Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (45 page)

On the Left, the dominant current of interpretation of the Holocaust can be called the Frankfurt School. The members of the group known by this name, largely German Jews who immigrated to the United States, portrayed the Nazi state as an expression of overgrown modernity. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their influential
Dialectic of Enlightenment
, began (as did Hitler) from the premise that “bourgeois civilization” was about to collapse. They reduced scientific method to practical mastery, failing (as did Hitler) to grasp the reflective and unpredictable character of scientific investigation. Whereas Hitler presented the Jews as the creators of bogus universalisms that served as façades for Jewish mastery, Adorno and Horkheimer opposed all universalisms as façades for mastery in general. The murder of Jews, they claimed, was just one instance of the general intolerance for variety that was inherent in attempts to inform politics with reason. It is hard to overstate the depth and significance of this error. Hitler was not a supporter of the Enlightenment but its enemy. He did not champion science but conflated nature with politics.

On the Right, the dominant explanation of the Holocaust can be called the Vienna School. Followers of the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek claim that the overweening welfare state led to National Socialism, and thus prescribe deregulation and privatization as the cure for political evil. This narrative, though convenient, is historically indefensible. There has never been a democratic state that built a social welfare system and then succumbed to fascism (or communism) as a result. What happened in central Europe was rather the opposite. Hitler came to power during a Great Depression which had spread around the world precisely because governments did not yet know how to intervene in the business cycle. Hayek’s homeland Austria practiced capitalism according to the free-market orthodoxies of the time, with the consequence that the downturn was awful and seemingly endless. The oppression of Austrian Jews began not as the state grew, but as it collapsed in 1938.

The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate. In the particular form of capitalism generated by German policy and experienced by Jews and their rescuers during the Holocaust, every exchange depended upon personal trust, in the sense that the other party in the arrangement could betray and kill. In an extreme version of market utopianism, which Hayek himself opposed, the Vienna School merges with the thought of Ayn Rand. She believed that competition was the meaning of life itself; Hitler said much the same thing. Such reductionism, although temptingly elegant, is fatal. If nothing matters but competition, then it is natural to eliminate people who resist it and institutions that prevent it. For Hitler, those people were Jews and those institutions were states.

As all economists know, markets do not function perfectly at either the macro or the micro level. At the macro level, unregulated capitalism is subject to the extremes of the business cycle. In theory, markets always recover from depression; in practice, the human suffering induced by economic collapse can have profound political consequences, including the end of capitalism itself, before any recovery takes place. At the micro level, firms in theory provide goods that are desired and affordable. In practice, companies seeking profits can generate external costs that they do not themselves remediate. The classical example of such an externality is pollution, which costs its producers nothing but harms other people.

A government can assign a cost to pollution, which internalizes the externality and thus reduces the undesired consequence. It would be simple to internalize the costs of the carbon pollution that causes climate change. It requires a dogma to oppose such an operation, which depends upon markets and in the long run will preserve them, as anticapitalist. On the American secular right, some supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics. Since the science of climate change is clear, some American conservatives and libertarians deny the validity of science itself by presenting its findings as a cover for conniving politicians. This is a merger of science and politics—quite possibly a dangerous one.

Though no American would deny that tanks work in the desert, some Americans do deny that deserts are growing larger. Though no American would deny ballistics, some Americans do deny climate science. Hitler denied that science could solve the basic problem of nutrition, but assumed that technology could win territory. It seemed to follow that waiting for research was pointless and that immediate military action was necessary. In the case of climate change, the denial of science likewise legitimates military action rather than investment in technology. If people do not take responsibility for the climate themselves, they will shift responsibility for the associated calamities to other people. Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible. A vicious circle can begin in which politics collapses into ecological panic.

The popular notion that free markets are natural is also a merger of science and politics. The market is not nature; it depends upon nature. The climate is not a commodity that can be traded but rather a precondition to economic activity as such. The claim of a “right” to destroy the world in the name of profits for a few people reveals an important conceptual problem. Rights mean restraint. Each person is an end in himself or herself; the significance of a person is not exhausted by what someone else wants from him or her. Individuals have the right not to be defined as parts of a planetary conspiracy or a doomed race. They have the right not to have their homelands defined as habitat. They have the right not to have their polities destroyed.

