Legends of Our Time (20 page)

I returned from my second trip to Moscow somewhat encouraged. I am convinced that however events turn out, these young Jews will continue to seize every available opportunity to demonstrate their solidarity with the Jewish community. I have no doubt that in the not too distant future they will appear in front of the synagogue not just once a year but twice, then three or four times, and then once a month. Something is taking place among Jewish youth in the Soviet Union, and the time has come for us to realize it. Without outside help, without teachers or books, without leaders and meeting places, even without an appropriate spiritual climate, they have managed to survive, and will manage in the future as well. And they will do so, I should add, on their own. They learn Hebrew in secret, translate a Hebrew song into Russian, pass from hand to hand slips of paper with a few lines of Jewish history written on them. They listen to foreign broadcasts and circulate among themselves news of what is happening in world Jewry and in the Jewish state. This activity is not organized by any single person in any single place. Each one of them takes part and feels personally responsible for its success.

Their salvation, then, will come from within themselves, not from us. They may already have realized how futile it is to rely on us—either on our help or on our sympathy—and so have taken their destiny into their own hands. In past years, guests from abroad played an important
role on the night of Simchat Torah. Each one of us would be surrounded by hundreds of youngsters, and we would tell them what was happening elsewhere in the world. We taught them new songs. This time, however, we were only observers. A year ago, they seemed to be making a conscious effort to explain and clarify their Jewishness, both for themselves and for others. This year, everything had suddenly become clear. Few of the participants were to be seen engaged in discussions among themselves or with the foreign guests. Rather than besiege us with questions, they appeared content with what they themselves knew. They didn’t need us any longer. And the next day, when they came in groups to the synagogue, and began to sing and dance, it was without our knowledge. We went home; they continued to dance and shout: “The people Israel lives!” That song will never die.

The trial of Eichmann at Jerusalem may be called historic insofar as it aimed not merely at judging the crimes and moral degradation of a single individual—or even of a system—but at trying to define more clearly a whole epoch of our history. That epoch, up to now, has eluded all human understanding—so inhumanly blind were its drives, so terrible their consequences.

Not one, but two peoples were transformed: the one into the murderers, the other into the silent horde of the murdered. How was it possible? we still ask sixteen years later. How was an Eichmann possible? We ask the question
in anguish—we are in the dark, still. How explain away so total a triumph of beastliness over man, and at the expense of the destruction of a whole people? How, and why? At a certain point in the asking, the why and the how come together, indistinguishably.

Those of us who looked to the trial for an answer to these questions looked in vain. I asked Alfred Kazin one day if he thought the death of six million Jews could have any meaning; and he replied that he hoped not. There can, indeed, be no answer naked enough, or real enough. But the trial should at the very least have shaped the question, should at least have revealed the cry inside the question that will echo through all time. Simply to condemn Eichmann was not enough; not even, in fact, possible. The enormity, call it even the absurdity, of his acts, transcended his person and placed him outside of temporal justice. The laws of living men could not judge him—only the dead could confront him. It was this that often made the trial seem unreal: that the principal characters, Eichmann foremost, appeared actually to be at ease in their respective roles, as if they had come together in the usual kind of judicial proceeding, the ordinary sort of trial where a man is being judged by his peers. Not so: not he, not Eichmann was being tried, but History. The accused Eichmann spoke freely, unafraid. He cited documents and figures, he held back nothing—he was desperately bent on saving his neck. Thus he often succeeded in giving a false emphasis to the proceedings. Yet we all know that it was not Eichmann’s neck that was really at stake. The case of Eichmann—symbol as well as individual—had to be judged in the domain of psychiatry and metaphysics, and not only by the processes of law.

It was precisely this kind of larger scope that the trial never achieved, as critics of the proceedings have pointed out. The beam of light that it threw did not encompass enough and therefore failed to uncover all the dark horizons. And if the focus of the trial was too narrow, the
reason was that the proceedings got stuck inside the rules of the legal game. The accused should have constituted the point of departure—he was, instead, the end in sight. So the equation was necessarily falsified: if, before the law, the Eichmanns are guilty, the others, therefore, are innocent. But the truth leads to a different conclusion: the others are guilty, too.

