Legends of Our Time (23 page)

I still do not understand why I did not throw myself on the Kapo who was beating my father before my very eyes. In Galicia, Jews dug their own graves and lined up, without any trace of panic, at the edge of the trench to await the machine-gun barrage. I do not understand their calm. And that woman, that mother, in the bunker somewhere in Poland, I do not understand her either; her companions smothered her child for fear its cries might betray their presence; that woman, that mother, having lived this scene of biblical intensity, did not go mad. I do not understand her: why, and by what right, and in the name of what, did she not go mad?

I do not know why, but I forbid us to ask her the question. The world kept silent while the Jews were being massacred, while they were being reduced to the state of objects good for the fire; let the world at least have the decency to keep silent now as well. Its questions come a bit late; they should have been addressed to the executioner. Do they trouble us? Do they keep us from sleeping in peace? So much the better. We want to know, to understand, so we can turn the page: is that not true? So we can say to ourselves: the matter is closed and everything is back in order. Do not wait for the dead to come to our rescue. Their silence will survive them.

We have questions? Very good. We do not want to put them to the executioner—who lives in happiness if not in glory at home in Germany—well then, pass them on to those who claim they never participated in the game, to those who became accomplices through their passivity. Their “ignorance” of the facts hardly excuses them, it was willful.

In London and in Washington, in Basel and in Stockholm, high officials had up-to-date information about every transport carrying its human cargo to the realm of ashes, to the kingdom of mist. In 1942-1943, they already possessed photographs documenting the reports; all were declared “confidential” and their publication prohibited.

Not many voices were raised to warn the executioner that the day of punishment is at hand; not many voices were raised to effectively console the victims: that there will be punishment and that the reign of night is only temporary.

Perhaps Eichmann was a small man after all. Hitler’s Germany was full of small men like him, all carefully seeing to it that the extermination machine functioned well and efficiently. But, large and small, all were sure that in one regard, that of Nazi policy regarding Jews, they would have nothing to account for the day after their defeat: the fate of the Jews interested no one. Someday they would have to give back the occupied territories and eventually pay the victors for war damages, that is only normal. But the Jewish question would not weigh on them. The Allies could not have cared less about what the SS did with its Jews. In that area, the Eichmanns could act with impunity. It is only in this way one can understand how Heinrich Himmler, Grand Master of the death camps, could, toward the end of the war, have conceived the possibility of becoming the best negotiator for a separate peace with the western Allies; the fact that his successful
direction of the annihilation of whole Jewish populations might disqualify him never even crossed his mind. And when, with feigned irony, Eichmann declared that no country was interested in saving Jews, he was telling the truth. Eichmann may have lied about his own role, but he did not lie about that of the Allies or of the neutral camp.

In fact, the Germans, known more for maniacal prudence rather than impulsiveness, developed their anti-Jewish policy step by step, gradually, stopping after each measure to catch their breath, after each move, to watch the reactions. There was always a respite between the different stages, between the Nuremberg laws and the
Kristallnacht
, between expropriation and deportation, between the ghettos and liquidation. After each infamy, the Germans expected a storm of outrage from the free world; they quickly became aware of their error: they were allowed to proceed. Of course, here and there, there were a few speeches, a few editorials, all indignant, but things stopped there. So, in Berlin, they knew what that meant. They said to themselves: since we have been given the green light, we can go on. Moreover, they were convinced—in all sincerity—that someday other peoples would be grateful to them for having done the job for them. Almost all the important Nazis expressed this idea in their writings; it also appeared in their speeches. They were killing the Jews for the good of the world, not only for the good of Germany. After all, the Germans should not be accused of thinking only of themselves.

I maintain that by forceful action, only once, by taking a stand without ambiguities, the free world would have been able to force the Germans to draw back, or at least to plan on a smaller scale. It is conceivable that for Berlin the absence of such action could only have meant a tacit agreement, unacknowledged, on the part of the Allied powers. One need only glance through the newspapers of the period to become disgusted with the human adventure
on this earth: the phenomenon of the concentration camps, despite its horror and its overwhelming ramifications, took up less space, on the whole, than did ordinary traffic accidents.

It would be a mistake to believe the inmates of the camps were ignorant of this. Knowing themselves abandoned, excluded, rejected by the rest of humanity, their walk to death, as haughty as it was submissive, became an act of lucidity, of protest, and not of acceptance and weakness.

Yes: the transport of which I was a part did not rebel on the night of our arrival. What must be added is that the young men spoke also of the necessity of alerting the outside world: naïve, they still believed the Germans were doing their work secretly, like thieves, that the Allies knew nothing about it, for if they knew, the massacre would stop immediately. “We will fight,” they said. “We will break this silence and the world will know that Auschwitz is a reality.” I shall never forget the old man who, in a calm voice, terribly calm, answered them: “You are young and brave, my children; you still have a lot to learn. The world knows, no need to inform it. It knew before you did, but it doesn’t care, it won’t lose a minute thinking about our fate. Your revolt will have no bearing, no echo.” The old man spoke without bitterness; he stated the facts. He was Polish and two years before had seen his family slaughtered: I do not know how he managed to escape and to slip across two frontiers before arriving among us, a refugee. “Save your strength for later,” he told our young men. “Don’t waste it.” But they were persistent. “Even if you are right,” they rejoined, “even if what you say is true, that doesn’t change the situation. Let us prove our courage and our dignity, let us show these murderers and the world that Jews know how to die like free men, not like hunched-up invalids.” “As a lesson, I like that,” the old man’s voice reached me. “But they don’t deserve it.”

Then we all held our heads up high and murmuring the words of the
Kaddish
we marched ahead, almost like conquerors, toward the gates of death where the elegant physician Dr. Josef Mengele—white gloves, monocle, and the rest—accomplished the sacred ritual of selection, of separating those who would live from those who would die.

