Legends of Our Time (21 page)

It was of course not the people’s fault, but the fault of their leaders who evinced a surprising lack of initiative, of political maturity, and of courage. Nahum Goldmann acknowledged as much not long ago during a meeting in Geneva of the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress. The major Jewish organizations seemed incapable of surmounting their internal bickerings in order to achieve unity of action. The Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People during the entire time it existed was boycotted by U.S. Jewish leaders. But if these leaders had their good reasons for not wishing to collaborate with this one or that one on the outside—and I daresay they did have their good reasons—why didn’t they set up their own Committee of Rescue, one which could represent all the organizations? This they did not do.

Therefore, it seems to me, for the trial to have been conducted on its right moral plane—the plane of absolute truth—the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner (or Ben Gurion himself as witness), should have bowed his head and cried out in a voice loud enough to be heard by three generations: Before judging others, let us look into our own errors, our own weaknesses. We never attempted the impossible—we never even exhausted the possible.

It might be said that with the advent of the Nazi regime in Germany, humanity became witness to what Martin Buber would call an eclipse of God. As if from a mighty curse, strong men and weak men, cowards and those who had been wont to see clearly, were to find themselves guilty in an association with Evil, if from no other cause than that they were living inside the same moment in history. All actions became sullied. Generous spirits fell asleep, distinguished sensibilities were dulled, powerful voices were silenced. The general apathy created
the climate in which the criminals on all sides could proceed quietly and efficiently, without disturbance of any kind, and without affected shame.

When the German surrender came, the civilized world uttered a great cry of horror but still shrank from coming to any closer grips with the problem. It wasn’t I: this was the popular refrain, and especially in what had been the Third Reich. Elsewhere, people were content to shed a tear, and declare, “We had nothing to do with it.”

To be sure, Karl Jaspers set himself the task of investigating the “German guilt,” but with the specific intention of thereby demonstrating the universal guilt. As a result, his investigation succeeded in allaying many fears in occupied Germany, in reassuring many uneasy minds. Did this not show, on the part of the German philosopher, a flagrant lack of humility? The non-Nazi world had to be allotted its share of the guilt—but this should have been the task and the duty of the intellectuals of New York or of Stockholm. The world, indeed, had more than a few lessons to learn—but not from a German professor.

In Western Europe, the reaction was to be found mainly in works of literature. Sartre, Camus, Gabriel Marcel, going to Malraux for their theme, stressed action and commitment: everything which happens around us, they proclaimed, involves us directly and necessarily. Yet, in these writings, the question was still not probed deeply enough. The hero of the modern novel, absorbed in expressing his protest, overlooks the nuances. A man was good or bad, a resister or a collaborator, or indifferent. The lines were drawn, the camps strictly defined. Whoever had blown up a train could sleep the sleep of the just, or of the proud, or of the happy. The others were, in this degree or that, vile,
salaud
. The sense of guilt played very little part in the determination of the European youth to build a new future out of the ruins around them. The arts—with the exception of painting—seemed to
have hardly any interior connection with the terrible events which should have furnished their inspiration. No new philosophy was engendered, nor any new religion: the earth had trembled and men had stayed the same.

It is reported that André Gide once told an anti-Semitic story. And when one of his disciples, blushing, reproached him: “You, too, Master?”—Gide started to cry. “I did not know that I was,” he said. That was before the war. Afterward, Gide did not cry. He had given up being witty at the expense of the Jews, so he no longer needed to feel guilty.

It is by a strange irony of fate that the only ones who were, who still are, fully conscious of their share of responsibility for the dead are those who were saved, the ghosts who returned from the dead. They do not feel this through any concept of original sin; they are Jews, they do not believe in original sin. The idea that rules them is more immediate, more agonizing, a part of their very being.

Why did you not revolt? Why did you not resist? You were a thousand against ten, against one. Why did you let yourselves, like cattle, be led to the slaughter?

