Holocaust: German demonological antisemitism. Browning recognized that antisemitism of course played a significant role, but could not have been sufficient to cause the Holocaust. Indeed, in the preface to his Ordinary Men, he wrote that "clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization." Browning attributed far more to the policy of the regime than to cultural antisemitism. The basic questions still remained: how and why did ordinary men become Holocaust killers? The answer, according to Browning, was not that they shared Hitler's worldview. In characteristically modest statements, Browning argued for an interdisciplinary, far more complex, and multifarious approach to understanding what one survivor had asked in an interview as early as 1946: "What really is a human being?" That question translated into Browning's life-long query: "How could human beings have perpetrated the Holocaust?" In a brief article about Goldhagen's work, Browning concluded that "Any attempt to understand perpetrators of the Holocaust—not just Germans, but all those recruited into its machinery of destruction—requires an investigation of human nature."2 His tentative yet erudite forays into how that monumental task might be achieved stood in stark contrast to Goldhagen's apparent reductionism. Unlike Browning's hesitant, diffident and cautious conclusions, Goldhagen's thesis, that virulent antisemitism is the leitmotif"of 150 years of German history and culture, rejected all other positions. In his appen-

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dix, he reproved as mendacious all testimony that would deny this. Historical situations and circumstances appeared irrelevant to him. At the USHMM symposium, Browning referred to Primo Levi's disturbing and valuable concept of "The Gray Zone," as he had done in Ordinary Men. A complex philosophical argument grounded in Levi's own concrete experience, the "gray zone" annulled any simplistic, monocausal explanation of deportment during the Holocaust. It included behaviors of victims and perpetrators, muddied the moral waters, refused to reduce the dilemmas to simplistic answers. Levi presented a profoundly depressing and, most important, complicated idea. Goldhagen's evidence came from "case studies" of the killing institutions apart from the death camps: the "work" camps, the Ordnungspolizei, and the death marches. He presented, often with an emotional and morally judgmental tone, numerous, nearly overwhelming, chilling, and gruesome examples. In his view, the Police Battalions represented a microcosm of lower and lower middle class Germans who "killed w/ sadistic abandon." Some even brought their wives to watch the slaughter and sent home photos of the killing. To Goldhagen, they were driven by the content of that "cognitive model" of the Jew as malevolent, powerful, and deadly demon. Again and again he called for a new interpretation that centers the perpetrators in this new light and concluded that all Germans who had the opportunity engaged in cruelty and killing willingly. All other explanations were dismissed. Indeed, the men of Police Battalion 101, which Browning (and Goldhagen) studied in his work, had the option not to kill. Although some initially refused to participate—at no risk—they eventually joined their comrades in massacre. Similarly, examinations of the death marches of 1944-1945 baffle and perplex most historians. Survivors themselves often grow incredulous regarding the possible motives for these final killing orgies. Goldhagen, I think, does us a service by reintroducing the subject. It strikes me as a good idea to remind us again of the nature of the furiousness, the seething barbarism of the Holocaust. But he, of course, explains the puzzle simply as the last gasp of frantic German anti-Jewish hatred. His book has raised again questions about the gruesome details of the cruel and brutally sadistic murder of Jews. In my view, however, the singular question continues to haunt us, more troublingly: why would ordinary people kill with such enthusiasm and sadistic cruelty? In the end, perhaps, the Holocaust presents the question of evil perpetrated by ordinary, if not "good," people.

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The Germans were not the first successfully "eliminationist" antisemites. Jews were expelled from Britain in the 12th century and it remained without them for 400 years; Spain was the same from 1492; the Ukraine and Poland began pogroms in the 17th century that led many Jews to migrate to German states in the 17th and 18th centuries. But there was no holocaust. From a purely historical perspective, then, other factors produced the Shoah. That means deeper consideration of the vagaries of human experience and historical circumstances; of the subtleties of motivation and behavior. These considerations yield complicated, not simplified, explanations. Historians have for generations examined the Sonderweg, the special road of German modernization. They have argued that Germany had developed differently than the rest of western Europe: it was illiberal, experiencing a disjuncture between economic advances and political immaturity; it came to national unification very late; and it developed its own nationalist or Voelkisch ideology that was antimodern. This idea received renewed credibility in John Weiss' The Ideology ofDeath: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. Weiss pointed out that the "demonic image" of "the" Jew was fixed as early as the middle ages and worsened by Luther, whose writings Weiss described as "more obscene than even Hitler's Mein Kampf." The peculiar brand of late nationalism that came to Germany along with its reactions to Enlightenment capitalism, revolution, and war in the 20th century all fused together to produce a unique brand of German fascism. How widespread that was remains moot. Local studies have shown, for example, that many Germans were drawn to antisemitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around. What fool would deny the power of antisemitism in the Holocaust? But German antisemitism, while it shared characteristics with that of other countries, unfolded in specific, different circumstances and with distinctly different results. In their reactions to Daniel Goldhagen's argument, several historians— Hans Mommsen, Yehudah Bauer, and Raul Hilberg among them—have noted that antisemitism and antisemitic political parties in Germany had dramatically declined from 1878 to the years just prior to the Nazi seizure of power.3 Nazism replaced civilized values and restraints with terror and indoctrination. Perhaps that was its most terrible contribution to our century. It created an enabling killing environment, a "warrant for genocide" as it officially loosened taboos and polluted the world so that even Jews and

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other victims became caught in the murky, gray zone it built. Nazism enabled the great transformation to make the Final Solution thinkable and practicable. It offered a new synthesis of ideological and fanatical determination combined with technological, bureaucratic, civilized methodologies and indifference. And although Goldhagen suggested examining the Germans anthropologically, as if they were some preliterate tribe like antisemitic aborigines, in fact, they were not a preliterate, alien people, but a modern, civilized culture, fashioned by the Judaeo-Christian, Enlightenment, and humanistic traditions. That's the problem: how do we understand the barbarous and the civilized, the human and inhuman together? If historians seek to answer the question that Graham Swift's historian poses in the novel Waterland— "whywhywhy"—this historian-political scientist culled a quickly and easily comprehensible and comprehensive answer. The meaning of the Holocaust then becomes singular and simple. German history and culture provide the answer to "whywhywhy" and proffer the meaning of the Holocaust as well. In his triumphal tour of Germany, Goldhagen also revealed the silver lining for Germany, summarized in a brief op-ed piece for Newsweek magazine, that "thanks to fifty years of Western democracy, which helped remake German political culture—and the legal abolition, and consequent general decline of anti-Semitism." Somewhat gratuitously, Goldhagen credited his book with aiding the new German consciousness. A "number one best seller" that "sparked a national conversation that continues" on the Holocaust, the book's reception, he said, demonstrates "the profound positive changes the country has undergone." Gone are the ingrained antisemitism, the habitual brutality toward and hatred of Jews that he had labeled "ubiquitous" and "profound." Germany had expunged what Goldhagen argued they had absorbed as if with the air they had breathed for centuries. Historians posed many historical questions about Goldhagen's book, questions that he addressed inadequately or not at all. And he and his opus raised other questions as well. Why did so many scholars react so emotionally and fervently to the work and, more strangely, to the author? Responses had been passionate, even hysterical. In Germany, he received the single-voiced criticism of historians and experts while younger people thronged to his lectures. Auditoriums were needed; halls were changed; 2,500 people lined the street in Munich at $10 per person and he received applause everywhere on his "triumphal procession." And in New Orleans, the audience clapped at his response after

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he was personally attacked and was even vilified by the leading professionals in the field of Holocaust studies. Thoroughly puzzled, some of my colleagues in other fields did not understand this. But one very prominent historian spoke to me about this in agitated terms: "He does not bring out the best in us [Jews, Germans, and historians]. His book is worthless and will be a blight on the field"—a disgrace to Harvard and to American scholarship. Scholars refused to participate in conferences where Goldhagen appeared. Part of these diatribes derived from reading the book backwards—notes first. In the footnotes, Goldhagen berated many historians—Browning, Hilberg, Hayes, Michael Marrus, and others. And sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, he seems to have distorted their work and misrepresented them egregiously. Knowingly or not, then, he committed one of the cardinal sins of professional scholarship. Works like Browning's Ordinary Men, or the scholarship of Raul Hilberg or Richard Rubenstein, imply that practically anybody could have participated in genocide. Most significantly, each of them amplified the complex nature of the Holocaust. When Hilberg, in his magisterial three-volume work,4 uncovered the nature of the bureaucratic apparatus that administered the Final Solution, he detailed the involvement of lawyers, engineers, accountants, professionals, and workers of all sorts. They were modern men in the service of modern institutions like the railway companies, finance offices, and private firms—almost 200 of which were engaged in the profitable construction of Auschwitz alone. These men who staffed the organizations could not be labeled "pure antisemites." Nor could the police in Reserve Police Battalion 101, those who shot Jews daily and whom Browning and Goldhagen each examined, be identified as uniformly diehard haters of Jews. In a review article, "The Goldhagen Phenomenon," Hilberg wrote that Goldhagen "overstates the extent and depth of German anti-Semitism [sic]."5 But Goldhagen promised and managed to provide an explanation of the Holocaust as he "addressed himself heedlessly to the disturbing question of 'why' and . . . chose one and only one answer." He thereby "shrank the Holocaust, replacing its intricate apparatus with rifles, whips, and fists."6 And that is the point: Like Primo Levi's books, those of Hilberg or Browning or Rubenstein leave us depressed, perhaps confused and helpless. For each of them, the moral puzzle remains unsolved. One finds little if any sense of relief or adequate explanation. At the end of the USHMM symposium, Leon Wieseltier pointed out that it is worse that

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some killed without conviction. It is an indicator, he said, of the resourcefulness of evil, its meaninglessness; that it is sober and drunk, monocausal and multicausal; and irreducible. We may never find satisfactory answers to the questions the Holocaust poses. The very least we can do is not accept falsely complete ones that placate our anger and our need to know. They mitigate a need for a simple and quick answer to questions that may be unanswerable about a subject that, as Socrates said about justice, demands the long road rather than the short one. From the fact that "the killers were ordinary Germans" (Police Battalions) one cannot conclude that all "ordinary Germans were killers." Lucy Dawidowicz once said that there is more to the Holocaust than Jewish suffering. There is also more to it than German antisemitism. In the search for meaning in or of the Holocaust, Goldhagen's has emerged as one of the quick-fix answers, a short road through a most complicated journey. If the meaning of the Holocaust lies in the culture of 19th century Germany and its efficacy in the 20th century, Goldhagen has given us a definitive answer to the most perplexing questions of our time. Simple, uncomplicated, and unencumbered by careful comparative and historical data and research, that answer may yet win the day. If it does, it will join other reductionist and mollifying theories that offer similar escapes from still more unpleasant and alarming implications. NOTES 1. See Robert R. Shandley, ed., Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate, trans, by Jeremiah Riemer (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Franklin H. Littell, ed., Hyping the Holocaust: Scholars Answer Goldhagen (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, 1997); Johannes Heil and Rainer Erb, eds., Geschichtswissenschaft und Oeffentlichkeit: Der Streit um Daniel J. Goldhagen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1998). See also Gustav Jahoda, " 'Ordinary Germans' before Hitler: A Critique of the Goldhagen Thesis," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 (Summer 1998), 69-88; Orner Bartov, "Ordinary Monsters," The New Republic (April 29, 1996), 32-38; Steven E. Aschheim, "Reconceiving the Holocaust?" Tikkun, Vol. 11, No. 4, 62-65. 2. Christopher Browning, "Human Nature, Culture and the Holocaust," The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 18, 1996), A72. 3. Hans Mommsen, "Conditions for Carrying Out the Holocaust: Comments on Daniel Goldhagen's Book," in Hyping the Holocaust, 29-43. 4. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 volumes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985).

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5. Raul Hilberg, "The Goldhagen Phenomenon," Critical Inquiry, 23 (Summer 1997), 721-728. 6. Ibid.

5

Of Parchment and Ink If the sky were made of parchment and the oceans and rivers were made of ink, there would not be enough parchment and ink to write of the magnitude of God. From the Shavuous Service If the sky were made of parchment and the oceans and rivers were made of ink, there would not be enough parchment and ink to write of one hour in Auschwitz. A survivor "Do you still believe in God?" The question arises regularly when Holocaust survivors speak—especially when they address American students, many of whom have read survivor texts, from Elie Wiesel's Night to Alicia Appelman-Jurman's Alicia: My Story. They seem intrigued by a survivor's faith or lack of it. And considering the apparent religious magnitude of the Shoah, there has been relatively little theological reaction from Jews about the place of God in the Holocaust.1 At issue here is not "Christianity and the Holocaust," but Judaism and the Shoah. As we will see below, survivors' anger and frustration has more often been directed in this arena than in the Christian one. Included in those responses to theological questions, survivor testimonies rest on a different plain than rabbinical, academic, or professional ones. Less unequivocal, emphatic, or certain, some of them reflect the ex-

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perience of the Holocaust in their syncretic confusion of opinions. Unlike more imperious answers, they echo the conundrum-like nature of the epoch, even from profound religious commitment. Conundrum implies a question without an answer, a problem without a solution, or a problematic situation that is unresolvable. Immersed in this religious conundrum, perhaps a variation on the question of God, is a question about the meaning of the Holocaust. Richard Rubenstein, among those theological voices who have addressed this subject most controversially, wrote: When I say we live in the time of the death of God, I mean that the thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth, has been broken. We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?2 Rubenstein joined a venerable group of Jewish doubters, some even Talmudic, and a line of Western thinkers that reach far back into ancient history, all proclaiming the death or disappearance of God. Even Elie Wiesel, in what is perhaps the most quoted passage in his signature work, Night, seemed to echo Rubenstein's sentiments: "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp.. . . Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever."3 After the Holocaust, such questioning voices assume chilling new depths. And here is Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, the opposite pole from the doubters and questioners: Ironically, never since the destruction of 1900 years ago has it been so abundantly clear that all that had occurred is the workings of the direct hand of God. Nonetheless, the question "Why" was posed: Not the "Why" of our Rabbis of old, "Why was the land destroyed?"—-the search for the specific sin that earned destruction, which only God could pinpoint; but the "By what right?"— subjecting God himself to our judgment, wherein human intelligence presumes to evaluate Divine justice.. .. It is essential. . . that we declare our total submission to Divine wisdom and Divine rule. It is Job again: do not presume to ask of God the reasons for his wrath. Who is Job—who are we—to judge the need or rationale for punishment, the meaning of God's actions? More to the point, this seems to assume what Job's "friend" assumed, that Job must have committed some crime, some indiscretion or sacrilegious or sinful act. The meaning of Job's suffering—and then the meaning of the Holocaust—is clear: suffering is al-

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ways God's punishment. Suffused with purpose and intention, human suffering carries a lesson, a moral, a divine and justifiable retribution for transgression or iniquity. Considered from this perspective, God has instilled the Holocaust with meaningfrilness. At the root of this discourse, whether Biblical or contemporary, rests the fundamental assumption, represented by Job's friends, that some meaning must be ascribed to suffering. Perhaps the most chilling prospect from a particular reading of Job is the terrifying suggestion that either God acts on whim, or the world, godless, is stochastic or random, with no reasonable meaning whatsoever.4 Many Orthodox Jews, including some survivors, in the prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Amos, or Hosea, have argued intractably, that the Holocaust must be viewed as God's just punishment on a people gone astray. Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, quoting a survivor interview in Reeve R. Brenner's The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors (1980), cite a stark, extreme statement of this position: The Holocaust was saying that Jews who keep the mitzvot (commandments) are doing the right thing and Jews who do not are doing the wrong thing, a terribly wrong thing but we will all suffer alike. The innocent and guilty together, until we all become religious and observant Jews. Marcus and Rosenberg offer seven theodicies that survivors have presented to explain God's place in relation to the Holocaust. This one suggests retribution, closely bound to another, "the suffering servant" theodicy of Isaiah.5 Rejecting such traditional explications, Rubenstein raised the question that plagues some Jewish theologians: after Auschwitz, can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God? An affirmative answer places Auschwitz, Hitler, the SS—as Rabbi Weinberg and Brenner's survivor seem to readily admit—in the position of God's instruments— a prospect if not blasphemous, then almost obscene to many. In this vein, the Holocaust presents little or no crisis of faith or theology. The typology of Jewish history and suffering remains constant: the Nazis, cast in the mold of the Amalekites (Exod. 17: 8-16), continued the behavior of prototypical antisemites.6 This position has gained strength in recent years, grown with the forceful insistence of leading Orthodox rabbis in Israel who ultimately accuse secular Zionists for the Holocaust. Some argue that Jews then and now have failed to obey the

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"Mitzvot genocide batorah," the commandment of genocide in the Torah, the order from God in Genesis to destroy all the Amalekites. It is a holy war, a Jewish jihad? But for many survivors who have pondered the question, such systems of symbolism abstract the experience, pose little if any resolution, and unsatisfactorily meager answers to colossal theological questions. Some Jews became apostates after the war; some became even more religious than before; others abandoned Judaism only to return to it later, perhaps after the birth of children. There are those who, like Elie Wiesel, questioned God, indeed, are or were angry and openly express that. Anger at least presupposes existence. Others reject that existence. Curiously, those who draw upon the Holocaust to justify either position, who argue most vehemently for or against the presence or absence of God, tend to be of the post-Holocaust generations. Survivors rarely enter the discussion with such certainty. For example, Rubenstein, not a survivor, at a conference nominally on the "Church Struggle and the Holocaust," revealed the origin of his denial, a powerfully dramatic experience, yet once removed from the Holocaust. In 1961, days after the erection of the Berlin Wall, Rubenstein visited Probst. Dr. Heinrich Grueber in that city. The only German to testify against Eichmann and himself a concentration-camp victim, Grueber explained the Wall to Rubenstein in theological terms. He believed God was punishing a sinful Germany; homeless Germans would now pay for those whom other Germans had made homeless. As Rubenstein listened raptly, the good Probst, finally asserted that Hitler had been a tool of God, sent to exterminate Europe's Jews. Rubenstein then realized that Grueber represented the logic of Covenant Theology applied to the events of the 20th century. "He [Grueber] recognized that, if one takes the biblical theology of history seriously, Adolf Hitler is no more nor less an instrument of God's wrath than Nebuchadnessar."8 Ultimately, such beliefs probe for the meaning of the Holocaust and find it, mysteriously, in God's unfathomable mind. And, just as for Job, a lesson emerges, a presumed revelation of sorts seems to have come to Rubenstein as he discerned that "If one takes Covenant Theology seriously, as did Dean Grueber, Auschwitz must be God's way of punishing the Jewish people in order that they might better see the light, the light of Christ if one is a Christian, the light of Torah if one is a traditional Jew."9 Disturbed by Rubenstein's story, Elie Wiesel, speaking at the same conference, offered a surprising, impromptu response instead of the talk