The old man had seen things as they were. Had the Jews been able to think they had allies outside, men who did not look the other way, perhaps they might have acted differently. But the only people interested in the Jews were the Germans. The others preferred not to look, not to hear, not to know. The solitude of the Jews, caught in the clutches of the beast, has no precedent in history. It was total. Death guarded all the exits.

It was worse than the Middle Ages. Then, driven from Spain, the Jews were welcomed in Holland. Persecuted in one country, they were invited to another, given time to take heart again. But during the Hitler era the conspiracy against them seemed universal. The English closed off the gates of Palestine, the Swiss accepted only the rich—and later the children—while the poor and the adult, their right to life denied, were driven back into the darkness. “Even if I had been able to sell a million Jews, who would have bought them?” asked Eichmann, not without sarcasm, alluding to the Hungarian episode. Here again he was telling the truth. “What do you want us to do with a million Jews?” echoed the honorable Lord Moyne, British ambassador to Cairo. It is as though every country—and not only Germany—had decided to see the Jew as a kind of subhuman species, an unnecessary being, not like others; his disappearance did not count, did not weigh on the conscience. He was a being to whom the concept of human brotherhood did not apply, a being whose death did not diminish us, a being with whom one did not identify. One could therefore do with him what one would, without violating the laws of the spirit; one could take
away his freedom and joy without betraying the ideal of man. I often wonder what the world’s reaction would have been had the Nazi machine ground up and burned day after day, not twenty thousand Jews, but twenty thousand Christians. It is better not to think about that too much.

If I dwell so long on the culpability of the world, it is not to lessen that of the Germans, nor to “explain” the behavior of their victims. We tend to forget.

The fact, for example, that in the spring of 1944 we, in Transylvania, knew nothing about what was happening in Germany is proof of the world’s guilt. We listened to the short-wave radio, from London and Moscow: not a single broadcast warned us not to leave with the transports, not one disclosed the existence, not even the name of Auschwitz. In 1943, when she read three lines in a Hungarian newspaper concerning the Warsaw Ghetto up-rising, my mother remarked: “But why did they do it? Why didn’t they wait
peacefully
for the end of hostilities?” Had we known what was happening there, we might have been able to flee, to hide: the Russian front was only thirty kilometers away. But we were kept in the dark.

At the risk of offending, it must be emphasized that the victims suffered more, and more profoundly, from the indifference of the onlookers than from the brutality of the executioner. The cruelty of the enemy would have been incapable of breaking the prisoner; it was the silence of those he believed to be his friends—cruelty more cowardly, more subtle—which broke his heart.

There was no longer anyone on whom to count: even in the camps this became evident.
“From now on we shall live in the wilderness, in the void: blotted out of history.”
It was this conviction which poisoned the desire to live. If this is the world we were born into, why cling to it? If this is the human society we come from—and are now abandoned by—why seek to return?

At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge—many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

Let no one misinterpret. I speak without hatred, without bitterness. If at times I do not succeed in containing my anger, it is because I find it shocking if not indecent that one must plead to protect the dead. For that is the issue: they are being dug up in order to be pilloried. The questions asked of them are only reproaches. They are being blamed, these corpses, for having acted as they did: they should have played their roles differently, if only to reassure the living who might thus go on believing in the nobility of man. We do not like those men and women for whom the sky became a common grave. We speak of them without pity, without compassion, without love. We juggle their thousand ways of dying as if performing intellectual acrobatics: our heart is not in it. More than that: we despise them. For the sake of convenience, and also to satisfy our mania to classify and define everything, we make some distinctions: between the Germans and the
Judenrat
, between the Kapos and the ghetto police, between the nameless victim and the victim who obtained a reprieve for a week, for a month. We judge them and we hand out certificates for good or bad conduct. We detest some more than others: we are on the other side of the wall, and we know exactly the degree of guilt of each of them. On the whole, they inspire our disgust rather than our anger.

That is what I reproach us for: our boundless arrogance in thinking we know everything. And that we have the right to pass judgment on an event which should, on the contrary, serve as proof that we are poor, and that our dreams are barren—when they are not bloody.

I plead for the dead and I do not say they are innocent; that is neither my intention nor aim. I say simply we have no right to judge them; to confer innocence upon them is already to judge them. I saw them die and if I feel the need to speak of guilt, it is always of my own that I speak. I saw them go away and I remained behind. Often I do not forgive myself for that.

Of course, in the camps I saw men conquered, weak, cruel. I do not hesitate to admit I hated them, they frightened me; for me, they represented a danger greater than the Germans. Yes, I have known sadistic Kapos; yes, I have seen Jews, a savage gleam burning in their eyes, whipping their own brothers. But, though they played the executioner’s game, they died as victims. When I think about it, I am still astonished that so few souls were lost, so few hearts poisoned, in that kingdom of the night, where one breathed only hate, contempt, and self-disgust. What would have become of me had I stayed in the camps longer, five years, or seven, or twelve? I have been trying to answer that question for more than twenty years and at times, after a sleepless night, I am afraid of the answer. But many people are not afraid. These questions, which are discussed as one might discuss a theorem or a scientific problem, do not frighten us. For that, too, I reproach us.

Since the end of the nightmare I search the past, whose prisoner I shall no doubt forever remain. I am afraid, but I still pursue my quest. The further I go, the less I understand. Perhaps there is nothing to understand.

On the other hand, the further I go, the more I learn of the scope of the betrayal by the world of the living against the world of the dead. I take my head in my hands and I think: it is insanity, that is the explanation, the only conceivable one. When so great a number of men carry their indifference to such an extreme, it becomes sickness, it resembles madness.