All of us, I believe, in varying degrees must take responsibility for what happened in Europe—Curzio Malaparte and even Karl Jaspers have pointed this out. We belong to a generation at once lost and guilty, and our collective conscience lies under a weight of humiliation. It is too easy to put the whole brunt on a single Eichmann: to do so is to evade coming face to face with the problem. No one ever doubted Eichmann’s guilt; everyone was convinced of it from the start, and no trial was needed for proof. If the trial was important—and I for one believe it was—it was because by reviving the past it was able to demonstrate how a crime could spill over and outward, and splash its guilt onto those who thought themselves to be standing at a safe distance. If the grandiose proceedings had failed to teach this lesson, they would have been not useless, but incomplete.

Future historians will find plenty of gaps in the Eichmann trial: the research will have to go on. Contrary to what we had every right to expect, the brief of particulars kept within the narrow concerns of the accused, of him who was actually standing trial. The role played in the annihilation program by all humanity—Nazified or otherwise—was brought up only in passing.

Yet, we all know that the Germans could never have succeeded in solving the Jewish Question with such speed and efficiency if it had not been for the help and tacit consent of the Ukrainians, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians. The Slovaks paid for every person the Germans
took out of their country; the Hungarians put pressure on Eichmann—who was by no means lacking in enthusiasm himself—to speed up the transports; the Letts and Ukrainians in their cruelty surpassed the Germans themselves; and as for the Poles, it was not by accident that the worst concentration camps were set up in Poland, worse than anywhere else.

But it is a well-established fact that wherever the local population was opposed to the deportation of their Jewish fellow citizens, the “yield” was poor—unsatisfactory to the Nazis. Eichmann himself emphasized this point in the confessions he made to the journalist Wilhelm Sassen, at Buenos Aires. In Denmark, almost the total Jewish population was saved. And because the Nazis could not get wide support for their anti-Jewish measures from the people of France, Belgium, or Holland, Eichmann’s henchmen did not do very well in those countries either—to the bitter disgust of the authorities at Berlin, it is known. Only where the indigenous populations were themselves eager to become
Judenrein
did the cattle trains with their suffocating human cargo roll swiftly into the night. This very important fact was hardly touched on at the Jerusalem trial.

Nor did the indictment at Jerusalem dwell much on the failure of the whole outside world, which looked on in a kind of paralysis and passively allowed whatever was being done to be done. The number—six million Jews murdered—could never have been reached if the voices of Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Pope had been more distinctly heard. If the Germans took the precautions they did to cover up their bloody deeds, it was because they were not indifferent to world opinion. In the confessions at Buenos Aires which I cited above, Eichmann notes—with amusement—that even if, through Joel Brand, he had managed to put up a million Jews for sale, there was not a single country which would have bought them. The indifference of our civilized world allowed the Germans
a free hand: go ahead, do what seems best to you with your Jews, we see nothing.

By 1942, Washington, London, and, yes, Jerusalem, too, were aware of what was going on, and Hitler and Goebbels on their side were expecting an avalanche of angry protestations. When none came, they understood: they had been given a free hand by the Western powers.

In the Jerusalem courtroom, correspondence between Chaim Weizmann and the British Foreign Office was offered in evidence: it spoke of a simple, touching favor that Weizmann had asked for: would His Majesty’s government give the order to the Royal Air Force to bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz? The answer was no. It is known that a similar request was addressed to President Roosevelt by one of the American Jewish leaders who had an entrée to the White House. As we also know, Roosevelt did nothing about it.

Is it not strange—let us use only that word—that the civilized world waited until it was too late before expressing its moral indignation, waited until there were scarcely any Jews left to be saved?