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on Holocaust literature for which he was scheduled. He began with the story of Mad Moishe the Beadle, who came every day to the bimah (altar), in the synagogue in Sighet, Wiesel's home in Rumania. He pounded on the pulpit and said, "Ribbono shel Olam, Master of the Universe, I want you to know that we are still here." Daily, even as the transports started: "we are still here." Finally, only Moishe remained in the ghetto, and still he came to the bimah and banged his fist: "/am still here." Then, he stopped and murmured, "but you—where are you?" An anecdote? An allegory or metaphor? Wiesel elaborates: "What the Germans wanted to do to the Jewish people was to substitute themselves for the Jewish God. All the terminology, all the vocabulary testifies to that."10 Typically profound, almost cabalistic, Wiesel's story implies a more mundane moral. If the "Germans wanted . . . to substitute themselves for the Jewish God," Jews were obliged to cling faithfully to that god, perhaps as a demonstration of the defeat of the Nazis, a symbol of victory, an audacious display of spite. How this midrash, or interpretation, connects to Moishe the Beadle remains tantalizingly obscure. Similarly enigmatic is Wiesel's concluding allegory about Rabbi Ishmael, one of the 10 martyrs in Roman times to whom God gave an option in the midst of his travail: if Rabbi Ishmael shed one tear, He would return the universe to chaos. But the rabbi did not cry. "Why didn't he cry? The hell with it!" Wiesel challenges. "If this is the price to pay, who needs it? Who wants this kind of world? Who wants to live in it? . .. But to be a Jew is to have all the reasons in the world to destroy and not to destroy." Presumably the moral to be taken from this story, as it might relate to the issue at hand, needs some transposition. The meaning of the story, and perhaps the lesson of the Holocaust, may lie in this parable, but it must present itself to many as simply inadequate to the task. To be a Jew, intimated Wiesel, is to have all the reasons in the world not to believe in God, and to believe in God.1] For after the Holocaust, almost as an echo to Emil Fackenheim's admonition to Jews to remain Jews of the faith in order to withhold final victory from Hitler, it is incumbent on Jews to believe in spite o/the Shoah.12 On balance, Rubenstein's point seems stronger, more concrete, and more consistent, if devastating and depressing. Wiesel's eloquence and Talmudic style appear strangely inappropriate in his abstruse parables. In Night or his other novels, or in his essays that directly address Holocaust-related questions, the literal assumes primary precedence; specific, human examples sharpen and reinforce Wiesel's purpose. Unlike that

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writing, however, this essay—admittedly an impromptu talk—lacks the intensity and assurance of those others. At least here, God's role in the Holocaust remains problematic for this primary emissary from the world of survivors. When they emerge, questions about that role have been among the most torturous for victims of the Holocaust who survived. Few subjects receive such intense reaction—dismissal or engagement. From the midst of incredulity about her own survival in hiding, Erna G. voices her paradoxically ambivalent yet adamant refusal to attribute that survival to God: How can a human being survive like that? [pause] How can you ... I can't even imagine, I can't even. .. . You know, it's like an invented—it cannot be reality. Why did we survive? How is it possible for a minimum of two years? [Question: Do you have any religious feeling about your survival?] No. Oh, no! If there was a god, he would never [have] allowed it. If you call, if you say "good" God. . . . [pause] This is just strictly my. . . . [long pause]13 Throughout the remainder of the interviews with Erna there would be almost no discussion about religion. Even her childhood recollections of her Orthodox grandfather reveal fear and hostility—a severe man, dressed in black, with a violent temper who never held her or offered her a kind word. And typically, she tries to mitigate the memory: "Maybe it was just too long ago and I don't remember." Erna seems to have bound Judaism's God to this image and to her experience of fear and disease, starvation and silence that meant survival for her. Pain and loss merge with religion and she finds no solace in it. Bereft of that comfort, visited by the physical losses of family, she mourns over the multiple deprivation of a religious heritage. Yet beneath an antipathy toward religion lurks a cautious, penitent attempt to palliate what she perceives as Judaism's failure. Much of that religious heritage had been absent from her life before the war. From religious grandparents came less observant parents, and the child had little awareness of ritual, having been born in France after her parents had emigrated from Poland. Others, however, attest to the centrality of religious observance in their lives before the Holocaust: "Religion was part of your life. .. . You kept your Sabbath, you were Jewish and you were kosher. That was a natural thing. And there were no questions." In Munkacz, in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Czechoslovakia, Agi R. recalls that there were no

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questions. She, like Wiesel, questioned and questions God, defying the idea of justice in His actions, yet acknowledging His existence— frustratingly unfulfilled in that concession. In the village of Betlan, in Transylvania, smaller than Munkacz but perhaps equally devout, there were no questions either. There, Abe P. grew up in a family that lived and breathed religious devotion. His initial reflections announce his religious sensibilities and their links to his family life. His father, he begins, had "bord andpeyas," a (long) beard and side locks; his mother wore a sheitl, a head covering; the region knew his grandfather as a ltmoira tzadek," one with an awesome or authoritative knowledge of interpreting the Law (Torah). Abe's childhood life revolved around religious education. He recalled in minute detail the table in his cheder (religious school), around which the students sat learning the alphabet; the weekly exams, the questioning, the "potches" (slaps) at incorrect answers; the Thursday night examinations and the Sabbath ones at home beginning with the weekly "wos hoben gelernt?" (what have you learned?) query from his father. Any sign of failure and "God help you!" His routine had already been established at a tender age, fixed like the natural course of events, like the God-ordained routines of the stars: 6 A.M., ready for cheder and davening (praying); breakfast at home, then he and his siblings "put down the siddurim [Hebrew books] and picked up our goyishe [non-Jewish] —our secular—books and we rushed to school. . . . [We] came home around 11 o'clock, ate lunch, rushed to school until 4 o'clock and we picked up our books and went back to shul [synagogue] . . . until 7 o'clock." Evenings were for study. Abe boasts that his father endeared himself to Betlan's rebbe (religious leader), because of his piety, a sign of the profound respect the community and the son bore him. Partly a consequence of that respect, the idea of questioning either of those two religious figures simply was beyond imagining: "God forbid!" There were no questions or conversations probing the nature of God—an unthinkable topic. Lessons learned by rote filled his mind and "the worst thing you could say about [a peer] was 'he doesn't know, he doesn't know Chumash [the Bible].' " To say that Jewish life in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Karpatorus) or in this small Transylvanian town revolved around religion would be a gross understatement. Judaism, ritual, and piety were inhaled like air.14 "It was a way of life." Subcarpathian Ruthenia, a part of Hungary before World War I and of Czechoslovakia between the wars, had been a stronghold of Orthodoxy since the 17th century as well as of Hasidism since the late

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18th century. Jewish Subcarpathian Ruthenia (ca. 45% of the population was Jewish) retained that tone until its destruction in the Holocaust. Numbers of Jews had arrived in Subcarpathian Ruthenia in the 17th century, fleeing from Galician pogroms begun in 1648 by Chmelnietski and his Cossacks. Poor and frequently downtrodden, they settled in the agricultural backwater towns and villages where the overwhelming majority remained at or below the poverty level in "primitive" conditions. From Galicia, too, emigrated key Hasidic rabbis in the late 18th century, establishing major schools oryeshivot in Munkacs, Sighet, Ungvar, and Chust, among other cities, and creating consequent internal strife with traditional, non-Hasidic Jews. Despite or because of that strife, the Jews of Subcarpathian Ruthenia maintained devoutly religious households and communities. 15 Hasidic sects, each with its own rebbe, filled the region. Jewish communities there exuded religious orthodoxy, piety, and education steeped in Talmudic literalism. Occupied by the Hungarians in 1939 as a result of a treaty with Germany, life remained essentially the same, although the new authorities established quota systems and antisemitic laws. The gendarmerie along with the Arrow Cross Party became a frightening presence for Jews. Jewish men were conscripted into labor gangs and camps when the war started, but only with the German occupation in March 1944 did the Holocaust reach its lethal peak there. By Fall 1944, virtually all Jews in these occupied areas had been shipped to Auschwitz. Here, Abe and the two survivors who follow him shared a type of religious education, which included rote memorization, constant reverence, and a rigorous educational schedule that, despite the different cities, remained essentially the same. There were "modern" Jews in these towns—Betlan, Volove—but "a so-called 'modern' Jew there, would be an Orthodox rabbi here [in the U.S.]." Violence, pandemonium and confusion exploded into that life. Three interviewees had voiced a poetic, blackly ironic inversion of part of the ritual service of Shavuos which reads: "If the sky were parchment and the oceans ink, there would not be enough parchment and ink to magnify the name of God." In their twists, or variations on this reading, each of the three substituted either Auschwitz or the Holocaust for "the name of God." Unlike Emil Fackenheim's apparent call for the substitution of the "Commanding Voice of Auschwitz" for the commanding voice of Sinai,16 these variations resonate with resignation or even cynical despair. When presented with this rather stunning modification, Abe reacts by

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reciting the original text, describing the letters ("a double aleph-bet") and avoiding the implications of the change. And then he abruptly launches into his own description of a day in Auschwitz. [It was] an insane world. Insanity was the order of the day. Sanity did not exist. . . Counted you . . . This counting; this Appel [role call] and constantly watching you. I don't know. I'm, I'm putting it now together. Over there, there is smoke and all kinds of things going on and here they're counting you over and over and over. Why are we so important? While other thousands of people are being killed. A persistent motif, the preoccupation with the Appel, a reflection, perhaps, of what seemed a German preoccupation, seems to conceal another theme: those "other thousands" seem to be more important, to him, than himself and those with him. Why was he so "chosen"? Why did he survive, when those other thousands did not, were not counted, do not count now? Insanity seems to be an explanation, a rationale, which ultimately fails to assuage his sense of guilt and his puzzlement over that infernal counting. Given the insane world of Auschwitz, his survival seems senseless too. He bears a part of the nature of that place and his reflections on God have prompted this veiled confession. But how does he feel about replacing the name of God with the name of Auschwitz? Without skipping a beat, rhythmically responding to that question, Abe somehow averts it: "When you davened [prayed] in Auschwitz, you davened with such gehunim, such intensity. . . . Oh—I davened every day alone . . . others watched us. A man at Buchenwald had a half-burned siddur and it was his shield. . . . " Does he reply to the question of Auschwitz supplanting God? Is this his answer? A refusal, perhaps, to face the question directly, like the taboo against speaking God's name or looking into the holy of holies. "I was afraid. I was fresh out of a yeshivah; I had peyas to the last moment. . . used to say tfilin [daily prayers] constantly . . . used to daven constantly with such concentration: 'Please God, help us!' " He remembers, repeats the fact of davening perhaps in order to emphasize that such religious observance continued, indeed was heightened, in Auschwitz. "While I was in the camp I never stopped believing." Sidestepping a direct confrontation with the question of divine responsibility for the Holocaust, Abe has sounded another primary motif: davening, constant, lonely, intense "full of torn [guts or energy]." He contrasts this with the prayer of American Jews, including his own, after the

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war. As he speaks, growing more agitated and angry, Abe reveals more of his inner torment, seeming to unearth secrets to himself, revelations that almost surprise him as they are spoken. [After the war] I became a shaygetz [non-Jew]. . . . I dropped out for a long time. . . . I'm ashamed to say it. I even ate trafe [nonkosher]. That's when I questioned. No! Let's not put it that way because [growing agitated again] when I went to shul I still davened with kahunis [enthusiasm]. Let's put it this way: I rebelled . .. Who did I rebel against? I don't know. This is the truth. I don't know whether it was God. I was always—even though I rebelled—I was a superstitious person. . . . I don't believe I rebelled—no—I would not put God in it. . . . I rebelled against authority. I rebelled because I didn't have parents—anybody to account to. I said: "I'm gonna do whatever I want." . . . But it didn't last long. Those questions about God's responsibility, God's role in the Holocaust, the substitution of Auschwitz for God in the prayer, and ultimately the meaning of the Holocaust hover around the discussion. Fixed on his postwar experience, Abe continues reflecting. "It was . . . [long pause] empty. An empty feeling. [In Yiddish] I didn't know anything... I didn't know exactly what [I was doing]." His silent rebellion, "a rebellion . . . without cause," internal and agonizing, led him to distraction after the war, bound him to the Holocaust, amplified the loss, and deepened the emptiness. Was it a rebellion against the experience, against the Holocaust itself? Or was it against the memory? I didn't look at it that way. I went through the Holocaust and I was angry for that. . . . We were in a state of confusion. .. . You know, there was no orderly life. // was not orderly. I don't know how else to explain it to you. It was empty. Something was missing. You walked into that shul on Shabbos, which was packed every Shabbos and every holiday . .. and there was a holiday and a Shabbos there and [pause] it was . . . empty. . . . It was sad. We were, we were, so sad, we were, we were. . . . We wanted to cry but we didn't cry. We didn't know what the next day would bring.... We were careless [pause] We, uh, we even got drunk.. . . Really we didn't care. . . . We saw our world destroyed. A Jewish world destroyed. There was one little kid who came from Rumania. . .. We loved that little kid No further discussion of the child ensues. Perhaps he decided to censor his story; perhaps the boy intruded as a distraction; perhaps Abe knows that to finish by telling of the child's death would be gratuitous and pain-

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fully exhausting, his silent question of why almost audible. Silence ensues, uneasy and long, more than a full minute, before he continues, shifting, or so it seems, to another subject. But the topic remains focused on his postwar religious sensibilities. As an assistant chaplain in the U.S. Army, Abe often conducted services for a small number of troops. "When I was a chaplain . . . [pause] it was nothing. It was another job. I used to daven. I used to daven by myself . . . No! I didn't daven, I just davened Friday nights." At this point, the pauses seem to indicate moments of decision. Should he divulge these feelings? Will his persona as particular interviewee, particular survivor, be altered? What will the interviewer think of hirn—questions raised silently, perhaps, but irrepressibly there. These moments appear to gain stress, create dilemmas for him, new and compounded struggles of how and what to tell. Trying to explain his postwar ambivalence, he contrasts American Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur Eve services), with those in Betlan, his hometown. He expresses contempt for the American version: This davening had no torn—no feeling.... [In Europe] there was meaning to This davening [in America] was very empty. [In Europe] every word is perfectl pronounced . . . with a tremendousfeeling. You know what? It helps you. It you vent your frustration. [Recites some prayers for healing the sick] You you say it with feeling: "Do not forsake us. Do not abandon me." People like scream out and yell that. They have the same request from God. . . . Learned it youngsters and we understood the words. Order, meaning, feeling, understanding—Abe yearns for prewar life that was exactly predictable, orderly, obedient, meaningful, unquestioned, full, and feeling. As he discusses that, simultaneously aware that it has all disappeared, he reflects the dilemma of having nothing left but rebellion with no one to rebel against; no order, no sense, "an insane world," riddled with questions that frighten him, drained of feeling, rendering him afraid to feel again. Ghosts of the past and the way the world ended converge on his religious memories, finishing with thoughts of his parents and brother in the gas chamber. Where in these confusing and conflicted ruminations can a person with such a past address the question of religion and the Holocaust with any sort of certitude? Ambivalence, an utter lack of unequivocal certitude, permeates much of Abe's subsequent narrative. Unprompted by a question, he reacts to the logic of his own rumination:

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No! [insistently] Maybe others did [abandon faith] but I didn't. [Relates a story about another prisoner's question to a religious man who replied: "Leave me aloner] No! We did notl We always talked about we're gonna go home—"God willing." He appears to digress, speaking about the train from Theresienstadt to the labor camp at Schlieben, his consistent belief while in the camps, his postwar abandonment of Sabbath observation and his guilt over that. Again he grows agitated and then returns to the question about God, citing a Talmudic passage: "The great judge should not judge correctly" . . . He knows what He's doing. He must know. Because nobody who's created such a world does not know what He is doing, does not judge correctly... the admonishment of the Torah [is] "to observe my laws but if you don't, just one of the others will defeat you." . . . I don't know. [Pause] There's always an answer: I said "look, I've survived." Hell broke loose . .. and all this comes to me in small bits .. . I was never able to find an answer. But if you blame God, you're excusing the human beings, the Germans, for what they did to us .. . the other nations that stood by. . .. My belief did not leave me. [Long pause] "How could God do this to us," I asked a young man once. "Do you believe we're ever going to get out of this camp [in Yiddish]?" He said to me [still in Yiddish] "Everything is luck. Even the Torah needs luck to be taken out from [the canopy]." So, you see, if you talk to another person who went to a yeshivah, he believed. He said "this is a punishment." Like the survivor quoted by Marcus and Rosenberg, Abe demands there be an answer—an answer in the Torah or Talmud. Such an answer must be there, yet he admits, almost in passing, that he "was never able to find an answer"', that while "my belief did not leave me" he nevertheless asked a fellow prisoner "how God could do this to us." The conflicts appear in thick clumps, rapidly thrown together, contradictions that are not contradictions. Searching desperately to resolve some of them, he has sounded a new, vexing theme*, punishment. It lurks beneath this long portion of the interview about judgment, answers, hell breaking loose, disobeying the laws and, finally, the quote from a fellow prisoner, another former yeshivah student. When queried further about this question of God's punishment of the Jews, Abe almost loses control of his temper: I hate that! Don't you ever say that! [Relates his arguments with rebbes over this question] American Jews—[are they] more of a tzadik [righteous man] than