When states are absent, rights—by any definition—are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited, or discarded, but are fruits of long and quiet effort. It is tempting but dangerous to gleefully fragment the state from the Right or knowingly gaze at the shards from the Left. Political thought is neither destruction nor critique, but rather the historically informed imagination of plural structures—a labor of the present that can preserve life and decency in the future. One plurality is between politics and science. A recognition of their distinct purposes makes possible thinking about rights and states; their conflation is a step toward a total ideology such as National Socialism. Another plurality is between order and freedom: each depends upon the other, although each is different from the other. The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny. The claim that freedom is the lack of order must end in anarchy—which is nothing more than tyranny of a special kind. The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, who endured Stalin’s Gulag while his brother was sheltering Jews, wrote that “a man can be human only under human conditions.” The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal. The state is for the recognition, endorsement, and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognized, endorsed, and protected. The state endures to create a sense of durability.

A final plurality thus has to do with time. When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. The defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future. Awareness of history permits recognition of ideological traps and generates skepticism about demands for immediate action because everything has suddenly changed. Confidence in the future can make the world seem like something more than, in Hitler’s words, “the surface area of a precisely measured space.” Time, the fourth dimension, can make the three dimensions of space seem less claustrophobic. Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy. A sense of the future has to be created in the present from what we know of the past, the fourth dimension built out from the three of daily life.

In the case of climate change, we know what the state can do to tame panic and befriend time. We know that it is easier and less costly to draw nourishment from plants than animals. We know that improvements in agricultural productivity continue and that the desalination of seawater is possible. We know that efficiency of energy use is the simplest way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. We know that governments can assign prices to carbon pollution and can pledge reductions of future emissions to one another and review one another’s pledges. We also know that governments can stimulate the development of appropriate energy technologies. Solar and wind energy are ever cheaper. Fusion, advanced fission, tidal stream power, and non-crop-based biofuels offer real hope for a new energy economy. In the long run, we will need techniques to capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. All of this is not only thinkable but attainable.

States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated. The study of the past suggests why this would be a wise course. Time supports thought, thought supports time; structure supports plurality, and plurality, structure. This line of reasoning is less glamorous than waiting for general disaster and dreaming of personal redemption. Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible. No conception of a durable state can compete with visions of totality. No green politics will ever be as exciting as red blood on black earth. But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant. The pluralities of nature and politics, order and freedom, past and future, are not as intoxicating as the totalitarian utopias of the last century. Every unity is beautiful as image but circular as logic and tyrannical as politics. The answer to those who seek totality is not anarchy, which is not totality’s enemy but its handmaiden. The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labor of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity, and survival.

We share Hitler’s planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. If we think that we are victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler’s world.

Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity. That is not enough for its victims. No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past. Perhaps it is true that to save one life is to save the world. But the converse is not true: saving the world does not restore a single lost life.

The family tree of that boy in Vienna, like that of all of the Jewish children born and unborn, has been sheared at the roots: “I the root was once the flower
under these dim tons my bower
comes the shearing of the thread / death saw wailing overhead.” The evil that was done to the Jews—to each Jewish child, woman, and man—cannot be undone. Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future.

That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow.

Wanda J., with the help of others, saved herself and her two sons. One of them grew up in postwar communist Poland to become a historian. He taught in the secret study circles that were known, by reference to a tradition of the nineteenth century, as a Flying University. After martial law was declared in Poland in 1981 he was interned in a camp. A decade after that, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, he agreed to be one of my two doctoral supervisors. In that sense I owe my career as a historian to the people who aided Wanda Grosmanowa-Jedlicka, to Wanda Grosmanowa-Jedlicka herself, and to her younger son Jerzy Jedlicki. In the quarter century in which I have had the good fortune of making the study of eastern Europe a career, I have been instructed by several other people who survived the Holocaust. Among my colleagues are people who owe their lives to rescuers mentioned here, such as Sugihara, and among my students people descended from people saved by others, such as Sheptyts’kyi. It would be absurdly conceited to describe these encounters as a personal debt; I acknowledge them as a source of this book. History goes on, for better and for worse; the pale light of each rescue refracts down the mirrored passages of the generations.