Well-known psychiatrists have attempted to give some explanation in their books dealing with the psychology of the concentration camp. The mystery of the victim’s acceptance occupies them as much as the question of the executioner’s cruelty. But to attribute that acceptance—as they do—to the disintegration of the personality, or to the rising up of the “death wish,” or to something in Jewish tradition, can only be a partial explanation. The metaphysical
why
is still lacking. Nor is any account taken of the kind of guilt which had been implanted in the prisoners.

The feeling of guilt was, to begin with, essentially a religious feeling. If I am here, it is because God is punishing
me; I have sinned, and I am expiating my sins. I have deserved this punishment that I am suffering. The revolt against God comes later—it is the final stage. First, the prisoner sacrifices his own freedom for God’s. He prefers to believe himself guilty rather than think that his God is the God of Job, for whom man is a mere example—a means of demonstrating a thesis in a verbal duel with Satan.

As each passing day took him further and further away from his freedom, the prisoner’s sense of guilt sharpened, pressed closer on his conscience. He was, in fact, only following a line of reaction which had been drawn for him by his jailers who, in the ghettos and in the camps, had known precisely—shrewdly—how to push to its extreme limit the emotion of shame and humiliation which he who is still alive normally experiences toward the dead.

I am alive, therefore I am guilty. If I am still here, it is because a friend, a comrade, a stranger, died in my place. Within a closed world, this certitude has a destructive power whose effects are easy to imagine. If to live means to accept or engender injustice, to die quickly becomes a promise and a deliverance.

The system of
Lebensschein
in the ghettos and of
Selekzion
in the camps not only periodically decimated the populations, but also worked on each prisoner to say to himself: “That could have been me, I am the cause, perhaps the condition, of someone else’s death.”

In this way the
Lebensschein
came to stand for a moral torture … a prison without exits. One of the witnesses at the trial was a man who had been a doctor in Vilna, and his testimony was terribly moving. Recently married, he had succeeded in obtaining a “living permit” and was working in a German factory. He was told he could save one close relative, and he went to his mother to ask her: “What shall I do? Whom shall I save? You—or my wife?” A man forced to make such a choice, to become a concrete
instrument of destiny, thereafter lives in a suffocating circle of hell; and whenever his thoughts turn to himself, it is in anger and in disgust. If André Schwarz-Bart’s hero, Ernie Levy, finally decided to take the train for Auschwitz, it was neither out of love, nor out of pity, but from the conviction that humanity had come to such a pass of evil that no one could continue to live who wished to remain just.

Reduced to a mere number, the man in the concentration camp at the same time lost his identity and his individual destiny. He came to realize that his presence in the camp was due solely to the fact that he was part of a forgotten and condemned collectivity. It is not written: I shall live or die, but:
someone
—today—will vanish, or will continue to suffer; and from the point of view of the collective, it makes no difference whether that someone is I or another. Only the number, only the quota counts. Thus, the one who had been spared, above all during the selections, could not repress his first spontaneous reflex of joy. A moment, a week, or an eternity later, this joy weighted with fear and anxiety will turn into guilt.
I am happy to have escaped death
becomes equivalent to admitting:
I am glad that someone else went in my place
. It was in order not to think about this that the prisoners so very quickly managed to forget their comrades or their relatives: those who had been selected. They forgot them quickly—trying to shut their eyes to the reproachful glances which still floated in the air around them.

Why did the Jews in the camps not choose a death with honor, knife in hand and hate on their lips? It is understandable that all of us should wonder why. Putting aside the technical and psychological reasons which made any attempt at revolt impossible (the Jews knew that they had been sacrificed, forgotten, crossed off by humanity), to answer we must consider the moral aspects
of the question. The Jews, conscious of the curse weighing them down, came to believe that they were neither worthy nor capable of an act of honor. To die struggling would have meant a betrayal of those who had gone to their death submissive and silent. The only way was to follow in their footsteps, die their kind of death—only then could the living make their peace with those who had already gone.