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[European Jews who sat and studied]? Any rebbe who says that [the Holocaust was God's punishment] is no rebbe at all. . .. There is a saying in the Bible: "Thou shalt bring an offering to God." That's a chutzpah [brazen]. What did that little sheep do to deserve punishment and killing? [Abe launches into a discourse on the four types of ritual sacrifice, then quotes in Hebrew]: "When Hell breaks loose, there is no difference between the good people and the bad people." Everybody is being swept by that. This is the answer . .. Once in a while, Hell breaks loose. . . . We may be paying for generations way, way back. As the question of sacred punishment prompts strong reaction from Abe, he has nevertheless circled to an oblique argument that may support the idea. Hell breaks loose, a vehicle for the reproof of previous generations, a hidden agenda of God's that victimizes unsuspecting, even innocent Jews. "We may be paying for generations way, way back." To demonstrate his idea, Abe briefly describes the short life of Samuel, who, according to the Talmud, thus paid for the sins of previous generations. And the paradoxically inconsistent conclusion follows: "No survivor will accept this concept that God punished us because we were not religious enough." Shifting to a discourse on the crusaders, Abe draws yet another conclusion, in Hebrew: "The ones that God loves, He punishes them." He seems to have switched again, recognizing the possibility that to reconcile God and the Holocaust, one must acknowledge an element of holy retribution, and again continues with apparent contradictions: One man told me "we have to accept everything God said." I said to him, that's not true. Because God said "If somebody [in Hebrew] comes to kill you, kill him first." I said, God helps those who help themselves [Hebrew, as he grows agitated] I said to him "the last time I turned the other cheek, I wound up in a concentration camp." And the rabbi agreed with me! [Pause] The Bible says a tooth for a tooth. Angry at the concept that God would punish Jews for a lack of piety, Abe nevertheless seems to lace his discussion with affirmation of the idea. He implies that the Jews disobeyed the "eye for an eye" commandment, the instruction to kill first when someone comes to kill you. Thus, they discovered the cost of transgression. As if in flight, Abe turns again to descriptions of davening, before, during, and after the war. He describes his feelings at the birth of his son, his return to the fold with subdued gusto, and when he describes his postwar rebellious attitude toward the lamen-

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tations of t'ish abuv, he seems to become melancholy. Were the deaths in the Holocaust like those deaths—holy, sanctified, and consecrated? No! [Pause] Well, yes and no. I don't know how to answer that... I don't believe that God wanted six million martyrs. . . . [Pause] I was singled out because I was [in Hungarian and in German] a dirty Jew; a damned Jew .. . Maybe He picked us out because we were not organized. With that statement, Abe has, probably unconsciously, substituted God for the Germans and the Hungarians. He seems to mean that the Germans and Hungarians, to whom he was a "dirty Jew" or "a damned Jew," may have picked the Jews for destruction because they were disorganized, easy prey. Yet he identifies the perpetrator as "He" in a discussion of the Kinot (Lamentations) in which God's martyrdom of pious Jews in history is commemorated. Typically, Abe moves to peripheral topics, the resistance movement (isolated, individual acts of resistance in the camps), only to return abruptly to the question of whether he considers the Holocaust a secular or a religious issue. "I cannot answer that. I only know I was disliked" (referring again to the Germans and Hungarians who persecuted him). After more seemingly discursive rambling—about Israel, the lesson of not turning the other cheek, the Exodus, the British quotas, Auschwitz, the ghetto—he returns to the question about the religious or secular nature of the Holocaust. His talking, perhaps, has covered his thinking, bought some time to address the subject. Religious Jews have paid for it. Regardless whether they were religious or not—they were Jews. It must have been, a . . . maybe it was from God since I do believe that maybe God does things I do not understand. .. . Not [necessarily] as punishment but maybe as a lesson: "don't turn the other cheek; you did not observe what I taught you [in Hebrew]: If somebody comes to kill you, kill him first. You didn't learn that" [Pause] You mean to tell me that I have to accept what the goyim want to do to me? "I give you just as much brains, saychel [good sense], strength [agitated] and everything to try to defend yourself. If you don't do it, how much can I do for you? What do you want me to do?" [Long pause] How do you explain [the six million]? My mother and father? Not listening to the warnings, that was maybe a punishment too. Maybe God has taken away our thinking [by not believing what we were hearing] Our nonbelief of the news of the Holocaust [was] the message to us.

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Has Abe dialectically advanced to the opinion that the Holocaust came as a punishment from God? After adamantly, even angrily rejecting the idea, he seems to have reasoned his way to that point. He repeatedly refers to the superstitious aspect of his religious conviction, vacillating between deeply felt religious passion and occasional fear and superstition. Finally: "You don't know how to answer these complicated things. I don't know how to answer . . . [pause] I know this much: in the camp I was afraid to irritate the Ribbono shel Olam [God] [pause]" But how much worse could it have gotten? Why the fear of irritating God in Auschwitz? [Pause] We knew that every minute, every hour something was going to happen. And we knew that the old people left and disappeared. And at the same time they count us constantly—what do they need us for, what's the purpose of it? Evidently they have a use for us.. .. They put us to work. They put us to work. They needed us. But then we found out we were just ninety day wonders. So those with the courage and the strength tried to survive. And at the same time, I believed very strongly [Hebrew] "everything is luck" and I also felt by davening, by davening and by cleaning myself up and not letting lice eat my body, I did everything possible because Ijust did not want to die\ [Pause] And I said to myself: 'Oy, Gotenu [my God!], wouldn't it be nice, I'm gonna find my parents and we're going to sit and I'll tell them my experiences . . . I remember that thought. But to realize that I'm gonna talk to [you, the interviewer] or to schools and colleges [pause] . . . off my rocker. With characteristic honesty, Abe has revealed the profundity of his ambivalence. Yes, he davened, a possible ticket to survival, but he couples that activity with cleaning himself of lice, a precise, physical and definite necessity for survival—like davening, a necessary but not sufficient element for living. Steeped in religious fidelity, his intensity of belief unquestionable, Abe nevertheless expresses another fundamental, equally basic source of his piety: he just did not want to die and feared irritating God for that reason. These emphatic avowals provide a tapestry of contrasts, contradictions, confusion, and equivocal feelings. Perhaps such paradoxical views might exclude each other in different contexts. They do not in this one. Holding such simultaneous, conflicting attitudes emerges as a commonplace in many survivor testimonies. And in few other subjects does this pattern manifest itself so strongly as in the subject of religion or God in the Holocaust. The concluding remark about the in-

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sanity of speaking to college students echoes Abe's characterization of Auschwitz as an insane world, a world that seems to pursue him in his heart of hearts, afflicting his relationship with God. This world, too, is insane. Can Holocaust experiences like Abe's be illumined by some theodicy? In a sense, that question stalks Abe and will stalk the others discussed here. Lawrence Langer has maintained that the Biblical figures of Jesus and Job, "archetypal examples of the value of suffering for the growth of the spirit,"17 demonstrate how "virtually useless" such traditional ideas are in confronting the Holocaust. The very language of the texts appears vapid when applied to Auschwitz and "betrays the limitations of all pre-Holocaust spiritual vocabulary." 18 Yet, ironically, Langer used a portion of Abe's testimony in earlier interviews to make this point and suggests that Abe would not ask God questions about forgiveness or justice. In the interview that dealt primarily with his religious viewpoint, however, Abe approaches those two subjects, circumspectly and obliquely, but steadily. He draws no certain conclusions, takes no firm stand. Religion provides him with little consolation and less explanation: as a theodicy, an interpretation of events that might offer a consoling model, or "the justification of God's goodness and justice in view of all the evil in the world,"19 his religious belief verges on irreconcilable differences with his experience. Abe returns to his memory about the young man in Buchenwald who miraculously retained a half-burned prayer book: And I asked him to let me use it for a minute to daven and he watched me like a hawk, he wouldn't let it out of his sight. What does that mean? [Pause] Siddur [prayer book] and God go together. He was the only one who could help us [growingangry;pause] He did—I'm here! I'm telling you. [Longpause] [David] did not make it. It doesn 't make any sense. . . . I was number 57929, not Abe P., a Katzetnik [concentration-camp inmate]. Another planet, an insane world. Did God create that planet? No. But he let the Germans create it, made them the carriers to carry it out. I don't have any answers. The only answer [Hebrew]: When Hell breaks loose, everybody is in it. The final emptiness: what is the meaning of clinging to God ("Siddur and God go together")? For life, for help, for survival—God saved him. But He did not save David, or the book for that matter. Haunted by such memories and associations, Abe seems to confront a host of prospects about a world with God and Auschwitz: no sense, no reason in number identities,

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in Auschwitz the planet, the insane world created not by God but on his behalf—is that possible? Is it plausible? Is it reasonable? No answers, only questions and a missing family—no parents with whom to talk— missing children, missing books and, perhaps, the unspeakable, a missing God. Alex E.'s family were not Hasids, did not follow a rebbe. He wore short peyas, his father wore a beard. Of the approximately 200 Jewish families that lived in his Hungarian town of Kralovsky Chlumec, Alex remembers one lawyer considered a "modern" Jew who observed the Sabbath but did not attend daily services. Alex's grandfather sat and studied the Talmud all day while his children ran the store, the family business. Some of his uncles were rabbis in other cities and his family could trace its origins to King David. Like Abe, he followed a rigid daily routine of cheder, public school, eventually yeshivah, and when his grandfather would visit, with his caftan, black hat, and silver cane, an event of consequence, there would be informal exams. The yeshivah he attended for a short time was 30 kilometers away, "the same place the ghetto was." No one even dreamed of raising questions about the universe or God, all enshrouded in mystery. About the rote memorization of the Torah and the Talmud he recalls: "[we] did not question what we were taught; I did not question what my parents told me . . . I accepted explanations given to us by our teachers and parents." These seem to be troubled comments. Asked about the variation on the Shavuout prayer, the substitution of Auschwitz for God, Alex responds quietly and firmly: "That never occurred to me. . . . I can never describe what went on, but I can't describe God either. They are each indescribable in different ways. [Pause] I have trouble seeing it that way [Auschwitz and God] . . . There was not a replacement [of God by Auschwitz] . . . anger, frustration . . . anger towards God [which is] connected to the glory of God." But he has not remained angry. "I believed God is with me . . . reads my thoughts . . . is a matter of examining and talking to my conscience. I was praying in my thoughts." Praying, like Abe, every day in camp—morning prayers marching to work, thanking God for surviving each day; praying to find his family, to return home. He returned, found no family and no home. Growing more thoughtful, Alex seems to contradict earlier statements, as if integrating his memories more deeply. "[Pause] Others were angry against God, against religion. But I didn't question [pause] not during the experience. I questioned after . . . about a year after liberation. [Pause] Is

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there a God? Was this preordained? . . . I was looking for answers. . . . What happened to me, the loss of my parents and my sister is something I cannot really question . . . I can question, but there is no way I can get an answer. And since I have to answer myself, I came to the conclusion—chose the conclusion—that I'm not to question. It was the will of God and I accept it." In the Warsaw labor camp, where Alex cleared away the debris and rubble from the uprising and the war, he attended daily, secret services conducted in the barrack by the esteemed Klossenberger Rebbe. The Rebbe received special privileges, permission to remain in the barracks, for example, from the Blockeltester. As objectively as he can, Alex relates the resentment of the other prisoners to the Rebbe. He comes no closer to expressing anger, estrangement, disapproval, or doubt about God or religion—just the brief comment about the resentment toward the old man, God's representative, His leader in prayer. Like the conclusion he chose, perhaps he has chosen this figure as a symbol, delegate, or emissary of God against whom he may, however gently, vent his frustrations. NOTES 1. For a brief overview of a wide variety of Jewish (and one non-Jewish) theological reactions to the Holocaust, see Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Holocaust Theology (London: Lamp Press, 1989). 2. Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966), 152. 3. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Avon, 1966), 44. 4. One of the more provocative treatments of Job is in Jack Miles, God: A Biography. 5. Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, " 'Faith, Ethics and the Holocaust': The Holocaust Survivor's Faith and Religious Behavior and Some Implications for Treatment," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1988), 413-430. 6. Dina Porat, "Amalek's Accomplices: Blaming Zionism for the Holocaust: Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel during the 1980's," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 27 (1992), 695-729. 7. Amos Elon, "Israel's Demons," New York Review ofBooks, Vol. 42:42-43, Dec. 21, 1995. 8. See Hermann Dicker, Piety and Perseverance: Jews from the Carpathian Mountains (New York: Sepher-Herman Press, 1981) and S. Y. Gross and Y. Yosef Cohen, The Marmaros Book (Tel Aviv: Beit Marmaros, 1983).

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9. Richard Rubenstein, "Some Perspectives on Religious Faith after Auschwitz," in Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke, eds., The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 256-268. 10. Elie Wiesel, "Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent," in Littell and Locke, 269-277. 11. Ibid. 12. Emil Fackenheim, God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Re/lections (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 67-104. 13. Ema G., Voice/Vision Project, University of Michigan-Dearborn Mardigian Library. 14. Dicker, 29-30. 15. Marcus and Rosenberg. 16. Fackenheim. 17. Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.

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"Angels, God's Emissaries Would Look Like Germans" What follows concerns a small portion of a series of interviews with Meilech. Those interviews, running to some 25 hours, represent a minuscule portion of his memory, which in turn recalls a minute portion of his experiences. The focus of these selections is theological. Upon reviewing the remaining parts of Meilech's narratives, one might discover that much of them are also theological—less explicitly, perhaps, but poignantly, often bitterly, sometimes reverently grappling with universal questions through specific, concrete events. Meilech was born in Volove, a small town in Carpatho-Ruthenia, in 1929. He was 14 years old when the Hungarian Police sent him to Auschwitz with his father, mother, younger sister, and younger brothers in May 1944. He was 14: a refrain he repeats at each interview. If survivors feel that there cannot be enough time, "not enough tape, not enough paper, and not enough ink" to adequately convey their experiences, Meilech has devoted himself to simultaneously affirming that and attempting to overcome it by a series of interviews. He broke a 40-year silence with a torrent of spoken memories. As he speaks, one hears echoes of Hasidic homilies, theological similes, and improvised metaphors as poetic as some of those in Meilech's tradition. His speech is laced with Hebrew quotations from the Midrashim, or from the Talmud or the Kinot laments. He quotes, then translates. Yiddish folk sayings and songs blend together with tales of beatings and a 14-year-old's incomprehension.

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A scholar: "I am a magnet," he says, "any time I see a book about the Holocaust, I am drawn to it." A comedian: "I have a good mind—and I'm modest." From deep, meditative wanderings that produce tears, he moves to jokes. They are usually Jewish jokes, long, and expertly delivered. A philosopher: "If I tell you jokes, I won't cry; or maybe I should cry and not tell you jokes." He smiles, laughs, and returns to the subject before his strategic digression. He glides with apparent ease from Auschwitz to humor and back to Auschwitz. Through it all, his persona as disguised theologian surfaces regularly. It is an interview like a roller coaster, with the same rhythms and ups and downs of emotion with which Meilech lives from hour to hour. Everything in his life connects to his survival—his business, his previous business, the robberies he endured, the financial disasters, the ulcers, and the constant battle to climb out from beneath debts. Few survivors continue to grapple so explicitly and profoundly with the personal consequences of the Holocaust. "I still do not believe it, I don't understand it. I was only 14 and in many ways I'm still only 14, or 12, sitting around the table with my parents. But at the same time, I'm 56, or 120. What happened to my childhood? Why?" Meilech thus voices the question that haunts all victims of the Holocaust, regardless of tentative answers. And having voiced the question, Meilech dwells on the answer for hours, circling, offering hypotheses, thinking aloud—"I'm talking to myself, you're listening in"—and concluding nothing. No answer suffices and the experience, the events, the epoch, and the loss all remain somehow insane, shrouded in mystery. "It was a world of insanity. The positive became negative and the negative became positive. If you acted with kindness, you did the wrong thing. It was lunacy. Everything upside down." Like Abe, Meilech recollects an insane world. He recalls, too, the intense Orthodoxy of his home, Volove, the district, the entire region of Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Karpatorus) whose history he has learned in some detail since the war. Geography shaped his life; where he was, the location of his village, determined the lives and deaths of his family. Volove lay near the major strongholds of Jewish learning in Subcarpathian Ruthenia: Munkacz (Mucachevo), Beregszasz (Beregovo), Chust (Khust), Ungvar (Uzhgorod), and Sighet (Marmasso Sighet). One commentator has written that "the region was very primitive, about one hundred years behind the times." Meilech's commentary

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on this interpretation typifies his spirit: "I think that man was wrong—it was at least two hundred years behind the times." It was in that environment that frequently spurned secular affairs that Meilech's spiritual consciousness was formed. To the question: "Why haven't you continued the religious observance of your father, recreated some of that in your own home?" he responds with over two hours of rumination. It is not a question he has considered directly before and it continues to nag at him into the next session. They were being marched to the trains, to their deaths. Guards and dogs and machine guns and guns with bayonets, and they marched. And do you know what they did? They prayed. They said Vidu, the prayer for last rites—for themselves. Meilech's voice assumes a tone of disbelief and sarcasm. So complex are these feelings that he returns to them again and again, clarifying, repeating, but always expanding, as if trying to work through a satisfactory answer for himself. Enveloping themselves in religious traditionalism, rejecting the secular world, made his community—the learned rebbes, the elders, the teachers, and his father and mother—vulnerable to violent invasion by that world. Yet, interwoven with his sarcasm and bitterness are warm descriptions of a way of life now lost. To a man who knows each day that the world is too much with him—with everyone—such a past recalls both naivete and wisdom and he has struggled to retain its values and ethics, apart from religious practice. We had the choice of going to Czech schools or Ruthenian—Ukrainian—school. To cheder we went all the time.. . . When they took us away in 1944 I was fourteen. The Jewish people were very religious. It was not a question of religion, it was a way of life [recites morning prayers]. I was very good in school, two years ahead of my peers. I was the oldest—I had younger brothers. My mother told me that my grandpa loved me, walked with me, and bought me cherries. My mother was the youngest of five. She inherited the homestead. My grandmother lived with us. My brother Mendel was bom in 1929, Yossel in '33. My mother loved that Yossele because he was named after her father. My sister came in '36, Freida Rivka. I was seven. My father picked me up: "Now you got a little sister."