And finally, in order to keep inviolate the historical truth, the prosecutor should have removed the last taboo: to reveal the sorry but nonetheless ineluctable fact that the Jews themselves failed to do everything they should have done: they ought to have done more, they could have done better. The American Jewish community never made adequate use of its political and financial powers; certainly it did not move heaven and earth, as it should have. We know the reasons and the justifications: they are not good enough. There can be no justification, nor any explanation for passivity when an effort had to be made to save five to ten thousand Jews from murder each day. Just how many meetings were there at Madison Square Garden, and how many demonstrations in front of
the White House? To think of how few makes one’s blood run cold.

In Palestine, the situation was hardly different. In Palestine, heart and conscience of the Jewish people, the means had not yet been found as late as the end of 1944 to give warning, or help if necessary, to the dense centers of Europe’s Jewish populations, over which death already hovered. By the time the few parachutists had landed in Budapest (with what results we learned from the Kastner trial) there was nothing they could do: half of Europe had been emptied of Jews. Why had agents not been sent over from Palestine sooner, with or without parachutists’ uniforms? Yes, we know that there was the war in Palestine, but the young men of Palmach would gladly have volunteered to go. Ten, maybe only five, out of a hundred volunteers might have reached their destination in Europe; even those ten or five could have organized resistance, escape, rescues.

One of the war’s most unforgivable incidents occurred when the Hungarian Jews from Transylvania were deported to Auschwitz. Their mass deportation took place in May–June of 1944, just a few days before the landing at Normandy. Arriving at the Auschwitz station, they still had no idea of what lay in wait for them; they were ignorant of the very name of the place, they had not heard of the horrors it concealed from them. Had they known, they could have made a dash for it, been saved. Not all, maybe, but the great majority. Mountains surrounded the area, and the Jews might have fled into these mountains and hidden out for a while. The Red Army had advanced to within eighteen to twenty miles from Auschwitz, and at night the rumbling of their guns could be distinctly heard. It was only a matter of a few days before the liberators would appear. But these pious Jews of Transylvania were told that they had nothing to fear, that they were only being transferred further inland—were told
and believed, for there was no one to tell them anything else.

This took place, I repeat, in the spring of 1944, by the time every child in Brooklyn, in Whitechapel, and in Tel Aviv knew that Treblinka and Birkenau were something other than the names of provincial little railway stations.

And yet to Joel Brand’s urgent solicitation for an interview so that he might make known his doubly tragic mission, Chaim Weizmann replied, through his secretary, that he was at the moment too busy to see Brand, that he would be able to receive him in a couple of weeks. Brand had made it clear, in his letter to Weizmann, that every hour counted; every passing day meant the lives of at least ten thousand Jews. How did Brand not go stark raving mad? That in itself remains, for me, one of the great enigmas—the enigma of man’s will to survive his damnation.

The terrible fact is that Weizmann’s response reflected an attitude widespread among the Jews of Palestine. An attitude, I dare to say, of an inconceivable detachment. People in Palestine behaved as if what was happening
over there
did not concern them too much. In his memoirs, Yitzchak Grunebaum, who was at one time head of a Rescue Commission, tells how the question came up again and again among his colleagues of whether they had the right, in order to try to save European Jews, to use money earmarked for the building up of Palestine. Grunebaum himself thought absolutely not: first came the Land of Israel, then the Diaspora. The Yishuv’s houses, factories, schools, must take priority.

One afternoon during the trial of Eichmann, a young Israeli poet, Haim Gouri, left the courthouse on an impulse. He went to the archives to look through the old Tel Aviv newspapers of 1943-1944. He came back shocked. “I don’t understand,” he said to me. “If you knew the things that were bothering us here, while
that
was going on in Europe.… Front page headlines: Municipal elections at
Hedera—or some other place.… And stuck away in a corner of an inside page, an item of a couple of lines: The Germans have begun the extermination of the Jews in the Ghetto of Lublin, or Lodz.…”