Much of this book was written in Vienna and in the northeast of Poland: two places where some of the most notorious oppression of Jews took place, the discussion of which has produced outstanding histories that have preceded and informed my own. The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna is the special creation of my late friend, the philosopher Krzysztof Michalski. Without his intellectual welcome and without the support of his colleagues there, especially Ivan Krastev and Klaus Nellen, I would not have undertaken this book nor seen it through to completion. I am grateful to IWM fellows for a seminar devoted to this book and to Dessislava Gavrilova, Izabela Kalinowska, and Shalini Randeria for their friendship in Vienna. In the summers I was privileged to have been the guest of Krzysztof Czyżewski and Małgorzata Szporer-Czyżewska and their Borderlands Foundation in Krasnogruda, staying with my family in a house that once belonged to the family of Czesław Miłosz. The Borderlands Foundation does what so many humanists recommend: seek and find ways to understand the other.

Some of the debts go back to the years just before I began this book. Discussions of my book
Bloodlands
, a history of German and Soviet mass killing on the lands where the Holocaust took place, helped me to ask what I hope were some of the right questions about the origins of the Final Solution. The books of Peter Longerich have been significant, in that I am seeking to extend his case for politics to peoples beyond the Germans and lands beyond Germany. Christoph Dieckmann’s study of Lithuania has been exemplary in its unity of theoretical understanding and regional knowledge. On the specific question of the psychic consequences of the appearance and disappearance of state power, I have been influenced for two decades by east European rereadings of Hannah Arendt, in particular that of Jan Tomasz Gross. Several of the lines of thought I pursue here were initiated in his books
Revolution from Abroad
and
Neighbors
. For almost a quarter century, Andrzej Waśkiewicz has challenged me to think more broadly about the category of politics. While I was writing
Bloodlands
I was also helping my late friend and colleague Tony Judt create a book of discussions called
Thinking the Twentieth Century
. Those conversations in New York helped me clarify some of the thinking about the state that figures in this book.

Robert Silvers of
The New York Review of Books
edited and published essays where I worked out certain ideas that feature in the middle chapters. Timothy Garton Ash, one of my doctoral supervisors, discussed structure and conclusions with me. Tina Bennett, now of WME and my agent, befriended me as we began graduate school together at Oxford. She was the first reader of this manuscript and its first editor; her discernment and her enthusiasm were hugely appreciated. Tim Duggan, my editor and publisher at Crown, took up the project with tremendous skill, energy, and devotion. Thomas Gebremedhin handled the manuscript superbly, and I appreciate the attention paid to this work by the staff at Crown. I also thank Detlef Felken of C. H. Beck for conversations between
Bloodlands
and
Black Earth
, Stuart Williams and Jörg Hensgen of Bodley Head for their reading of the full text, and Pierre Nora of Gallimard for his thoughts about tone and conclusion. My friends and colleagues James Berger, Johann Chapoutot, Fabian Drixler, Rick Duke, Susan Ferber, Janos Kovács, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Eric Lohr, Wendy Lower, Istvan Rév, Berel Rodal, Joanne Rudof, Stuart Rachels, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Anton Weiss-Wendt were generous enough to comment upon full drafts. David Brandenberger and Joshua Goodman each commented on a chapter of this book. Andrea Böltke and Andy Morris read the text with exemplary professional care. Jonathan Wyss of Beehive Mapping added the indispensable visual element.

The arguments that appear here are also the fruit of the learning that comes from listening to students. I taught draft chapters to a special seminar at the London School of Economics in 2013–2014, and am grateful to students there as well as to my colleague Arne Westad for wonderful discussions. I learned a good deal from my students in History 987 at Yale University in 2012; a late draft of this manuscript was read by the students of History 683 in 2015. Graduate students at Yale have been my intellectual companions. While I was thinking about this book, Yedida Kanfer finished a doctoral dissertation on religion and society in Łódź, and while I was writing, Jadwiga Biskupska completed one on the German occupation of Warsaw. David Petruccelli has helped me to think about transnational history and Katherine Younger about church and state. Jermaine Lloyd kept me thinking about race as a category of transnational history. Sara Silverstein, whose dissertation bears on the relationship between rights and the state, provided thoughtful comments. I have also learned from Rachel White, whose subject is French Christians and political resistance. Aner Barzilai and Stefan Eich intervened with useful suggestions.