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With this introduction, Meilech sounds much of what will continue throughout his long testimony. An almost clinically objective tone pervades the description of life before the war. Later, Meilech includes the prospects of other schools in the town of Volove, not only Ruthenian and Czech, but Hungarian, German, Russian, and Jewish. The significance of this multiple choice emerges from a personal perspective: he could have attended any of those schools—he spoke all those languages. His breadth of learning remains evident, and he will pride himself on how well he did in school and how devoted he was to his lessons and learning. That characteristic of his childhood connects to his life today. He was, as he noted, "two years ahead of my peers." In a sense, that has remained the case, somehow, regarding those of his own age, in particular survivors. Few have read so widely on the Holocaust. And despite a marked ambivalence regarding religion, a confession of agnosticism, he repeatedly quotes segments from Scripture or various midrashim or prayers, first in Hebrew and then in English. The association of past and present appears immediately, tragically. The introductory remarks move from school, to cheder, to the Jewish population, to "when they took us away in 1944 I was 14." The memories are bound up with each other, intersected forever, and inseparable, thereby tainting, "polluting" (Langer) any reminiscences of life in Volove before 1939. This phenomenon occurs again with his discussion of languages which leaps from Yiddish at home, Ruthenian in school, to "in the camps there was no talk...." The topic of religion equally entwines with the violence. Like Abe's community in Betlan, Meilech's revolved around religion, the same rituals and piety. His attitude regarding that piety became etched during the Holocaust. Ambivalence, like so many other "normal" words, hardly seems adequate, but his feelings remain divided and much of his narrative deals with his sentiments about the legacy of Judaism. [My father] was religious—but it's all relative. [It was measured by length of beard, how much time you spent in shul, etc.] Over there, one they considered non-believer, over here he could become a rabbi in an Orthodox synagogue. Modem was hiding the tsitsit [prayer vest] under your shirt. You weren't supposed to. You can't even say "very religious" because that was a way of life You couldn't find anybody missing from the synagogue on a Sabbath. The Sabbath suit, you had one suit, and your everyday clothes maybe had patches o top of patches. That suit had no patches or one patch. If I would buy a suit in Sa

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Fifth Avenue, it wouldn't be the quality of that suit. Friday night we had meat—sometimes there was no meat, but on Friday night you had delicacies. Every Friday night we sang Zemirot; and my mother sang lullabies. Saturday— shul—my father would put me in his lap and I would fall asleep. After I was liberated I kept very little of that—right or wrong, I don't know. My memories of life in Volove: I can't share it with anyone. You know, I can't sit down with my brother and say "You have your wife and kids and I have mine." I can't reminisce. To fully appreciate the multiple layers of meaning behind these "reminiscences," one must hear Meilech's voice. These obviously gentle and warm memories—falling asleep in his father's lap, hearing his mother sing lullabies (a theme he elaborates on later), walking with his grandfather who bought him cherries—are not related with equivalent warmth; nor do they seem to evoke fond memories. Perhaps this is in part explained by the ending, the realization that there is no one to share the recollections, to participate and deeply empathize; there is no one, in short, who shared the experience of his home, who remembers his mother's voice, his father's beard, the stories they told, and the worries and joys of his life. Who will share emblematic words from his home; who will recall the "secret" language of that household and family, a language steeped in meanings derived from their particular, private history? In the face of these obstacles to speaking, acrimony, anger, remorse, disbelief, uncertainty, and disappointment blend together as he tries to explain his abandonment of a communal religious heritage. Forsaking that heritage, or contemplating its disavowal, produces stress and a need to explain. For Meilech, such a discussion must encompass a definition or redefinition of his heritage of Jewishness, a defense of his rejection or semirejection, a circumlocution that skirts parts of the issue, and an honesty that confronts it head on. He speaks of it, bluntly, with passion and tears in the end. His response to the question of why he has not recreated part of Volove's religious ambiance delves deeply into his most hidden, often cynical-sounding thoughts. The answer winds around the subject, digresses, incorporates a battery of avoidance techniques, and finally, although not for the last time, engages the question. [Relates analogy of religion to man with diabetes who is forced to lose his legs lived in fear since I was 9 years old. . . . In '41 already I was aware that people could be machine-gunned and put into a grave and the bottom ones might not

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even be dead and the earth will quiver a day or two later. I was aware at age often that people could be tied up with barbed wire and thrown into a river called Dniester. When you lived in fear and you lived in confusion . .. [My father was taken to a labor camp in '41 and sent a postcard every 3 months.] Why didn't I recreate that life after the war? I was alone. My friends and I were reprimanded when they took away the men because we had played on the streets. Every few months rumors we were going to be taken. My father's away. They tell me now I'm the man of the house at age of 11. My father came back. He told all those horror stories, semisecret. But we heard, we knew. In 1943, in the fall, I'm 13, my mother insists I got to study and go to my uncle in Ungvar where there's ayeshiva. I didn't want to go. I'm afraid. But I studied. One semester. But, before Passover, when the Germans marched into Hungary, all I know is my uncle told me "here is train fare, go home." My mother's pregnant with the fifth kid. I come home and it's total depression. It's black, black bottom. I'm still only 13. And the rumor is forced labor. Anybody over 12. And I took a train to Chust and took a truck to Volove [coming home from my uncle in Ungvar]. And they weren't happy to see me. "What did you pay the driver so much for?" I felt very cheated. But within 3 weeks they took us. [Digresses to present.] Going back to why I don't keep it [religion]. [Digresses]. Again, maybe it's Freudian—I don't want to answer. First of all: maybe it was easier not to keep it. After the D.P. camp I came as an orphan. All this that happened to me because I was Jewish. Maybe I didn 't want do itfor that. . . . Then we have to define what is Jewish. Are you Jewish because you're willing to help people or Jewish because you wear a beard? Are you Jewish because you care about people? Or because you don't answer the phone [on the Sabbath]? It's all according to your values and how strict you want to be.. .. Tradition for my parents was [the way their lives were]. Not a choice. All these Jews .. . really believed if you said prayers twice the messiah would come next week at 4 o'clock. I'm not making fun of it—like all oppressed peoples, they turned to miracles. There are intimations of themes that will continue later in this lengthy discussion of religion and the associations surrounding it. At age 9 Meilech was exposed to horrors that adults could not easily assimilate. At age 10 he had heard about, if not witnessed, still more. The metaphor of the diabetic who loses his legs seems connected to the loss of his father in 1941 when he was taken to the labor camp; connected, too, to his growing questioning of religious practices upon which he and his family had

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stood. If this metaphor carries forward, it will perhaps explain much of Meilech's attitudes after his father's death—like the loss of legs. His words should not be dismissed lightly at this juncture. Questions about his father and mother and religion percolate beneath virtually everything that he will say. From age 9 and 10, to age 11, when he was "the man of the house," he had no father, no childhood, no ground upon which to stand and from which to grow. This concern with age broods beneath the surface of his testimony. It is a concern with lost childhood, with the years that disappeared, and make him, in his own mind, four years younger than his chronological age. At age 13, with his father back, he was sent away because his mother, the more traditional and pious of his parents, insisted that he go and learn, study Talmud at the famous yeshiva in Ungvar. And upon his return he was "cheated" of the warmth of a family homecoming. The reasons are unclear: perhaps the shock of his pregnant mother ("and it's black, black"). Having been away, alone, he returned home triumphant, a survivor of sorts already, only to be rejected, even accosted by his parents. "I'm still only 13," interjected out of sequence in the narrative of his journey home. A journey that must have been difficult at best for a lonely and bewildered 13-year-old child; "and they weren't happy to see me." But there is no time to dwell on the boyhood emotions attendant of that stunning reception because "within three weeks they took us." And this childhood misery, obdurately bound to it, clearly emerges from religion. Each word, as Elie Wiesel has noted, "contains a hundred words." The yeshivah at Ungvar, for example, with its long history of scholarly achievement and honor, carries associations so full they cannot be spoken to anyone not familiar with the region. When Meilech speaks of that school, he understands what it meant to his mother and cannot, does not try to, communicate that to the listener. It meant fear and loneliness to him. When he speaks of returning home, the smells of the house, the greeting in dim light, the conditions under which they lived and to which they would be subjected within the next three weeks are not communicated. Those, too, meant different things to him than to his parents. Perhaps the secret theme running through this segment is his memory and fear of being alone—an orphan even before the D.P. camp—what Primo Levi termed a "memory wound." Forced to confront the issue of his Jewishness, Meilech finally and clearly states the possible rationale behind his abandonment of ritual observance: "All this happened to me because I was Jewish." He will speak

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later of his mother's quite different definition of what it meant to be Jewish: social conscience, concern for others, and study. All these he has continued. His narrative continually affirms this as he quotes Hebrew texts, Holocaust literature, book after book to demonstrate his broad learning and scholarship. Has he not, then, maintained his Jewishness in practice? The issue remains unsettled, probably can never be settled, for him. In a burst of memory that moves from resentment to rancor, from disdain to pathos, Meilech pours forth one of the several climactic statements that crescendos to a passionate silence. His narrative has gone quickly from ghetto to arrival at Auschwitz and back to 1941 when his father was sent to forced labor. In rapid spurts he has spoken of the arrival, then comes to a halt, a long pause, another silence full of inexpressible meanings. Meilech attempts to communicate this welter of feelings. All I know is this: I come to work, I take the freeway. I see chimneys. They remind me of it. If I take a shower, it reminds me of the camps. If I eat a piece of bread, I eat it, it reminds me how people would kill for an extra crumb of bread. I've seen it, I remember it, and—[pause] all of us have traumatic experiences.... [All of us have stories.] I believed it at 12, like any 12-year-old believes. At 12 you look at things differently than when you're 56 or 40. Take my father: he was 43, he was educated for those days, and here's what he tells me: "Oh—you see those chimneys, you see those chimneys? They say, they say that's where your mother"—and this is something I'll never forget—"they say, that's where your mother and brothers and sister were burned." In other words: "Do you think these guys know what they're talking about?" When he told me that, we had been on a train for two days, I slept on a bunk of boards, my back hurt, I'm hungry, dirty . . . they give you a bowl, 5 sips per person, they train you to answer to your number, an SS is propositioning me to go to the hospital if I'm sick, and down deep, I don't want to leave my father—not that I'm worried about him, I don't want to be totally alone. You were constantly [pause] rushed, harassed, being beaten; they did terrible, terrible things—exterminated like rats, a program to exterminate. Degradation, cleaning latrines with hands, hangings, beatings, blankets with lice, marking them with a yellow mark, naked, that they're going to their deaths. I saw it. I was there. Everybody would gladly kill anybody for a piece of bread. Or just not to be beaten. The question is: how did my mother feel when she was standing naked, holding on to her children, and next to her are men and other women? How does anybody

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feel knowing that this happened? The question is that a Jew who knows that his wife and his children were killed, on Yom Kippur, in the camp, he goes [beats breast in ritual penance] "I sinned; I stole; I cheated." He lost everything, and yet he tells God he sinned. And these guys making fun of this with the belt buckles that say "Gott ist mit uns" ["God is with us"] on SS belts and you asked me why I don't go back to that way of life again. By the time this torrent of words flowed forth, Meilech had discussed most of the events described here. He had commented in calmer, more reflective ways about the drive to work, the naivete and confusion of a 12-year-old, his father's age and educational background, and the haunting statement made on the Appelplatz about the chimneys. This last he had mentioned several times before and would mention again. "Your" mother—not "Mama" or "my wife" or "our family" or "my children," but "your mother and brothers and sister." Meilech notes with an astute, critical ear the strange statement. Later he will recall it with the same harsh edge to his voice, wistful, almost accusatory tone and look, but then try to mitigate the comments with references to the circumstances and his father's mental state at that moment. Yet it is "something / will never forget." Who were the mythical "they"? In historical context, the words, which fell like blows but were dimly felt, followed a deadening sequence of events that Meilech now knows were calculated to debilitate, disorient, and, ultimately, exterminate. In the barracks at Auschwitz, an SS officer offered to remove those under age 16 to easier tasks. Meilech's father urged him to go, perhaps they would put him in school. But he refused, and here he reveals why: "not that I'm worried about him [my father]. I don't want to be alone." Now, at age 56, there is a complex mixture of anger, regret, guilt, and confusion; the 14-year-old's mind melds with the 56-year-old's. How could his father have sent him away, albeit unsuccessfully? Had Meilech followed his advice, he would have died in the gas chamber with his mother and his brothers and sister. Had his father been more aware, more alert, more wise, he would have perhaps understood the need to conceal his son's true age as the prisoner had secretly advised him on the platform. Yet how could he not have felt concern for his father at that moment? His brutally honest admission of his own fear of isolation forces him to ponder the lack of feeling then. How to describe those moments, those hours when he lost everything, including his 14-year-old identity? After uconstantly" he pauses, not for a

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breath, but to search for a word, the word to describe accurately the conditions he recalls. "Rushed, harassed, being beaten" all spoken in rapid succession because none of them are adequate to the task. As if to compensate for the thinness of the words, the associations tumble out in thick bunches. After hours of painstaking description, of sharing stories, single words now serve as emblems, like poetic emblems, to evoke the fuller meaning—but still incompletely. Among the repeated stories that become such reference points, one emerges with particular relevance to these themes revolving around religion, father, and family. Once again, the anecdote begins with a book, The Kinot, the lamentations recited on the Jewish holiday of Tisha Bi-Av, memorializing the destruction of the temple. Included are excruciatingly detailed descriptions of Jewish tribulations from the time of the Babylonian captivity; and passages have been added since the Holocaust. When we memorialize the destruction of the temple on Tisha Bi-Av . . . and my father, in 1943, took me to synagogue and he made it his business to read to me Kinot, how much the Jews suffered when they went into Rome. I cried—I really did. I just—[pause] many times I think my father tried to tell me how much the Jewish people suffered and a year later he was shot for no reason. [Long silence; tears and weeping.] And how many others? [Weeps.] [Returns to the subject at the next interview.] In 1943 my father took me to the synagogue. I remember like now . . . to say penance before the High Holy Days. My mother was very, very religious—more than my father. Not more religious, more devout. I mean, the fact that she was the mother and I was the oldest was very, very important for her. To see that these kids get a good Jewish education. She gave up her bed instead of tuition and I slept with that man [private tutor], a hunchback who they hired for the semester. Every family would pay a certain amount. And my mother gave up her bed in lieu of tuition. See, this village where I'm from the whole life revolved around Jewishness. Right or wrong—Jewish education. To go to cheder or to yeshivah. The way my mother would rock us to bed . . . sing a song: "Under Meilech's cradle, stands a golden goat. The goat went to make a living, rosenkes mit mandlen, raisins and almonds. What would be the best merchandise to buy? This child, Meilech will learn Torah. Knowledge he will gain. Books he's going to write. And a pious, just Jew he will remain." In other words, the emphasis was on being righteous, just, and gaining knowledge. They feel if you study and praise God, everything will be fine. So, my father took me early in the morning, 4-5 o'clock. I wasn't really happy to get up that

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early in the morning, but, being I was the oldest, okay, I went. On Tisha Bi-Av it was very important for my father to read the limrgy about what happened when the Jews were taken prisoner or defeated. I didn't understand, then. The lamentations. Until finally I cried. I imagine he felt he accomplished his purpose, finally, I knew what the Jewish people suffered. That was one year before they took us away, or 1 Vi years. [Reads from Kinot.] A sad, sad literature. Written over 600 years before Christ... in Babylon. [There are] a few pages on the Holocaust. [Reads.] Religious people say this [the lamentations] all day on Tisha Bi-Av.. .. Total sadness. Total lamentations. [Silence.] I remember this from when my father taught it, that's why I bought [the book]. [Silence.] Reconciling suffering with piety and righteousness seems impossible here. His narrative does not progress chronologically from the Babylonian Captivity, the destruction of the Temple, to 1943; they are grouped together in single sentences. Are they comparable? If the hand of God was at work in the one, was it also at work in the other? "For no reason" his father was shot. How could a people so steeped in righteousness suffer such a persistent fate? How could his father, his devout mother, his brothers and sister, the infant, suffer such horrible fates? If he wept at the reading of Lamentations, the holiness of Jewish travail, did Meilech weep similarly over the destruction of his family and Volove? Was that, too, holy? The year 1943 was blunt, harsh, and secular. All his descriptions, his recounting, bristle with the knowledge of brutality that ignored religious hostility, a hostility that might, at least, be intelligible. Was there talk of Jesus at Auschwitz? When they were herded to Sikirnitsa ghetto or onto the trains, or lined up at the platform, were they cursed as demons or anti-Christian? No, the structure of this portion of Meilech's story indicates another, more puzzling answer. From his most telling remarks about the region, revealed by the lullabies of his mother, to be Jewish in Subcarpathian Ruthenia meant to be "righteous, just, and gaining knowledge." And for that, Jews were murdered. Within that general lesson, the personal one seems to nag incessantly. For the oldest, the task is to fulfill those wishes, continue the heritage of Jewishness. As "the oldest" he confronts his past, his tradition, his parents, and the Holocaust with a directness that tears him in different directions. "The oldest" remains 14, the "man of the house," the heir to the obligations of Judaism, but simultaneously a child.