There comes to mind another case, also presented before the court at Jerusalem: the case of the woman who, naked and wounded, had managed to escape from the ditch, the mass grave in which all the Jews of her town were mowed down by German machine-guns. That woman returned to the ditch after a little while to rejoin the phantasmagoric community of corpses. Miraculously saved, she still could not accept a life which in her eyes had become impure.

It is not known yet what the psychiatrists uncovered who examined Adolf Eichmann at great length, before and after his trial. Surely Eichmann’s victims—those who are alive, that is—ought to be examined. Only, these ghosts maintain against us an oppressive silence which they brought back with them from over there. They refuse to open up. One thing that is not known is that they are afraid of their own voices. Their tragedy is the tragedy of Job before his submission: they believe themselves to be guilty, though they are not. Only a Great Judge would have it in his power to rid them of this burden. But in their eyes no one possesses either such authority or such power: no one, either human or divine.

Therefore they prefer, in this condemned world, not to hurl their defiance at men and their anger into the face of history, but to keep silent, to pursue the monologue which only the dead deserve to hear. Guilt was not invented at Auschwitz, it was disfigured there.

I was not quite fifteen when, for the first time, completely fascinated, I was present at a strange discussion about dignity and death and the possible relationship between the two.

People who were dead and did not know it yet were discussing the necessity, rather than the possibility, of meeting death with dignity.

The reality of certain words escaped me and the weight of that reality as well. The people around me were talking and I did not understand.

Now, I am more than twenty years older, and all paths
leading to the cemetery are known to me. The discussion still goes on. Only the participants have changed. Those of twenty years ago have died and they know it now. As for me, I understand even less than before.

I had just stepped off into unreality. It must have been about midnight. Later, I learned that executioners are usually romantic types who like perfect productions: they find in darkness a stage setting and in night an ally.

Somewhere a dog began to howl, another echoed him, then a third. We were, it seemed, in the kingdom of dogs. One of the women went mad and let out a cry that no longer resembled anything human; it was more like barking; no doubt she wanted to become a dog herself. A pistol shot put an end to her hallucination; silence fell over us again. In the distance, red and yellow billows of fire, spewed out by immense smoke-stacks, rose toward the moonless sky, as if to set it aflame. A quarter of an hour before, or less, our train had stopped at a small suburban station. Standing at the grates, people read the name aloud:
Auschwitz
.

Someone asked: “We’ve arrived?”

Another answered: “I think so.”

“Auschwitz, you know it?”

“No. Not at all.”

The name evoked no memory, linked itself to no anguish. Ignorant in matters of geography, we supposed it was a small peaceful spot somewhere in Silesia. We did not yet know it had already made history with its populace of several million dead Jews. We learned it one minute later, when the train doors opened into an ear-splitting din and when an army of inmates began to shout: “Last stop! Everybody off!”

Like conscientious tour guides, they described the surprises in store for us: “You’re acquainted with Auschwitz? You’re not? Too bad, you’ll get to know it, it won’t be long before you know it.”

They sneered: “Auschwitz, you don’t know Auschwitz?
Really not? Too bad. Someone is waiting for you here. Who? Why, death, of course. Death is waiting for you. It waits only for you. Look and you will see.”

And they pointed to the fire in the distance.

Later, many years later, I asked one of my friends: “What were your first impressions of Auschwitz?”

Somber, he answered me: “I found it a spectacle of terrifying beauty.”

I found it neither beautiful nor terrifying. I was young and I simply refused to believe my eyes and ears. I thought: our guides are mocking us in order to scare us. It amuses them. We are living in the twentieth century, after all; Jews are not burned anymore. The civilized world would not allow it. My father walked alongside me, on my left, his head bowed. I asked him: “The Middle Ages are behind us, aren’t they, Father, far behind us?”