The Moral Obligation of Holocaust Remembrance

Auschwitz and the New Anti-Semitism
On this day, 75 years ago (January 27^th, 1945), the twin extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau were liberated by the Red Army. The Nazis did not operate any extermination camp within Germany but chose the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Maidanek, Chelmo and Stutthof in Poland for implementing their ‘Final Solution’ that became the Holocaust. In the decades following its liberation, Auschwitz would become the symbol of the Holocaust and a metaphor for the human and civilisational catastrophe of the 20^th century, a word that would stand for the horror of the past and the fear of the future. January 27^th became the International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, is April 20^th-21^st this year).

The 12 years of the Nazis destroyed Europe by destroying the world of European Jewry. Post-war, when the world saw the images out of the extermination camps of Poland—that first shock of the liberating Allied soldiers—the life and liberty of Jews should have been secured in perpetuity. Not at a price of six million but millions more, over the centuries. The meagre population of European Jews should certainly not have had to feel vulnerable ever again. And yet, the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz coincides with real danger that looms large and near. For, the inflection point in the rise of the new anti-Semitism has been crossed.

The anguish of Jean-Claude Juncker, the former President of the European Commission, captured the fear succinctly, albeit with its full range of emotions, when he said around last year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day: “On this day, I am deeply worried. I would never have thought that during my lifetime Jews would be afraid to practise their faith in Europe. It saddens me that nearly 40 per cent of them are considering leaving Europe. Holocaust denial is still alive in Europe. One in three Europeans declares to know ‘just a little’ about the Holocaust and one out of 20 has never heard of it.”

Europe’s remaining Jews find themselves caught between the rise of nationalism and the far-right at one end of the socio-political spectrum and, at the other, a new radical left that appears to have inherited the old left’s anti-Zionism (read anti-Israel stance), mixed it with medieval anti-Semitism and appeasement of Europe’s newest potential vote bank of immigrants, and produced a concoction that increasingly looks like a Himmler & Heydrich legacy. Juncker flagged the nationalists and the far-right. But France’s beleaguered President Emmanuel Macron was bold enough to quickly proclaim what anti-Semitism watchdogs had been arguing for some time—that anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism. If there ever was any distinction between the two, and exploited by Europe’s political left, the time for honouring that distinction was over.

Pablo Iglesias, the pony-tailed, open-collared, ‘young’ leader of Spain’s far-left Podemos (the darling of the global academic left) called Israel “an illegal country” in 2018. He has hosted a talkshow on an Iranian-funded TV channel that aired allegedly anti-Semitic content and he is also on record for claiming: “The Holocaust was a bureaucratic problem.” Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez made Iglesias Spain’s Second Deputy Prime Minister earlier this month. The price for the mainstream Sánchez’s second administration was a coalition that now features a leftist radical as its Number 3 who doesn’t bother any more about keeping his anti-Semitism latent. (Jeremy Corbyn, after all, didn’t get into government.) The Financial Times’ recent ‘Simon Schama on Auschwitz and the new anti-Semitism’, a belated but must-read article, might as well have been directed at Iglesias.

Unlike Corbyn’s antecedents and predilections, Pablo Iglesias is a fresh symptom of Europe’s anti-Semitic problem on the left, as much as the Squad is in America. The far-right and neo-Nazis, of course, have been around for much longer, although they are now riding the nationalist wave. And, unlike Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, the far-right elsewhere has not toned down its anti-Semitism. The Alternative for Germany (AFD) had made an attempt, but without a simultaneous check on its racism and xenophobia in general, that experiment was bound to be stillborn.

Almost daily news reports of violent attacks on Jews, particularly the Orthodox marked by appearance, in cities on either side of the pond, as well as graffiti and desecration, are being met with words and more words, not action. The perpetrators in the street seem to be increasingly emboldened by a verbal ‘legitimisation’ of anti-Semitism to which new categories of elected representatives have been contributing at every opportunity, to the extent of belittling and questioning the facts of the Holocaust. The ‘facts’ of the Holocaust need not be recounted here but two fundamental truths must iterated.

First, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened without the bureaucracy. But it wasn’t a ‘bureaucratic problem’. The ‘bureaucrats’—civil servants, economists, demographers and even geographers—created the blueprint for the Holocaust, mapping the Third Reich, Germany and Europe, compiling and analysing data across the drawing board of the continent. They turned it into a science. This new science became the tool for the Nazi regime to bring about Entjudung, or the systematic removal of Jews from German economy and society which complemented Arisierung, or the Aryanisation of Germany. The removal of Jews from Germany’s economic life along with the transfer of Jewish property and businesses allowed the regime to ‘de-Jew’ German society. Here’s an interesting fact worth remembering—this process of gathering data and analysing them had begun before the Nazis tricked and terrorised their way into power in 1933. At the same time, the data gathered and analysed was not acted upon till Hitler’s Aryanisation began. Thereafter, the work assumed a magnitude and pace of a different order. Thus, the bureaucracy and the regime depended on each other. With Nazi totalitarianism, the bureaucracy found its enabling political environment. Without the bureaucracy, Hitler would have embarked on the annihilation of Europe and its Jewry still, but the barbarism would perhaps have been more a matter of madness and evil, and less of method. After the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, it all led to its inexorable end in the Holocaust. (Of the several scholarly works on the method behind the Holocaust, there’s one book I always recommend reading—Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction by Götz Ally and Susanne Heim, 1991, English translation 2002.)