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Historically, from 1938, Jews became increasingly isolated, separated from the rest of the population of the region. So, too, was Meilech separated and isolated from his previous life. To be the oldest took on new meanings in 1941 and 1943. To be a Jew carried drastic repercussions. Separation and loss included separation from what being Jewish had meant. That has continued to stalk Meilech as he searches for words to translate the language of after into the language of before so that his experiences and his feelings might be adequately expressed. Keep in mind, / am 14 years old. . . . Nobody explained anything—before or during or after. The Germans [were] in full gear. Angels, God's emissaries would look like those Germans. Again, I look at them at age 14. But their helmets shine, uniforms immaculate, boots, guns, bayonets. They were gods—not messengers of God, they were God. [Before boarding the cattle train for Auschwitz] the only people I knew were my parents: my father and my mother, and my little brother, Yossele, bom in 1933, and my little sister Freida Rivka who was born in 1936, and my little brother Jehuda Mendel who was born in 1931. No words were spoken. My father didn't pat me on the back and say everything will work out. I didn't comfort my father and say don't worry, Dad, everything will be fine. Nobody said anything. [Pause] The older people—I mean the mature adults—took out their prayer books and said the last rights. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Here's a beautiful spring day; on top of each train car is a guy with a machine gun . . . I didn't think anything. To me—I was watching a movie. Nobody said anything to me. Nobody asked me. I'm still only 14. I was a grown-up at 14. In a way, I wanted to pray with them. There are two worlds in this description of "a beautiful spring day." One is the world of Meilech's parents, of pious Volove, of prayers and serenity. The other is the world of guns and bayonets, cattle cars and SS men. A world without words, whose language is violence and pain. A world without thinking where no one thought to offer consolation any more. A world without tears. It is the second world, however, that Meilech recalls as the world of God. Do these three men—Abe, Alex and Meilech—share attitudes about God and religion during and after Auschwitz? Each came from pious homes, with minor differences in degree, perhaps blindly religious, saturated in rote learning and unquestioning obedience to authority. Yet that prewar life provided purpose, order, and meaning—meaning in every gesture, every ritual; every act had significance: from the growing of

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peyas, to the wearing of a skullcap; from the routinized Shabbos exams to the packed educational schedules. Every deed resonated with religious implications, unquestioned but significant, steeped in tradition and archetypal precedent. More than any other concept, perhaps order embodies the essence of these lives. The Holocaust, as Abe indicates and as Meilech and Alex reveal in private, sometimes bitter and sometimes cryptic reflections, was—not "represented," not "symbolized," or "signified" or "embodied"—chaos, as literal as it could be, the antithesis of order and meaning. Auschwitz, its chaos, disrupted everything—shattered their prewar lives and continued to plague their lives with that chaos, invading their minds, their prayers, and their memories. No memory of life before remained untainted, "unpolluted" by the memory of what ended it. Like many survivors, Abe and Alex seemed to have attempted to combat that lingering chaos with religion again—a difficult task in a country without religious fervor, among people (Jews) with no torn in their praying. They have tried, it appears, to combat the insanity that invaded and permeated their lives, made them seem purposeless. Meilech, in 1941, at age 11 consumed by fear and confusion, like Abe and Alex watched as chaos replaced or murdered order. Unlike the other two, he continued to question explicitly the function and efficacy of religion. Yet his questions remained couched in religious terms, in the words of the Scriptures or the Perkey Avot, in Hebrew, from Psalms and Rashi. Those texts and he have abandoned each other, yet he cites them in pained recollection, with the connections strained to breaking, the questions before his eyes, sad. Meilech is a seeker of explanation, a hunter of reason and meaning. He has found no satisfactory explanations, the harshest forms of reason within the German system of values and logic, and a desolate emptiness instead of a lesson. Paradoxically, Meilech considers those texts both relevant and irrelevant after the Holocaust. 'Was gewen is gewen und mer nicht um" (What was, was, and is no more), a Yiddish proverb, seems to suffuse his narrative. That motif forms the discomfiting basis for Leon Wells's Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy. Like Abe, Wells tormentedly contrasts American religious services, in particular Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur services, with those he recalls from Europe.1 He describes a life in the shtetl near Lvov as totally immersed in loving, warm, devotion and piety. It is a life informed by awe and education; revolving around fear, love, and awe of God. Everything in Wells's youth was wrapped in devotion—every move, gesture, and word. The memoir unfolds through the

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Holocaust and after, focusing on Yom Kippur of each year: 1942, when the first Aktion struck his village; 1943, when Wells was part of the opprobrious "Death Brigade"; 1944, after liberation, when the nature disappeared along with any hope and when Wells realized he had no purpose or aim. At that Yom Kippur service in the old synagogue in Lvov, where the few survivors gathered not for religious reasons "but rather like animals who herd together. Not thinking, not feeling . .. [as] a potent survival instinct," Wells knew that he could no longer cling to his faith.2 In the starkest possible contrast to previous Yom Kippur services, there was "no joy or thankfulness to God . . . nor was there any discussion about God or religion in general."3 As he traces the history of subsequent Yom Kippurs, Wells continually draws upon passages from Job, which question the justice of God's plan, the value of righteousness, and the prospect of blind faith in the face of a potentially malevolent world. Disillusionment melds into anger and despair as Wells realizes that he, the survivor, remains in mourning, alone in it. Awe disappeared from his life; betrayal haunts him night and day—dreaming and waking. In the awful shadow of his awareness of all this, with the day of awe upon him, he concludes that "the Nazis . . . were God's messengers." Corresponding with a friend and fellow survivor of the Death Brigade, Wells feels his doubt transform into contempt—for the Hasidim, the Belzer Rebbe who had emphatically told Wells's father not to leave Poland (in 1937). Questions rise up, only to culminate with Wells ruminating on the absurdity of the artificially added conclusion of The Book of Job (Job, 42:17). It is a happy ending about which Wells writes with sarcastic bitterness: "Weren't some survivors after the war much richer than they ever could have dreamed of being before the Nazis . . . ? Most remarried and had children. As the saying goes, 'God gives and God takes.' "4 Just as readers of this ending find mindless solace in it, so Wells views those who urge him to find happiness in his survival. And finally, on Yom Kippur, in 1994, the service in America has virtually no resemblance to Kol Nidre before the war, "no sense of awe." Wells may be Abe speaking when he writes "Dead is dead. It is all gone . . . as it was on the first Yom Kippur after my liberation."5 Gitta Sereny, near the end of her book on Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka, asks him if he thinks God was in Treblinka. Yes, he replies, "Otherwise, how could it have happened?" A bit startled, Sereny asks him if God isn't good. "No, I wouldn't say that. . . . He is

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good and bad." 6 And at the conclusion of his little- known The Trial of God, Elie Wiesel reveals that God's eloquent, devout, and much admired defender is Satan.7 NOTES 1. Leon Weliczker Wells, Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy (Lexington: Kentucky University of Kentucky Press; 1995). 2. Ibid, 101-103. 3. Ibid, 104. 4. Ibid, 143. 5. Ibid, 147. Leon Wells, like Abe, contrasts American religious services, particularly Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur services, with those he recalls in torment from Europe. 6. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 364. 7. Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God.

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Hidden Children "I felt shame," choked Erna as she described her post-Holocaust feelings at age 10, "can you believe that? Shame." Born in Metz, she and her family had attended a wedding in Vischnitza, Poland, the home of her father. She was 5 years old when the wedding occurred at the end of August 1939. Unable to return to France, she, her older sister, and her parents lived with her paternal grandparents in the ghetto for about a year. It was a year of deprivation and misery. Wisely, her father must have decided to take his family and run to Erna's maternal grandparents in the Ukraine. Beneath her every memory, a child's memories, remains constant and overwhelming fear: fear of her paternal grandfather, dressed in black, who treated her with anger and even violence; fear of the Germans, persistent and terrifying. From this miasma of fear emerges an image of strange Poles occupying the house "and the [her extended] family disappeared." Thus, they left, and she "assume[s] they were taken and were shipped [to Auschwitz]... or maybe they were shot right there. They were just not there. I was young." Since this must have occurred before the German invasion of Eastern Poland, it is unlikely members of Erna's family went to Auschwitz—at least not then. They all died. Uncertain about the sequence of events, she "sees" her father weeping, her mother holding him as she also wept. He had been forced to bury the bodies of murdered Jews. She remembers her maternal grandfather with some affection, less harsh than the extremely religious grandfather in Vischnitza, sitting on his lap, walking hand in hand to synagogue. But still "I remember a lot of fear, a great deal of fear." Remnants of shame and fear seem to linger as

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she speaks, struggling with reliving, "refeeling" the experiences and the attendant, original emotions. Erna's passion runs the gamut from anger to anguish as she tries to wrest some purpose and meaning to learn from her story. When she achieves that elusive and fragile goal it seems to fade immediately—-repeating a common paradox of the simultaneous yes and no, meaning and meaninglessness, hope and despair all on some alternating current that exposes what may be the crux of such narratives. This procession of contradictions arises throughout survivor testimonies, and, indeed, throughout Holocaust statements of almost any sort. Erna suffered shame near the end of and after the war. But the dominant, pervasive motif of her interviews recurred in a nearly obsessive fashion: fear. Like other child survivors, Erna remains haunted by fear; it never seems to drift too far from her. In Rosvotov, the Ukraine: I remember having extreme fear in this household. . . . Everything was totally silent in that room and I remember all of us sort of huddled in one room. There was a bed in it and everybody sort of sitting around that bed and in extreme fear. From then on all I remember is just fear. The Germans had invaded and the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile killing units, executed their Aktionen. I remember being told to hide in the comer all the time . . . and there was a lot of fear again . . . and I can still see the comer as a matter of fact... I remember being told to be quiet in the house . . . With this, Erna emphasizes another motif entwined with the first two and already sounded: silence, a silence born from her terror and not easily overcome—not even after the war, not until the 1980s, when she began to speak of her experiences. Her uncle and father lifted some floor boards and with cups dug a cavity .. . large enough to hold four of us. Yeah. And the cavity had one or two steps. . . then you slid down into this cavity and the dirt was taken out at night. . . . So there was a fear of rage then of Aktionen... I just remember everybody walking around so terribly quiet. Affirming the details to herself as she speaks (beginning with "yeah"), Erna repeatedly notes the demand for silence, growing more agitated each time the subject arises during the interviews:

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We had to be totally silent. . . and all I see is always silence out of me. I don't see myself talking or even crying when I had pain because I knew I shouldn't... we couldn't—we would have died, you know. Throughout the whole ordeal you didn't cry no matter what—whether it was hunger or pain you didn't cry. Because there was [longpause] the pillow.. . . There still is this pillow. At any rate . . . Each night the family entered "the cavity" and each night Erna's mother brought a pillow—but not to rest her head. Her mother held it as Erna lay in her lap, poised, like a weapon, to be used if Erna cried or spoke or made any sound whatsoever. Their lives and the lives of the rest of the family depended upon this, and yet "they all disappeared." And Erna remembers the pillow, can barely speak of it, but sees it in her mind's eye. Her memories flow quickly as she recounts them, reluctantly, admitting nervousness, and "seeing" again people lying dead as you came from the room or the building, people lying dead. And I remember once, umm, we were all, well, I was away but there were people standing around these dead people and I can just see, umm, like they were so silent. . . . They were not saying anything . . . Silence and stillness became equivalent to fear and terror. This coupling of feelings and behavior remained active in Erna's life, and the Holocaust meant fear, shame, silence, and death. They did not dominate her life as long as she hid them—remained silent; but when they emerged in her interviews, the secret and directive power of such memories and associations revealed itself devastatingly. Hidden as a child, these emotions changed little in Erna's adulthood as she retained motifs of hidden terror and connections to her fear, shame, and silence. She would not fully emerge from "hiding" until the 1990s, adding anger and a new ensemble of fears to those indelible childhood memories. In 1986, in her first interview, she declared: "I didn't want to know [about her own past] . . . and we [her husband and two sons] never talked about it. They know the story, but they never asked questions. I think they don't want to hurt me." Thirteen years later, angrier, she imagined her hidden child experience as a puzzle and she would "get no rest until every piece of the puzzle is in place. I need to know, as if they [her dead relatives] would be haunting me to tell their story." The question of meaning may be crucial to these few comments. There is an almost tangible search for some meaning in her importunate drive to know more. "It's

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my history and therefore it will effect my grandchildren. . . . I need to know . . . otherwise I will not exist as Erna." For more than 20 years Erna kept her secret. When she thought about her childhood experiences, she suffered a pain "so intense that I didn't want to know. I couldn't come to grips with it. I needed to live. . . . We [she and other child survivors in her circle of friends] wanted to have a good time—-to smile, to laugh. . . . " When the German government sent her to a psychiatrist, she "froze, could not speak a word. And I had a wonderfully happy life [pause] until I started remembering." Once again, the pause discloses some subterranean thought that Erna mulls over before finishing with "until I started remembering." Remembering precluded laughing, smiling, "a wonderfully happy life." Speaking about her past had invaded the rest of her life and infected her most intimate relationships. Perhaps not anticipating such debilitating affects, she began to seek information about her history because she believed it would bring coherence and meaning to her life. Gradually she became obsessed with knowing. And as she did, her anger grew: toward her father and sister who never spoke; the farmer, who forced them out of their hiding place in the barn, unable to walk, leaving them painfully crawling along the road until "liberated" by the Red Army; toward her mother, who died, shot in a ditch as they were strafed by Germans. Erna was angry, it seems, at virtually everyone she knew. "Nobody ever cared: where are the children [the child survivors and hidden children who were never acknowledged]? Why didn't they give us an identity?" Despite difficulty remembering her internment in a camp, she thinks— "I have a sense we went out of the camp." Her father had somehow found a farmer who agreed to hide her immediate family in the loft of his barn. Ambivalent, at best, this mysterious farmer left conflicting sentiments in Erna: How we did it I don't remember. And I remember it being at night. And the next thing I remember is, is, is, standing in front of the bam with a farmer and his wife and he was hushing us and he was opening up the bam, sort of pushing us in there.... I see my parents on their knees begging the farmer... a marvelous human being—religious. This "marvelous human being" seems to have been a reluctant rescuer, but a rescuer nonetheless. Erna's experience of Ukrainians instinctively

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informs her that the man must have had ulterior motives—"he may have thought we could help him get to America"—and harbored typical antisemitic feelings toward them. No one in her family searched for the farmer after the war; Ema preferred to try to forget him and the entire experience. An impossible task, for she remembers with a child's memory: details of sounds, smells, and sights reduce her to tearful silences. She recalls the smell of the hay, not "the sweet smell of hay in summer. . . . It wasn't sweet smelling like below [below the loft of the bam], it was the smell of hell [weeps; long pause]"; she recalls or "sees" the lice that covered her and her parents kneeling on either side of her cracking the vermin as she lay on that hay. The sound returns to her: "there was a special noise, and the blood [of the lice] would come out, but you had to do it, you know, they were everywhere, we were covered, we were absolutely covered." Seeing, hearing, and smelling compound the emergence of this particular memory, layers it, and produces a plurivocal moment that nearly stymies the telling and the memory. That story grows even more complex, connecting to the death of her mother as she helplessly watched. Her mother died, covered with lice, "like you see ants on a huge hill, that was my mother, with lice and vermin, totally covered." The very mention of "lice" has produced a tense and ambivalent tone: Ema is angry with the Russians who "did not take care of her. She was Jewish [pause]. She died [pause]. . . . Anyhow, watched her die. . . . She said nothing—Nothing! She didn't say nothing. At any rate . . . [the formulized signal for changing the subject]" Yet, even after this unacknowledged sign, "at any rate," she continued: "/ can say nothing. I did not even cry. Can you imagine that? Anyway, these are things that should be forgotten." She has matched her mother's silence. Angry, confused by the meaningless dying with no farewell, no acknowledgment, "Nothingl . . . nothing," her own silence haunts her with a surfeit of feelings that range from remorse to utter bewilderment, from guilt to rage, unable to grasp how a mother could overlook a child. Ema recalls and retells this nadir of her story still caught in the grip of a 10-year-old's fear, disorientation, and incomprehension of death. Typically, Ema has raised more questions than she has answered. What did the pauses contain here? The first, followed by "She was Jewish," touches Ema's rage and "lifelong quest" for human justice. The second, following "she died," seems more troubling. Angry that her mother did not speak, she nevertheless watched her die and did nothing, only ob-

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served, seemingly dispassionate, not crying. As if to counter such antipodal feelings and guilt, that particularly painful recollection triggers this one of an earlier time, hiding in the bam: I remember my mother, again, see my mother . . . I remember that, you know, my mother, that's the only tender thing, although she did all these wonderful things, she used to take my face and she used to hug me and hold my face with both hands, and [pause] urn, [whispers emotionally] she used to tell me to be quiet. S used to call me a little kleineke [little one]. And I can still hear it. Isn't that funny? That, of course, is not funny. Ema sees and hears her mother—the visual and aural memory of 7-year-old child—and in the midst of a rare tender moment, the familiar, frightening order for silence strikes doubly hard as her mother wrapped or concealed it in love. In her memory, Ema has struggled with such moments that rekindle fear as the tenderness paradoxically couples with the essence of her lost childhood. A vortex of discordant associations seem to rush to her mind. At the center, Ema's images of her mother grow yet more problematic: I have a lot of feelings about my mother because of the pillow, yet I know she loved me a great deal and I adored her. [Pause.] She was gorgeous, truly a beautiful woman . . . I see her body and I see everything except her face and I think that maybe I—it was anger. At the most painful moment of her testimony, Ema returns to this fleeting idea of anger in her description of the burial as she whispers: "I was so angry at her"—for dying? for the pillow? for the enforced silence? Or had she misspoken and meant to say she was angry with those who let her mother die? Ema confronts that unspeakably dense, worst, perhaps most degrading and horrific moment of her experience—perhaps of her life—after describing the bleak, roadside burial of her mother. "I didn't cry," she repeats, "somebody said 'she is not even crying.' But you know, I was dead in effect." Dead, but not dead, silent, with an internal scream, the images of death in life stalk the literature and testimony of survivors—from Ema to Elie Wiesel and Charlotte Delbo. She has sounded a motif that seems to have informed a good portion of her narrative; a motif she addresses in some distress, exhausted, angry, and sad. Her mother had told her stories in the beginning of their hiding—fairy tales about the Emperor Franz Josef. But "after a while there

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were no stories . . . you become numb." Hunger and thirst, the creeping illness that overtook her, affected everyone in the small space of the bam. You really have no feeling after a while, you are dead in effect, no emotions one way or the other . . . you are just a piece of flesh and I see myselfjust sitting all the time, constantly sitting. [Pause.] So I just remember this silence—and the buckets, the smell of the buckets. Some of the memories of postliberation carry as much torment as those of the war years. Ema spoke of her Russian liberators who regularly hung Germans they captured. They seemed to make a special effort, she recalls from her childhood images, to have her observe the hangings—as if such violence would bring her pleasure or satisfaction. And she recalls a bifurcated attitude, accentuated now as she has regained a once lost moral consciousness. I was empty is what I can tell you. I should have felt sorry for them, but yet I didn't. So I had two things I just could think: they killed my mother. .. they denied my life until then because I was Jewish—I didn't know what it meant to be Jewish. What does it mean to a child, you're Jewish, what is being Jewish? It did not mean anything to me, all I knew is because of them all of this was happening and because primarily that my mother had died [pause; thoughtful, searchingfor some connection] I blamed them for that. But yet, I was unfeeling enough that I could take pleasure in watching them twitch on the end of the rope. So can you imagine, how old was 1,10 by then, to have become that; you can watch people be hung and not feel and want to kill? That's horrible. [Longpause.] Although equally intense conversations would follow, these comments are a culmination of sorts. In them Ema expresses her feelings of participation and contamination, much as Primo Levi had described the cooption of the victims into the Auschwitz system, into the realm he labeled the "gray zone." Ema laments her loss of feeling, yet also tries to justify or explain it. "Empty," she feels she "should have" felt remorse over the hangings. Yet the only hint at meaning is in those retributions. For Ema has returned to the question of meaning: the meaning of being Jewish; the meaning of the hangings; the meaning of her experience. Her ambivalence grows clearer with each word: angry at her mother, yet still mourning the way the Russians mistreated her, and still weeping over her death; angry at being Jewish, but confused, as she tries to find some essence in that identity as she nurses a fearsome antipathy toward