I am grateful to Naomi Lamoreaux, the superb chair of Yale’s history department, as well as to Ian Shapiro and the MacMillan Center and Jim Levinsohn of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Adam Tooze led two discussions of early chapters at Yale. I have been very fortunate to spend my career at an institution so devoted to the humanities in general and to history in particular, and where Jewish, German, and Slavic history are broadly represented in teaching, research, and library collections. I cannot stress enough the importance of the open stacks of the Sterling Library, the support of librarians at Yale, and the special resource that is the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. New Haven has been my home over the years because my old and true friends Daniel Markovits, Sarah Bilston, Stefanie Markovits, and Ben Polak live there.

The arguments have also benefited from public presentation. I was fortunate to have been able to discuss this book at a René Girard Lecture at Stanford University, at a Philippe Roman Lecture at the LSE, at a 1939 Club Lecture at UCLA, and at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, at Sheffield University, the University of Edinburgh, St. Andrew’s University, Birkbeck College London, University College London, the University of Oxford, Cambridge University, City College of New York, Princeton University, Georgetown University, Emory University, the Institute for Social Research at Hamburg, the Sorbonne, the Conrad Festival in Cracow, and at an Arendt Prize seminar at Bremen. Leon Wieseltier had an idea that took me to Ukraine at an important moment.

The arguments here rest upon the broad learning of countless colleagues in history and other disciplines, and in some measure upon my own research. In the early sections on Hitler’s thought I returned to the primary sources, above all Hitler’s own writings and speeches, in order to elucidate certain basic logics as clearly as possible. The intellectual debts that enabled such an attempt are too broad to be recorded, either here or in the Notes, but include my studies with Mary Gluck and Leszek Kołakowski as well as long encounters with Isaiah Berlin and Andrzej Walicki. The sections of chapters
2
and
3
on interwar Polish policy, and the sections of chapters
9
,
10
,
11
, and
12
that discuss individual rescue, rest heavily on archival materials. The documentary evidence of rescue is largely in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish; I have been at pains these last few years to read as much of this material as possible. Generalizations, of course, are quite difficult. I have done my best to make sure that the claims about rescue are based on what Jews themselves said, with a preference for languages they knew at the time, and for dates as close as possible to the events recalled. As with many aspects of the history of the Holocaust, there remain large untapped reserves of primary materials in these east European languages. Jeffrey Burds, Wójtek Rappak, and Zbyszek Stańczyk generously shared archival documents that are cited here. Tess Davidson, Karolina Jesień, Andrew Koss, Julie Leighton, Olga Litvin, and Adam Zadrożny all helped me to find sources. The responsibility for this text is mine.

Although this is not a book about science, I do make certain claims about the relationship between science and politics. Insofar as I have made sense of these connections I owe a debt to practicing scientists, especially my friends Matthew Albert, Olivia Judson, and Carlo Maley, my cousin Steven Snyder, and my brother Philip Snyder. My brother Michael Snyder, a student of Native American literature, has expanded my own thinking about the global character of the history I aspire to recount in this book. Throughout its writing I have been grateful for the love and support of my sisters-in-law Lori Anderson Snyder and Mary Snyder and have thought often of my nieces Cora and Ivy and nephews Benjamin and Thomas. I would not be able to broach the metaphysical questions that bound this history without my parents Estel Eugene Snyder and Christine Hadley Snyder. I think also upon my grandparents and great-grandparents, to whom I owe what understanding I have of living from the land. As I wrote in the hills of Podlasie I thought of the hills of Ohio.

Mira, lily of the valleys. Marci Shore understands much of this subject better than I. She knows languages, sources, shadows that do not flee away. Her translation of
The Black Seasons
demonstrates what can be said about this history in English. Her historical writing on ideas is for me exemplary, and the philosophical questions posed here are ones that she keeps alive in my mind. I thank her for her loving-kindness: to me, and before all and after all to Kalev and Talia.