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Orthodoxy and organized religion; angry at the Germans for their responsibility yet trying to feel sorry for them as they were hanged; angry at the Russians for not saving her mother, but acknowledging them as kind rescuers who treated the child warmly. She remains empty, but has filled herself with life and happiness—both empty and not empty. I have dwelt on Ema's story because she both typifies child survivors and is sui generis. Her fiery passion about Holocaust education and neo-Nazism marks her public speaking and she unfailingly spellbinds high school audiences. She never "rehearses," but speaks spontaneously, compellingly engaging even the most jaded of adolescents. She is uncompromising in her anger: she erupts equally at skinheads and at Orthodox Jews who refuse to teach about the Holocaust in their schools. And she is haunted by and fixated on her childhood, obsessed with the injustice of being saddled with such fear and such fearful memories. In the introduction to his collection of biographies of hidden children, Andre Stein wrote that "it is . .. time to tell our stories because we have a legacy—we are the last survivors."1 The concept of a "legacy" contains a promise, a bequest of some meaningful history that will inform the future. Those who convey a legacy to the next and future generations assume their pasts transmit a meaning full of direction and certainty. Ema, like so many of her fellow child survivors, seems driven to instruct in order to impart just such a direction; to debunk racists, like the frightening young skinheads she heard on a television talk show. She believes she can help create a gentler world in which her grandchildren will be safer than they are while sharing a world with such creatures. Yet, despite the overbearing urge to tell, can Ema find such a meaning to her story? Has she broken the silence of her childhood in hiding and unearthed some meaning to convey to her grandchildren about the Holocaust? Sharing the consequences of continued, frozen childhood fear and the reactions to it, Fred also uncovered his past in the 1990s, an excavation that altered his life. When he was a child in Delft, Holland, Fred's parents and two brothers quickly walked out of their house one day. To avoid attention to themselves, they decided to leave behind the rucksacks that had been prepared weeks before and lay waiting on a shelf by the door, an indication of the urgency that the message to leave had conveyed. The family disappeared, determined to escape by "onderduinken," or "diving under": "[It meant] to submerge beneath the surface" and the family separated and dispersed to assorted locations in the Dutch countryside. For the next three years Fred was deposited in various homes for short peri-

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ods of time. His mother, like a guardian angel (her name was Engeline) appeared at critical moments, and sometimes would move him from one place to another. She imposed silence upon him and Fred believes that in all probability none of his rescuers knew he was Jewish. Occasionally, his mother would claim she had survived and fled the bombing of Rotterdam or Zeeland and needed a temporary home for her child. Uninformed as a child, he speculates that the Dutch underground may have had a hand in guiding some of the family's movement, but his mother unquestion-. ably took an aggressive role in determining how and where she and Fred survived. With their three children distributed in various places, Fred's parents, at least at the outset, took shelter with some non-Jewish friends who courageously hid them. He lived for his mother's visits, always surprising and erratic, but steadfast. Once, when she discovered Fred was ill, she vehemently insisted he be taken to the hospital. She took him there herself and when she left him again, was caught at the train station and sent to Bergen Belsen. By insisting she had American citizenship (she had lived in Boston), she avoided Auschwitz. That remarkable behavior indicates a measure of her strength of character and dominance, and she eventually landed in North Africa. She returned to Delft, to the shock of her husband and three sons, months after the war ended. After his mother was caught, Fred's father collected his three sons and was transformed, at least in Fred's eyes, from a meek follower into a heroic leader and patriarchal protector. His father picked up Fred and took his three sons into hiding in a cottage in the country (Gelderland) not far from Delft. Most likely he had the protection and guidance of the underground. For Fred, fear, the silent terror that translated into the dominant memory of his life, arose from these years. He retains those childhood memories, as he retains his childhood toy bear companion. He retains the consciousness of a frightened and lonely child whose only consistent comrade had been provided by his parents: his cloth bear. Fred clung to the bear, whose head had been reconstructed from the pocket of his jacket that had once borne a yellow star, throughout his years in hiding. He clings to it still whenever he discusses those times or their aftermath; the bear connotes his fear and its alleviation, the Holocaust and his survival, the anguish and the rescue. Fred weeps when describing its significance. The bear palpably carries such dense and layered meanings it seems to defy description. Although Fred has not expressed any sentiment of skepticism regarding his audience's ability to

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fully grasp Holocaust victimization, his articulate and engaging narrative seems straitened when he attempts to communicate the fullness of the bear's symbolization. It has become his experience incarnate: For me [weeps] it's about children and . . . the violence done to children . . . almost everything that I have to say about this experience, philosophically, has to do with childhood and children. So this [the bear] reminds me that I was a little kid, and that when we are talking about the Holocaust I'm a little kid [again] [longpause]. Fred became a philosophy professor, married, and raised a family. Years later he changed his life—his family, his career, and the consciousness of his past. He told his first two children very little about the Holocaust; they heard some "adventure stories" about the war from him, "but the real meaning of this, the Holocaust, the antisemitism, the dehumanization, the suffering, the terror, no." With his second marriage came a culturally Jewish wife, Roz, and two new children; a new academic degree (a Ph.D. in psychology); then began a new career as a clinical humanistic psychologist (with his psychologist wife). Memories emerged slowly, and his son aided him in transcribing a series of interviews he conducted with his parents and brothers. His youngest child asked for a bat mitzvah and her talk on that occasion was about Janusz Korczak, the martyred leader of the Warsaw orphanage, and the Holocaust. This confluence of events produced a renascence of memory, identity, rumination, and even behavior that seems to have further altered Fred's and his family's lives. From a dual academic perspective, Fred has crafted a different outlook on his experiences. After years of apostasy, he identified himself as a Jew for the first time in his life since the Jewish Brigade, bivouacked in Delft in 1945, made him their mascot. Like many survivors, particularly child survivors, he has struggled with questions of identity and in his newfound Jewish awareness he continues to eschew any religious connection, defining instead a three-part source of identity: I am a child of survivors .. . and I'm a survivor because I survived the war as a hunted Jew . . . and I am a hidden child, hidden in one way or another during the Holocaust when [Jewish children] had to hide [pause] their physical being or their psychological or their identity. So Fred came to the Hidden Children Organization, with Ema, as one of its earliest members. Irreligious, even antireligious, each felt a strong

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sense of Jewish identity, a consciousness of their Holocaust pasts almost organically determining their thoughts, feelings, and much of their lives. From the group, each seemed to draw purpose or meaning. "We [hidden children] are the very last of the survivors. . . . So we feel some kind of duty or it's almost like a coming due feeling that it is time and it is necessary for us to speak . . . I'm trying to assess what this experience meant, what it was for them, how it impacted on their l i v e s . . . . " With this goal, Fred, like Ema and other hidden children, has accepted speaking engagements at high schools, colleges, universities, and public events. Like Ema, Fred has grown indefatigably resolute about the subject. Over the years, fueled by much study and discussions among the group of hidden children, he has clarified his feelings and sometimes expressed with explosive obduracy his feelings of rage and detemiination from the point of view of one who knows the "permanent scars and permanent damage" done to children of the Holocaust. They speak publicly. But what do they seek to convey? What meanings, what lessons? If Primo Levi and others have feared the simplification and reduction of the Holocaust, these two wrestle with it directly and immediately. Fred has thought explicitly about the meaning he wants to convey: "And that's my message I still don't know what that message is that I should [communicate]." Fred points to a famous photograph of a class of Dutch Jewish children. In the very front row, with thick, dark, curly hair, and wearing a jacket with a star of David on the pocket, he sits looking into the camera with the innocence of his age. His grandfather, with whom he stayed a brief time in Amsterdam, had put him into the Jewish school as he had been ordered. Upon discovering this situation, his mother, with extraordinary foresight, yanked him from the school. Almost all the children in the crowded classroom of the picture died in Auschwitz. And Fred brought the photograph to his interviews: "If all the children in this picture are dead . . . and even if not [pause] one and a half million children. . . . [long pause]" His "message," then, emerges in emotion-laden, somehow angry yet desperate tones: No belief, no value, no dogma or principle, no abstraction is ever more important [weeps] than the freedom and dignity of a child. If we do not learn this from the Holocaust, we learned nothing. A positive conclusion. But a conclusion that conforms to the contradictory nature of so much of Holocaust history and experience. Fred strug-

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gles to place his own Holocaust story into some sort of order and his frustration grows as he becomes increasingly agitated in that attempt: And so when it was all over, nobody knew what the fuck to do except get back to normal. . . carry on as though it never happened, and that is sort of what we did. Eventually rny mother came back. We went back to Delft, we went back to school, hey, it was over. I was in the fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, and then we immigrated to the United States, a whole new chapter in my life began. It was like it never happened. For the next 30 years it was just a few stories about a long time ago, and it is not until very recently . . . it seems to take survivors 40, 50 [grows more assertive] years before they begin to tell their stories and what really happened. And then we all just put it away. We all just went on as though it had never happened. That's all you could do. And yet, [adamantly punctuating each word] it's not right, not in some ultimate sense. The world should have changed. Everything should have changed. But, I suppose that's childlike. I don't care, that's why I'm here as a child survived. Life should have changed . . . it should make a difference, whatever the hell that means. But that is how it feels to a kid, how can you let this go, how could you have ever let this happen to us? How could you betray little children this way? Forgive me for speaking like a child, I am now an adult and I know that the answers to that [voice quivers] that there are no answers to that. . . but everything should have changed when this finally ended. Disconcerted, recognizing the injustice and ultimate meaninglessness of his own experience and perhaps of the Holocaust itself, Fred grapples with this awful insight and its apparent negation of his earlier insistence of Holocaust education's absolute necessity for the sake of children. His remarks elide into a conversation with himself: "I suppose that's childlike. I don't care, that's why I'm here as a child survived. Life should have changed. . . . it should make a difference, whatever the hell that means." His anguish approaches despair, finally, accusing the adult world, then and now, for allowing the murder of children, for the "betrayal" of children as he repeats a now incredulous realization that if everything ought to have changed, nothing did. Hidden children like Ema and Fred confront naive and anodyne responses to the Holocaust bluntly and honestly. At times they confound older survivors with their new-found truculence and bravado. At length, however, their candor connects to the inconclusive nature of Holocaust reflection. Lawrence Langer has commented that the Holocaust yields no meaning because "all inquiry ends in the gas chamber and the crematorium." These particular survivors, however, lived in the shadow of the

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gas chamber and the crematorium for most of their postwar lives, convinced that their ordeals paled by comparison with those of camp survivors. Yet they, too, have retained the original terror that plagues virtually all survivors. Shortly after the war, psychoanalyst Edith Sterba examined and treated children who had survived the Holocaust. Their comments remain chilling. One child declared, "I shall never be able to capture the years that I lost, or the love I did not get." Another, expressing what Sterba noted as a "complete suppression of all emotional reactions," said that "nothing can ever be good again. If it is bad, it can become worse, and even if it is good, what good is it to me if my family is not here to enjoy it?" 2 Recalling Fred's concern for the fear that lingers in children, it seems plausible that those sentiments, expressed again and again by Sterba's charges, have been deeply embedded in the hidden children—in child survivors, indeed, in most survivors. Such feelings can never be fully removed, and render positive or entertaining judgments about meaning or lessons at best discordantly conflicted, contradictory and depressingly confused. NOTES 1. Andre Stein, Hidden Children: Forgotten Survivors of the Holocaust (London, New York, and Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993), x. 2. Edith Sterba, "The Effect of Persecutions on Adolescents," in Massive Psychic Trauma, ed. by Henry Krystal (New York: International Universities Press, 1968), 51-60.

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Conclusions: Reflections on Meaning Revisiting his own thinking and the historical controversies of his distinguished career as one of the deans of Holocaust studies, Yehudah Bauer wrote that "The Holocaust is a warning. It adds three commandments to the ten of the Jewish-Christian tradition: Thou shalt not be a perpetrator; Thou shalt not be a passive victim; and Thou shalt not be a bystander." Such sentiment seemed inconsistent with Bauer's career-long critical edge and his determined avoidance of maudlin conclusions. As if to respond to potential critics, he ended the chapter this way: "But if there is even a chance in a million that sense should prevail, we have a moral obligation, in the spirit of Kantian moral philosophy, to try."1 Who would not concur? Such faith in human reason and the power of education might validate the reasons for speaking given by survivors; the rationale that the "lessons" of the Holocaust are not only leamable but palpably effective; that the impact of books and lectures will stop killing, racism, hatred, and antisemitism. Terrence Des Pres, in his pioneering work The Survivor, seemed determined to salvage human dignity and integrity from the experiences of the Holocaust. "Stripped of everything," wrote Des Pres, "prisoners maintained moral identity by holding some inward space of self untouchable."2 Tzvetan Todorov concurred and went even further to draw a positive meaning from his reading of Holocaust experiences: "The experience of good in the camps sheds some light on an age-old moral debate as well. In performing a moral act, are we fulfilling our basic nature, conforming, as the ancients argued, to our primary purpose?"3

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Survivors rarely draw such grandiose conclusions, and refrain from offering heartening comments. Yet some, like Agi R., expressed a similar view when she declared that even in Auschwitz, literally in the shadow of the crematorium, "your soul is your own," an entity in itself untouchable by the camp or the oppressors. As the humiliating routine unfolded at Auschwitz, Agi found the fortitude to laugh at herself, reflected as she was in the eyes of her friends who laughed with her when they saw each other hairless. They clung together, under the aegis, as it were, of her "Lager Mother," her friend's mother. Yet the Lager Mother had replaced her biological mother, sent to the gas chamber by Mengele as Agi tried to follow and was rebuffed violently by a guard. Unable to believe that her mother and younger brother were murdered, she fantasized about them, clung to her girlfriends and a new parent. And when "my Lady," her Lager Mother, died in her arms on the death march from Ravensbruck, Agi became delirious. Moral dignity, however, an enduring or redeemed integrity, pervades her narrative. That dignity shines through in her telling, if not in the actual living of that past. Primo Levi, Taddeus Borowski, and Jean Amery—less sanguine than DesPres or Todorov—each died perhaps overwhelmed by the fear of simplification. In his last book, a book that many believe anticipates his suicide, Primo Levi noted that understanding means simplifying, but simplifying often means lying. Are there simple answers to questions about resistance? About guilt? About survival? About what it means to be a Jew after Auschwitz? About what it means to be a non-Jew? Perhaps at best we can aim to eliminate simple questions like my own naive questions to the man whose brother had gone off to join the partisans in the mountains of Yugoslavia as soon as the Germans came to Greece. Why didn't he join his brother? Incredulous, he responded: "my parents and grandparents and younger brothers and sisters. How could I leave them"—they who were confused and even angry at his brother's choice. All save the brother died at Auschwitz—along with some 60,000 other Jews from Salonika. Now his brother seems completely correct, visionary in his acts. But then—abandoning the family, what conflict in himself must have been stirred and remains stirred? No goodbyes; like so many, including Elie Wiesel, this man, too, remembered the 8 words at Auschwitz which ended good-byes—"men to the left, women to the right." What survivor is free of such memories? And how to communicate what that meant? Will language ever again match such directness? Can

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old language communicate such unprecedented experiences—for, as Levi noted in Survival in Auschwitz, no new language exists to supplant the old.4 Does "cold" or "bunk" mean the same for me as it does for someone who endured a death march or slept in a barracks in Auschwitz? We have come to a problematic juncture of meaning, communication, and experience. One example may serve to sharpen this obscurity. Almost every survivor who has spoken to me about the terrible journeys in the cattle cars has expressed a lost sense of time: "How long? Two, three days—I don't know—it was forever." Time became immeasurable; they entered another world as they climbed into those wagons and approached the planet of Auschwitz. Here, described in typical fashion, not with complete sentences but with punctuated lists, each word carrying more than we might usually expect: Yelling, screaming, people pushing, moaning, and crying. There was no air and we tried to scurry around to get a little air from cracks in the car. No sanitary facilities. I was a small child, and all I remember is the suffocation and the smell, and the bodies pressed against me. [pause] It was horrible. These pivotal moments divided lives in half; from the instant the wagons began to move, attitudes and values began to change as this straightforward statement suggests: "The train left the station and the children started to cry from hunger and thirst. And the crying and the wailing of the mothers for their children was driving the rest of us crazy." It is certain that a journey that ought to have taken hours—from Warsaw to Treblinka or Lodz to Auschwitz—usually took days and nights. Those who suffered the boxcars, the moaning and the wailing and the crying out of children, the suffocation and the stench, the terror and the alteration of their lives forever, often speak of sadistic German torturers who left carloads of Jews to die of thirst, starvation, and disease. Most of those who found themselves on those trains were doomed. They were put on "Sonderzuege," the category of trains given by the German Reich Railways for groups—excursion rates, one-third fare, children under age 12 rode half-fare and under age 4 rode for free. Raul Hilberg has elaborated this history in excruciating detail: these were rates charged the SS by civilian railroad authorities and overseen by civilian railroad employees—some who were responsible for passenger trains, some for military, some for scheduling, some for charting itineraries, some for keeping the

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books, cost accountants who had the enormous task of billing and making sure that the state, or the SS—an official organization of the state paid their bills on time.5 No money, no trains. And those planners, some of whom subcontracted scheduling to the German Middle Europe Travel Bureau, might schedule Sonderzuege for groups of German tourists going to the Greek Islands—Corfu, for example, from which Jews were being shipped in the other direction—or groups of thousands of Jews to less exotic locations like Treblinka and Maidanek. "Those sadistic bastards left us to suffer and die," said one survivor. But these planners and railroad employees, 1.5 million of them, civilians in Berlin or Krakow or Warsaw, made bureaucratic decisions based on what priorities were assigned to the trains. Military first, regular passenger next, and special trains third. These priorities might, on occasion, change: the Central Transportation Directorate (ZVL, or Zentralverkehrsleitstelle) a locatedfreightcar space weekly. On September 21,1944, for example, the ZVL assigned armaments first priority, the harvest second, and scrap metal, ore and wood all shared third place. Cars were then assigned to operating divisions to meet these priorities by yet another office, the Hauptwagenamt (Main Car Office) attached to the GBL Ost in Berlin. They were responsible only for freight cars. (These included gondola and "covered"or box cars.) Juedische Sonderzuege had no priorities. So they waited, shunted aside for hours. "I was just a bureaucrat," said the director of Traffic Planning Office 33 in Krakow, who never left his desk. As far as he knew, those places were "just a destination." Someone in the RSHA office of Section IVB4, Eichmann's department, had to establish a point of origin and a destination to be written on the appropriate lines on the appropriate form; someone in IVB4a had to contact local SS and police to make sure that so many thousands were ready to leave; someone had to contact the camp to notify the commandant of the time and date of arrival; someone had to total the costs—round trip fares for guards, one way for Jews; someone in the IVB4b office of finance and evacuation had to wrangle the rolling stock; someone else had to calculate the expected amounts of cash and goods to be collected from that particular Jewish population. Someone had to notify the German police and Polish police, or Hungarian, French, Slovakian, Croatian, or Greek police that they would be responsible for so many Jews at various points along the way—Kossice, for example, was where Hungarian jurisdiction ended and German began so both police forces had to be alerted.

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And there were corresponding offices and responsibilities in the DRB: someone in the Reichsbahn Office El 17, international passenger trains, had to chart the time schedules, calculating how fast the special train must go to avoid priority trains; someone in EII21, the Operations Office, had to notify all the signalmen along the way after the itinerary had been established; these arrangements had to be coordinated with the appropriate staffs in the General Operations East offices of the Reichsbahn to guarantee car allocation, proper scheduling, and traffic control. Liaison staffs had to be established and consulted in occupied countries and axis satellites who maintained "Autonomous Railroads" were staffed by representatives of the Deutsche Reichsbahn in each major city. Money exchange experts had to be hired and were often on site for payment from the SS to the railroad—in Salonika, for example, while my interviewee may have waited for departure, crammed with his family in a boxcar, there was the problem of converting the cost from marks to dinars and then to Hungarian florins and then to zloties, since the train wound up passing through those jurisdictions and German currency exchange experts consulted on the relative costs of the train. Sadism? Not obvious. Even antisemitism might not have been a factor. Just routine jobs for railroad, police, and business employees. In texts like Michael Marrus's The Holocaust in History and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, one of the most frequent words in describing these bureaucratic and labor forces is "conscientious." Conscientious, not brutal or sadistic, not vicious or Jew-hating. We witness routine behavior, conscientiously carried out. And rather than assigning the annihilation top priority, the DRB carried out its task with a minimum of resources efficiently and routinely. The consequences were momentous for the victims, but for the Reichsbahn, the organization that delivered the transportation services, it appeared as a minor event. If we cue to know about the Holocaust, these are the subjects to explore: one of the more disturbing aspects of this education, then, is its boredom—the study of bureaucracy, of routine behaviors, of the history of business and efficiency experts, of apportionment of tasks to thousands of officials and their staffs, is indeed boring stuff. The consequences may be spectacularly horrendous, monumentally upsetting—but the processes are rarely (with significant exceptions) even dramatic or epochally evil. This intensifies already disquieting questions about meaning. And the consequences of such routine behavior, dispassionate and indifferent, were the prolonged, agonizing deaths of Jewish children in

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boxcars. Those who observed, felt, smelled, and lived with this experience remember starkly sadistic actions. It matters little that those actions may have been empty of emotion, sadistic or otherwise. It matters little that literally millions of men received gainful employment from their deaths; that these were business-as-usual, civilized procedures. There are few aspects of the Holocaust that escape this terrifying phenomenon. The desk murderers, administrative massacres, the routineness of it all, set the Holocaust apart from other mass murders, pogroms, and genocides. In 1909, Max Weber wrote his famous essays on bureaucracy. Commenting on the future of Prussia and Germany, he remarked: "[Bureaucracy's] specific nature . . . develops the more perfectly the bureaucracy is dehumanized, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is the specific nature of bureaucracy and is appraised as its special virtue." Maturing under "the principle of sine ira et studio [without anger or love]" bureaucracy disparages personal engagement, feeling, or sympathy. Weber went on to describe bureaucratization as a motivating force in modem society. It worked best the further a person's office was separated from private life; it functioned with the complete involvement of the bureaucrat engaged in his job as his "duty"; it worked best the more relationships to persons were eliminated, that is, the more it was devoted to "impersonal and functional purposes." This, indeed, was primary: bureaucratization "demands purely objective considerations, an objective discharge of business without regard for persons." I have suggested above that the last four words of this sentence are the watchwords of bureaucracy; they are the dictum of this institution and a key to the mysteries of how the Holocaust was perpetrated. The advantages of such a system are obvious: technical superiority over earlier, more primitive forms of organization; this was, after all, the critical difference between premodern and modem life, which guaranteed the removal of ambiguity and the achievement of precision, speed, continuity, efficiency, and logic. And where does all this lead? I would suggest that the railroads are a prime example of how this particular aspect of the modem mentality can be molded; so, too, the doctors who participated in various ways by the thousands, or the lawyers, clergymen, students, businessmen, craftsmen, plumbers, architects, engineers, chemists, technicians of all sorts, stenographers, workers, police, and civil servants. For all its use of passenger categories to describe people in cattle cars, every bill of lading referred to the contents of those cars as Stuecke,

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pieces, like inanimate objects—or, as more than one survivor has noted, "less than animals." Hermann Langbein, non-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, wrote that because we cannot create a true picture, Auschwitz is called Hell and the perpetrators devils. However, he went on, Auschwitz was not Hell, but a German concentration camp, a modem institution created by the German state; for many, a profit-making venture. This is the legacy of the perpetrators to the rest of us, even as more than 1,500 German companies have admitted to using slave labor during World War II and some of them now hire the most respected historians to investigate the claims brought by survivors against them. Should we continue to search for meaning in the Holocaust, this ugly history may bring us to the unpleasant realities of how the Western civilized project emitted the Holocaust. The study of the perpetrators and the process yields sometimes unbearable implications: meaning. By now it should be relatively clear that I have found no significant "meaning"fromlistening to the victims who survived. What the Holocaust "means" to them is loss—utter and complete. "The Holocaust, to me as an individual," wrote Rene L., a hidden child survivor, "means loss—of people, father, relatives, loss of identity, loss of God, loss of belief in people... and it means the acceptance of evil in the world, acceptance of cruelty in people but also belief in the goodness in people, the duality in each of us, the capability to feel both evil and goodness . . . " Rene's choice of specific words derive from his own experience, yet he passionately expresses an ambivalence common to most, shared by Ema and Fred, and exposes a deep desire to salvage human goodness from the abyss of the Holocaust. How and why poring over survivor testimonies, studying the history of that miserable epoch and exploring this simultaneously personalized yet general meaning of loss translates to a life-enhancing or uplifting moral educational vehicle for subsequent generations remains problematic. Its importance rests to a great extent in what the treatment of the Jews reveals about the perpetrators and, alas, about much of the non-Jewish world. As I have tried to organize these reflections around the concept of "meaning," it may be useful here to address what that might mean. Does the concept imply lessons, relevance, significance, efficacy, or merely consequences? Is it compounded of some or all of these? As with all aspects of the Holocaust, meaning, if it exists, will not be singular or one-dimensional, but complicated and multiform, confounding and unsettling.

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Silence, remorse, and memory stalk survivors. What stalks the perpetrators? Do they dwell on such questions as meaning? At his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann described his feelings at the Wanssee Conference, where the administrative plans for the implementation of the Final Solution were formalized: "Here now . . . the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich." As he looked around him, not one voice was raised in protest. "At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt."6 Most significant in this testimony, however, Eichmann implied that had one of these authorities— whether SS, Army, or Civil Service—raised any objection, questioned the order for the annihilation, he, too, might have goaded his conscience and challenged the new policy. But "as far as [he] could see, not a one of them objected." And so, he thought, if these esteemed leaders of the military, SS, and civilian realms did not demur, who was he to object? He became, at this point, a bystander of sorts, a silent participant in the destruction process. He would testify that he never hated Jews; that he saw them as opponents, perhaps, but never as demons or objects of loathing. Adolf Eichmann, even if he were telling the truth, could not have dissuaded Hitler from carrying out the Holocaust. But if Hitler was the motor, the necessary factor for the murder of the Jews, he was not sufficient for its execution. It took millions of civil servants, bureaucrats, workers, soldiers, doctors, and countless others not unlike Eichmann to perpetrate a continent-wide crime. And some, most, of them, too, were bystanders. Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Laureate and 20th-century voice from the fire, like Elijah, a prophet of that fire, has virtually proclaimed that in time of such unprecedented murder, silence becomes complicity and that the sin of the 20th century was indifference. In his Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen argued that the opposite of indifference motivated most Germans, products of a culture that had produced generations of Jew-haters. Given the opportunity, therefore, to annihilate Jews, Germans, claimed Goldhagen, leaped at the chance with great gusto and commitment. Indifference had nothing to do with it. His argument raised disturbing prospects, unsettling questions, veered close to cultural racism itself, and remains, to many scholars—especially German scholars who rallied almost with one voice to oppose the thesis, a unique occurrence in postwar German scholarship—unconvincing and offensive. Yet Goldhagen pointed to unanswerable questions and demanded and offered answers. Why, for example, did German guards in

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April and May 1945, only weeks and days before the end of the war, not SS men, Wehrmacht soldiers and last-minute recruits, policemen, or reservists, continue to murder Jews on the death marches with such sadistic methods? How to explain such events? Still, there remains more to the Holocaust than these sadistically perpetrated murders. A vast system of legislation accompanied the Nazi regime. It included involvement of lawyers who drafted the laws, of police, judges, and members of the diplomatic corps who administered them, of the business hierarchies who contracted with the government for major contracts, the universities, hospitals, and virtually every level of administration in the country down to school teachers and postal clerks. Even anti-Nazis would abide by such rules. Even members of the Nazi Party who were not antisemitic would not oppose the legitimately authorized policies of the Fuehrer. Even solid citizens with excellent educational backgrounds would follow the rules. Even devout Christians would put aside their consciences in order to obey the dictates of the state system. Those who participated in the Nazi and government bureaucracies, the railroad officials, doctors, and civil servants simply continued to do what they had done before the Nazi takeover. Railroadmen routed trains, doctors conducted examinations and medical experiments, police arrested those identified by the courts as lawbreakers or "asocials" or "undesirables," postal clerks delivered official mail without thinking that the messages ordered people to report for deportation. Without thinking, clergymen gave information on baptismal records to identify "Aryans" from "non-Aryans." Judges continued to rule on the law, even if the law was based on the racial ideology of the Nazis. Of the millions of people involved in these procedures, only a fraction was composed of sadistic, die-hard antisemites. Almost all of them had Jewish friends or even Jewish relatives. They were God-fearing, family-oriented, lawabiding citizens. Each of them, involved in the "Final Solution" in this long-distance way, worked to enhance the reputation of his own institution—school, business, department, hospital, and military unit—sought to gain favor with his superiors and enhance his own career, salary, and prestige. Refusing to work at their jobs would have served no purpose and would only have meant their own loss of security. They were means to an end, these people, "conveyor belts for almost any policies." The ends of those policies, especially since they were developed step by step and rarely foreseen early, were almost irrelevant. As one scholar has argued, they

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simply stopped thinking about those ends and focused only on their own short-term gain, on their own narrowly defined jobs as specialists. What happened in the next department or the next office was not their affair. Ethics or morality, hatred or anger seemed to have never entered into the picture. Perhaps most significantly looms the routineness of the administrative, business, bureaucratic apparatus; the nonthinking banality of the destruction process that engulfed an entire continent. The world that produced the Holocaust, the mindset of business as usual, is more like our own than like the one that preceded it. Its roots may be deep in the Western tradition, but, as Max Weber pointed out, it ripened and flourished in the 20th centmy: among civil service and business bureaucracies, among the population of civilized countries, not just Germany, composed of men trying to get by, to protect their families, earn decent livings, practice their professions, make lots of money, take advantage of opportunities presented by situations, governments, wars, expropriations, and vacancies. Following orders does not begin to describe the complicated process that was involved. Normalcy, indifference, apathy, and an inability to understand the consequences of their involvement—if we cannot speak definitively of complicity in murder, we can speak of these phenomena. Raul Hilberg has suggested that "there was no cleavage between the German in the street and the perpetrators, who could be found in every agency." In Germany, he has written, "the difference between perpetrators and bystanders was least pronounced; in fact it was not supposed to exist."7 The whole population was to be involved in watching, alienating, and isolating the Jews. "I do not understand the question," said Otto Ohlendorff, hardly a bystander, the former commander of one of the notorious Einsatzgruppen that killed 1.4 million Jews in less than eighteen months. The question had to do with whether or not he felt any bad conscience over killing women and children each day. "I did not hate Jews. In fact, I was dedicated to helping Jews." Thus spoke Adolf Eichmann. "You must understand, here, I never hated Jews. It simply was not in my nature," said Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz. These voices echo those of Franz Stangl, or Albert Speer, or the literary figures like Gletkin and Joseph K. who moved through their lives sine ira et studio. Bureaucratic, official, amoral, almost medical indifference shaped the decisions of those men. Throughout Europe that sense of indifference prevailed regarding all events that did not touch one's personal

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existence. All Europeans became increasingly preoccupied with their own troubles. Thus, the epigraph that precedes Hilberg's chapter on bystanders, taken from the film Shoah: "It's this way: If I cut my finger, it doesn't hurt him."8 Writers like Koestler and Kafka and Ortega y Gasset found disheartening meaning in their observations of Western civilization in the 20th century. Their forays into the tone and nature of modem society transformed into horribly evil and real forms in the perpetrators of the Holocaust. There is meaning in this—terrifyingly multidimensional, and paralyzing. I can find no "legacy" to speak of from the victims; this, to me, is the legacy from the perpetrators. Perhaps, as Goldhagen in part suggests, it is a legacy of unrestrained hate founded upon ancient grounds of superstition and antisemitism. Yet if such hatred drove those about whom I have spoken, they often kept it well-hidden, disguised, and silent. I hesitate to draw universal conclusions from these examples because unhistorical parallels are misleading and even specious. But indifference, blindness, diffidence, and passivity in the face of injustice or prejudice infused institutions and populations. Given this phenomenon, the question of understanding hate, so often presented as a focus of the study of the Holocaust, seems to me a bit off center. Equally problematic looms the understanding of nonhate and its connection to the perpetration of evil—for we cannot ignore the testimonies of people like Ohlendorff, Eichmann, Hoess, Albert Speer, Franz Stangl of Treblinka, or the host of others who claimed no malice. Perhaps the ultimate in such claims came from the doctor at Neuengamme who, at his 1966 trial for the medical murder of 20 Jewish children, testified that he had given the children morphine so they "would not suffer unduly," and thus "only killed them." The public prosecutor of Frankfort at this trial perceived this argument as a valid one, an argument that spoke well of the medical ethics and humanity of the doctor. That the murders were committed on April 20, 1945, with no possible prospect of any medical use (as if that were ever a viable excuse), that they were wanton and pursued doggedly in the midst of the chaos of the end of the war, seemed to mean little or nothing. Lawrence Langer, commenting on this startling position taken by the public prosecutor of Hamburg in support of the alleged compassion of the murderer-doctor, proposes a "psychology of detachment" in which the perpetrator separates himself inwardly from the plight of the victim and from his own violence (true especially when the victims were Jews, the ultimate Other in the Nazi universe). The re-

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suit of such attitudes appeared again and again in war crimes trials: the utter perplexity of the perpetrators, from physicians to concentration-camp commandants, from businessmen to civil servants, from SS men to scientists, when confronted with the prospect that their actions may be construed as criminal.9 How could they, normal in every respect, family men, men who loved children (like the commandant of Neuengamme who authorized the murder of the 20 children), men who were loyal and dutiful, be guilty of criminal behavior? Detached from the effects, even from the nature of the actions, they seem to demand a redefinition of criminal that liberates their behavior from reprehensible categories. In a work on the ethics and morality of the world of corporate managers, Moral Mazes, sociologist Robert Jackall discussed our own "bureaucratic impersonality," tracing its roots to the Protestant ethic and thereby to the work of Max Weber. Jackall wrote that "bureaucratic work causes people to bracket, while at work, the moralities that they might hold outside the workplace or that they might adhere to privately and to follow instead the prevailing morality of the particular organizational situation." He then quoted a former vicepresident of a large firm: " 'What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man's home or his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you.' "10 Such work organizes behavior and shapes consciousness; separates or compartmentalizes people's lives and depersonalizes or even dehumanizes daily routine. Such work engages people in "rational, socially approved, puiposive action" that provides status and rewards for self and family. It must produce social and psychological consequences, as much, I think, as economic conditions or religious instruction. It "places a premium on a functionally rational, pragmatic habit of mind that seeks specific goals"11 and clearly creates behavioral guidelines. This is not a legacy of the Holocaust, perhaps, but it is a Western tradition that in part explains the vast cooperation of normal people in that catastrophe. It is a legacy that takes time to examine. It is a legacy that is boring, like most bureaucratic procedures. And it is a challenge. For in the face of this almost frantic indifference stand the facts: no Holocaust without that continental-wide cooperation, without that apathy or indifference, without that nonthinking behavior. It ought to at least give us pause that sociologists like Jackall can describe that heritage in such current detail, now more sophisticated and intense. The Holocaust raises questions about indifference, perhaps the subject closest to its heart. Sometimes it emerged as technocratic, professional, cold, medical, business, or bureaucratic in-

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difference; sometimes as emotional, defensive, philosophical, theological, or moral indifference. We come to the center of the subject and it is not simple. I think that no generalizations apply: there were antisemites who rescued Jews, Nazis who helped hide them, and devout Christians who helped hunt them down. It is not our place to feel contempt or complacency. In the shadowy memory of some 1.5 million children murdered, such feelings seem if not immoral, simply inappropriate. Questions of meaning eventually merge with questions about education. Despite or even because of an overwhelming tendency to confront the Holocaust as void of any meaning, full education about it seems an unquestioned imperative if only to reiterate Yehudah Bauer's hope for "a chance in a million." Cautious, sensitive, and accurate education about the Holocaust must—must—include these subjects. Those who have ventured into the fire to teach about the Holocaust have rarely dealt with bureaucracy, indifference, normal citizens, bystanders who were simultaneously participants because teachers have argued these were complicated subjects that could not be fully communicated in a short period. In Germany, for example, until a few years ago, teachers who braved Holocaust history focused on quantitative studies—statistical, cataloguing numbers killed and avoiding any implementation of survivor testimonies because they were considered too emotional and biased. They simplified that bottomless past. And to teach simplistically about the Holocaust one must lie about it—Hitler did not dupe a nation; evil Nazis were not the only ones responsible for the murder of the Jews; gas chambers were not the only form of killing—nor the principal one, for that matter; Germans who refused to participate were not subject to execution or concentration camps; resistance and rescue both existed, but need to be examined in their very specific and complex contexts. To do justice to the subject, a teacher must go beyond numbers because the Holocaust is not only about quantitative data. I do not believe in lessons from the Holocaust—only in memory. It is part of the tragic inheritance that sometimes when we think of our own children, we must think, too, of the murdered children and perhaps of this complicated problem of the meaning to be derived from a meaningless murder of a people and a culture. In the Introduction, I referred to Susannah Heschl's conclusion about the fundamentally irrational nature of antisemitism. Surely the murder of the Jews shares in that irrationality, overlaid by an almost unfathomable vacuum of logical origins. Meaningless, then, derives from a lack of reason—and I think we can

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find no convincing rationale that offers anything near a "meaningful murder." Like any conundrum, this one, the search for meaning in what may be a meaningless if terrible epoch, presents a frustrating and endlessly debilitating inconclusiveness perhaps best treated, along with survivor testimonies, with silence. And as I write those words, it seems imperative to immediately note that the silence produces its own eerie dialogues with voices from the victims as well as from the perpetrators—voices both spoken and that surface from a variety of written documents—from memoirs to bills of lading. Somewhere in the midst of that dialogue lies the possibility of a fuller appreciation of tortured silences and perhaps an acceptance of the abysmal implications of the Holocaust without insisting on meaning. I do not believe in lessons from the Holocaust, yet the actions and myopic thinking of the perpetrators of whom I have written here strike me as instructive. They present us with behavior that pervades our own society and one by one the perpetrators might instmct us as caveats to the possibilities of our own lives and times. Most fundamentally, those caveats derive from the indifference of peipetrators and bystanders to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust. Indifference of such magnitude is rooted firmly in the ethos of our own civilization that values objectivity and distance in virtually every aspect of life. While as a historian I am reluctant to offer such judgmental conclusions, the subject ineluctably demands moral assessment. I do not believe in lessons, but listening to silences tormented by anguish and sorrow may deepen our ability to fathom the nature of the Holocaust. At its most rudimentary level it is loss—utter and absolute. Survivor testimonies, because we receive them one by one, deepen the appreciation of the Holocaust to which I referred above. Here, then, are what I reluctantly term "lessons" gleaned from the perpetrators, and "meanings" drawn from the testimonies. Trying to bring them together, to discover some connection from which genocide could explode, has been fruitless. No rational point links the two groups, no reasoned animosity, only what appears to be an arbitrary and deadly crossing of paths. That failure to find a ground, a meaningful connection between victims and perpetrators should obviate glib responses about what the Holocaust teaches us. Paradox and uncertainty appear wherever one turns in the terrain of the Holocaust. Contradictions mark the nature of the experience and its aftermath: for survivors, Wiesel once noted, if you ask them if they are happy

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they survived, whatever they answer will be a lie. The urge to speak exists simultaneously with an equal urge to remain silent; there must be meaning from the Holocaust, but there cannot be. And all are true: speaking and silence inexorably and often enigmatically coexist; we may extract meaning from the Holocaust, but it may be sacrilegious to speak of it. History and memory complement each other, the public and the private with memory enlivening history as history provides memory a context. I do not believe in lessons, but learning about that history seems to me mandatory because the past constitutes part of the present. I believe in the importance of memory. There is an undercurrent in my own tradition that tells us that the reclamation of memory and words is a mitzvah, a good deed, a good thing to do. Elie Wiesel, in The Oath, a little known work, wrote: "Jews felt that to forget constituted a crime against memory as well as against justice: whoever forgets becomes the executioner's accomplice."12 But Moshe, the madman, "the last prophet and first messiah of a mankind that is no more," questioned that tradition, passionately rejected it, and offered the alternative of silence, forgetting, burying the past because of its awful content, which could only bring sorrow to anyone who should contemplate it. In a devastating ending, the protagonist curses the urge tp testify and pass on his memory. He insists upon a vow of silence from his people, a halt to chronicling the story of those destroyed because his tradition demands it.13 Although the oath of silence is broken to save a life, Moshe may be Wiesel's only hero and because the plea for silence erupts from him, I'm not sure that this most venerable tradition of recording memory convinced Wiesel himself of the virtue of speaking. After 20 years of listening, it has not completely convinced me, either, but, despite my own ambivalence, listening and chronicling still seems a good thing to do. Like a mitzvah, it carries inherent goodness, uncharacteristically unquestioned in the service of life. NOTES 1. Yehudah Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London: University Press, 2001), 67. 2. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 202. 3. Todorov, 291. 4. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 1 5. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European J

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6. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 288. 7. Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 197. 8. Ibid, 193. 9. Lawrence L. Langer, "Understanding Atrocity: Killers and Victims in the Holocaust," Michigan Quarterly Review (Winter 1985), 125-133. 10. Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5-6. 11. Ibid, 7-13. 12. Elie Wiesel, The Oath (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 237. 13. Ibid, 238-244.

Bibliography BOOKS Alicia Appelman-Jurman, Alicia: My Story (Toronto, New York, London, and Sydney: Bantam Books; 1988). Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1964). Yehudah Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). Sidney M. Bolkosky, The Distorted Image: German Jewish Perceptions of Germans and Germany, 1920-1935 (New York and Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975). Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). John Chrysostom, Discourses Against Judaizing Christians, trans, by Paul W. Harkins (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1979). Norman Cohn, Warrantfor Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-conspira and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967). Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Holocaust Theology (London: Lamp Press, 1989). Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans, by Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Hermann Dicker, Piety and Perseverance: Jews from the Carpathian Mountain (New York: Sepher-Herman Press, 1981). Magda Denes, Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War (New York: Norton, 1997).

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Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Rainer Erb, ed, Geschitswissenschaft und Offentlichkeit: DerStreit um Daniel Goldhagen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1998). Emil Fackenheim, God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Refections (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraitsof the Nazi Leadership (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Searchfor Ultimate Meaning (A revised and extended ed tion of The Unconscious God) (New York: Insight Books, Plenum; 1997). G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: The New American Library, 1947). Daniel Goldhagen, Hitter's Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996). Henry Greenspan, Who Can Retell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998) S. Y. Gross and Y. Yosef Cohen, The Marmaros Book (Tel Aviv: Beit Marmaros, 1983). Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vol. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985). , The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). , "Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders," Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victim Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Rudolph Hoess, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the Kommandant of Auschwitz, ed. by Steven Paskuly (New York: De Capo Books, 1996). Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 1974). , "The Metamorphosis," in The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, trans, by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1961). , "In the Penal Colony," in The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces; trans, by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1961). Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans, by Daphne Hardy (New York: Modem Library, 1946). Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (New York, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). , The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

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Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans, by Raymond Rosenthal (New York and London: Summit Books, 1988). , Survival in Auschwitz, trans, by Stuart Woolf (New York: Summit Books, 1986). Franklin H. Littell, ed. Hyping the Holocaust: Scholars Answer Goldhagen (Merion Station, Penn.: Merion Westfield Press, 1997). Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate (Northvale, N.J, and London: Jason Aronson, 1993). Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1930). Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). Alvin Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980). John K. Roth and Richard Rubenstein, eds. Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1987). Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). , The Cunning ofHistory: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). Matthias Schmidt, Albert Speer: The End of a Myth, trans, by Joachim Neugruschel (New York: Collier Books, 1982). Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1995). , Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). Robert R. Shandley, ed. Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate, trans, by Jeremiah Riemer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Andre Stein, Hidden Children: Forgotten Survivors of the Holocaust (London, New York, and Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993). Graham Swift, Waterland (New York: Washington Square Press, 1983). A. J. P. Taylor, From Sarajevo to Potsdam (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968). Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days ofHitler (New York: The Macmillan, 1947). Leon Weliczker Wells, Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995). Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Avon, 1966). , The Oath, trans, by Marion Wiesel (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

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, The Trial of God, trans, by Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1979). Benjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, trans, by Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Schocken Books, 1996). ARTICLES Neal Ascherson, "Survivors," New York Review of Books, Vol. XXVII, No. 10 (June 12, 1980), 34-36. Steven E. Aschheim, "Reconceiving the Holocaust?" Tikkun, Vol. 11, No. 4, 62-65. Orner Bartov, "The Lessons of the Holocaust," Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 13-20. , "Ordinary Monsters," The New Republic (April 29, 1996), 32-38; Christopher Browning, "Human Nature, Culture and the Holocaust," The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 18, 1996), A72. Benzion Dinur, "Problems Confronting 'Yad Washem' in its Work of Research," Yad Washem Studies, I (Jerusalem 1957), 7-30. Amos Elon, "Israel's Demons," New York Review of Books, Dec. 21, 1995. Ann Harman and Miriam Katz, "Model and Methodology for Training Professionals and Para-Professionals Working with Elderly Holocaust Survivors," ASA, 1997. Raul Hilberg, "The Goldhagen Phenomenon," Critical Inquiry, 23 (Summer 1997), 721-728. , "Confronting the Moral Implications of the Holocaust," Social Education, April 1978. Gustav Jahoda," 'Ordinary Germans' before Hitler: A Critique of the Goldhagen Thesis," Journal ojInterdisciplinary History, Vol. XXXIX, No. I (Summer 1998), 69-88. Tony Judt, "The Courage of the Elementary," New York Review of Books, Vol. XLVI, No. 9 (May 20, 1999), 31-38. Lawrence Langer, "Moralizing the Holocaust," Dimensions, Vol. 12, No. 1,3-6. Lawrence L. Langer, "Understanding Atrocity: Killers and Victims in the Holocaust," Michigan Quarterly Review (Winter 1985), 125-133. Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, " 'Faith, Ethics and the Holocaust': The Holocaust Survivor's Faith and Religious Behavior and Some Implications for Treatment," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 3 (Nov. 4,1988), 413-4 Harvey Peskin, "The Rescue of Memory," Readings: A Journal of Reviews and Commentary in Mental Health, Vol. 12, No. 4 (December 1997), 4-9. Dina Porat, "Amalek's Accomplices: Blaming Zionism for the Holocaust: Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel during the 1980's," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 27 (1992).

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Alvin Rosenfeld, "Primo Levi: The Survivor as Victim," in James S. Pacy and Alan P. Wertheimer, eds., Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1988), 123-144. Mary Rothschild, "Survivors or Heroes?" Los Angeles Jewish Journal. This article was included in the training kits for volunteer interviewers in 1994. Richard Rubenstein, "Some Perspectives on Religious Faith After Auschwitz," in Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke, eds., The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 256-268. George Steiner, "K," in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 118-126. Edith Sterba, "The Effect of Persecutions on Adolescents," in Massive Psychic Trauma, ed. by Henry Krystal (New York: International Universities Press, 1968), 51-60. Max Weber, "On Bureaucracy," From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans, and ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1947), 196-228. Elie Wiesel, "A Plea for the Dead," in Legends of Our Time (New York: Avon Books, 1968), 213-237. , "Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent," in The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, ed. by Franklin H. Litel and Hubert G. Locke (Wayne State University Press: Detroit, MI, 1970), 269-277. SURVIVOR TESTIMONIES Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Project, University of Michigan-Dearborn Mardigian Library.

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Index Abe P. 59, 84 AgiR., 19-20,58, 104 Alex E,, 69-70, 84 Amalekites, 55 American Society on Aging, 13 Amery, Jean, 104 Amsterdam, ix-x Anne Frank, ix, x, xi Antisemitism, 2, 7, 44, 51 Arendt, Hannah, 31,43 Arrow Cross Party, 60 Aryanism, x Augustine, 2 Auschwitz, ix, x, xi, xii, 7, 16, 20, 22, 37, 53, 55, Bartov, Orner, 9 Bauer, Yehudah, 45, 46, 103, 115 Bauman, Zygmunt, 32 Belzer Rebbe, 86 BemardO., 18-19 Betlan, 59, 76 Birkenau, 21 Borowski, Taddeus, 104 Brenner, Reeve R., 55 British quotas, 66 Browning, Christopher, 10, 43

Buchenwald, 68 Bureaucracy, 31, 108-109 Central Transportation Directorate (ZVL), 106 Chelmno, 5 Christianity, ix, xii, 1,2,6, 8 Chrysostom, John, 2 Chust, 60 Cohn, Norman, 4 Cologne, 7-8 Covenant Theology, 56 Darkness at Noon, 30 David M., 19-22 DEGESCH, ix Delbo, Charlotte, xii, 94 Delft, 96 Des Pres, Terrence, 103-104 Dimensions, 9 Dwork, Deborah, 45 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 32 Eichmann, Adolf, 31-32, 34, 43, 106, 110 Einsatzgruppen, 90, 112 Eliminationist, 44

126 Enlightenment, 6, 7 Ema G, 58, 89 Exodus, 66 Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, 39 Fackenheim, Emil, 57, 60 Fest, Joachim, 32 Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, 16 Frankl, Viktor, 14, 19,21 Fred L., 96 German Reich Railways (DRB), 105 Germany, 7, 48 Glazar, Richard, 39-40 Gletkin, 30, 34, 35, 112 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 7, 14, 43-51,110,113 Gray Zone, 36, 95 Grueber, Heinrich, Dr., 56 Hamburg, 113 Hasidism, 59, S6 Hayes, Peter, 45 Hidden Children Organization, 98 Hilberg, Raul, 10, 32, 43, 105-107 Himmler, Heinrich, 34 Hitler, Adolf, 8-9, 48, 55 Hitler's Willing Executioners, 14,43, 110 Hoess, Rudolf, 34, 112 "In the Penal Colony," 31 Into that Darkness, 37 Isaiah, 55 Jackall, Robert, 114 Jesus Christ, 4, 5, 6 Jews, ix, xi, 2, 4, 7 Job, 28,29, 54, 86 John the Gospeler, 2 JosephK.,31,35, 112

Index Judaism, 6, 53, 83 Kafka, Franz, 30-31,113 Kinot, 66, 73, 82-83 Klossenberger Rebbe, 70 Koestler, Arthur, 30, 113 Korczak, Janus, 98 Krakow, xi, 1,7, 18 Kraiovsky Chlumec, 69 Lang, Berel, 9 Langbein, Hermann, 109 Langer, Lawrence, 9, 31, 76, 100, 113 Lanzmann, Claude, 5, 6, 37 Levi, Primo, xi, 15, 19,21,23, 79,95, 104-105 Lodz, 105 Luther, Martin, 2, 6, 7, 48 Maidanek, 106 Main Car Office (Hauptwagenamt), 106 Man's Search for Meaning, 14 Marcus, Paul, 55, 64 Marrus, Michael, 45, 107 Mauthausen, x, 16 Meilech, 73 Me in Kampf 48 Metz, 89 Middle Ages, 2, 4 Moral Mazes, 114 Munkacz, 58 Nathan O., 23 Neuengamme, 113-114 Nicholls, William, 5, 8 Night, xi, 57 Nuremberg Party Rally, 39 Nuremberg Trials, 38-39 Ohlendorff, Otto, 112 On the Jews and Their Lies, 3

127

Index Onderduinken (diving under), 96 Ordinary Men, 10, 43, 80, 89, 104 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 31,34, 113 Paul, 2 Perpetrators, ix, 23, 30 Peskin, Harvey, 19 Pisar, Samuel, 20 Police Battalion 101,47,50 Pope, 8 Prussian bureaucracy, 34 Ravensbruck, 19 Reformation, 2 ReneL., 109 Riga, 16 Rimal murder, 5 Rosenberg, Alan, 55, 64 Rosenberg, Hans, 34 Rosenfeld, Alvin, x, 15, 31 RSHA (Reich Security Office), 105 Rubashov, 30, 36 Rubenstein, Richard, 30, 32, 34, 50, 54 Salonika, 104 Sam O., 1 Satan, 29, 30, 87 Schindler 's List, x, 17 Schmidt, Matthias, 39 Section IVB4 (Transportation and Jews), 106 Sereny, Gitta, 36, 37, 86 Shame, 89 Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy, 85 Shoah, 5,37,113 Sighet, 60 Social Science History Association, 43 Sonderzuege, 105 Speer, Albert, 31, 32, 37, 112 Spielberg, Steven, x, 13 SS (Schutzstaffel), ix, 5, 21, 55

Stangl Franz, 31, 34, 36, 86, 112 Stein, Andre, 96 Sterba, Edith, 101 Subcarpathian Reuthenia, 59, 73 Suchomel, Franz, 37 Survival in Auschwitz (If This Be a Man), 23, 105 Survivors, xi, 1, 15, 53 Swift, Graham, 13,49 Talmud, 66, 69, 73 The Cunning of History, 35 The Destruction of the European Jews, 106-107 The Drowned and the Saved, xi, 23,36 The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors, 55 The Holocaust in History, 107 The Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, 48 "The Metamorphosis," 31 The Oath, 117 The Politics of Memory, 45 The Survivor, 103 The Trial, 31 The Trial of God, 29, 30, 87 Todorov, Tzvetan, 39,40,103-104 Torah, 66, 69, 82 Treblinka, ix, 36, 86 Ungvar, 60 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, x, 17, 46, 50 Van Pelt, Ian, 45 Vischnitza, 89 Visual History of the Shoah, 13, 15,17 Volove, 60, 73 Waterland, 13,49

128 Weber, Max, 30, 32, 108-109, 112, 114 Weiss, John, 48 Wells, Leon, 85 Westerbork, x Wiesel, Elie, x, xi, xii, 19, 23, 24-26, 29,53,54,79,87,94, 104, 117

Index Wieseltier, Leon, 50 Wilkomirski, Binyamin, 16-17, 19 Young, James, 45 Zionists, 55 Zyklon B, ix

About the Author SIDNEY M. BOLKOSKY is a modern European intellectual historian. He has written on the history of psychoanalysis, German literature, German Jews in the Weimar Republic, and was the principal co-author of Life Unworthy of Life: A Holocaust Curriculum. He is director of the Voice /Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Project at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and is a faculty associate at the institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor. He began interviewing survivors in 1981.

Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of Religion Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican Harry James Cargas, editor Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust Victoria J. Barnett The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust: Radical Theology Encounters the Shoah Stephen R. Haynes and John K. Roth, editors Noble Daughters: Unheralded Women in Western Christianity, 13th to 18th Centuries Marie A. Conn Confessing Christ in a Post-Holocaust World: A Midrashic Experiment Henry F. Knight Learning from History: A Black Christian's Perspective on the Holocaust Hubert Locke History, Religion, and Meaning: American Reflections on the Holocaust and Israel Julius Simon, editor Religious Fundamentalism in Developing Countries Santosh C. Saha and Thomas K. Carr Between Man and God: Issues in Judaic Thought Martin Sicker Through the Name of God: A New Road to the Origin of Judaism and Christianity Joel T. Klein Gods of Our Fathers: The Memory of Egypt in Judaism and Christianity Richard A. Gabriel Human Dignity and the Common Good: The Great Papal Social Encyclicals from Leo XIII to John Paul II Richard W. Rousseau, S.J.