Second, that ordinary people of the Third Reich, especially in Germany, knew little or nothing about the Holocaust at the time is a myth. The Holocaust wouldn’t have happened without society’s collusion. (For the Holocaust-ignorant today, of the countless tomes of memoirs and accounts, I again make a single recommendation as essential reading—the relatively recent What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany by Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, 2005.)

The Struggle to Understand
The Hungarian-born late Israeli writer Emphraim Kishon had delightful anecdotes on the habit of early (post-1948) Israelis using David Ben Gurion’s name as an exclamation, seemingly suited for both ‘Good grief!’ and ‘Thank heavens!’ In To Jerusalem and Back (1976), Saul Bellow quotes Ben Gurion as quoted by the Austrian-born late British writer Jakob Lind in his The Trip to Jerusalem (1973): “The Jews know hardly anything of a hell that might await them. Their hell is a personal dissatisfaction with themselves if they are mediocre.”

Bellow expands the idea and turns Ben Gurion’s irritation on its head: ‘Jews do, it is well known, make inordinate demands upon themselves and upon one another. Upon the world, too. I occasionally wonder whether that is why the world is so uncomfortable with them.’ And adds: ‘At times I suspect that the world would be glad to see the last of its Christianity, and that it is the persistency of the Jews that prevents it. I say this remembering that Jacques Maritain once characterized European anti-Semitism of the twentieth century as an attempt to get rid of the moral burden of Christianity.’

The next idea that Bellow touches upon, in the words of a ‘Harvard professor’, is the irony of Jews facilitating a second Holocaust by gathering themselves in a single, tiny country. Philip Roth, in his Operation Shylock (1993) would turn this very idea into a savage and sinister post-modern parody by means of a doppelgänger of the protagonist Philip Roth who wants to take the Jews out of Israel and back to Europe where, say, Poland would open its arms and cry with tears of joy “Our Jews are back!”

A recurrent theme in writers who survived the Holocaust is how easy it was for the Nazis to mislead Europe’s Jews. In Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, a Jew who registers as a Jew at the Badenheim Sanitation Department asks of another “What do they want of us?” The reply is: “It’s hard to understand.” Appelfeld, who passed away in 2018, had escaped from a forced labour camp in Transnistria and stayed hidden for three years. He never used the Holocaust as a literary subject, preferring to deal with it metaphorically. In 1988, he told Roth: “…the Jewish experience in the Second World War was not “historical”. We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day” (Shop Talk, 2001).

The paradox of Nazi Germany was the fact that Appelfeld’s archaic mythical forces and dark subconscious were very tangible—concretised in the regime and the Holocaust, as well as the devastation of a continent. But, here’s a thought. What would it have meant for the world of letters if Bruno Schulz had not been shot dead outside the Drohobycz Ghetto in November 1942? If Irène Némirovsky hadn’t perished in Auschwitz in August the same year? Or, conversely, if Ivan Klíma, then a child, had to move on from the Terezin concentration camp and not come back home (only to confront another totalitarianism soon but that’s another story)? We don’t know and the case of Primo Levi shows that it might not have helped knowing either.

Levi’s memoir If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, 1947 and 1958), translated, rather reductively, in the US as Survival in Auschwitz, is a testament to the struggle for survival in the midst of the Holocaust that asks if, as a man is stripped of that identity, he can still be called human. Levi was a Holocaust survivor (he was sent to Monowitz, a subcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau). If This Is a Man/ Survival in Auschwitz is an unsentimental, almost unimpassioned, calm and lucid account—an objectivity that, ironically, sometimes comes only from the thick of things. Levi and Appelfeld are first-rate illustrations of the challenge faced by Holocaust survivors, especially if they were writers, to write about what they escaped from which millions of others didn’t. But did one escape? Levi, certainly did not, as his suicide in 1987 appeared to confirm.

When Bernard Malamud said “All men are Jews except they don’t know it,” he was hinting at a link of fate and suffering, beyond the Jewish Schicksalsgemeinschaft, that connected one human being to another. On the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and against the backdrop of the rise of a new anti-Semitism, that overused and much abused Malamud line should be revisited.

Postscript: A Visit to Yad Vashem
To be fair, Auschwitz (an eastern concentration camp but a western extermination camp) doesn’t do complete justice to the memory of the Holocaust since many more people died in the eastern death camps. However, hierarchies among death camps are not a matter to settle in a public, collective remembrance of the Holocaust but in the preservation of its million memories.

Peter Matthiessen’s In Paradise, published three days after his death in April 2014, is one of the best ‘recent’ works of fiction with the Holocaust as theme that I’ve read. In it, about a hundred people of several nationalities and ethnicities gather at a former death camp, living in the Nazi quarters and meditating on the ‘selection platform’. They pray and bear witness. They try to understand.

Having spent a lot of my reading hours on the Holocaust for most of my adult life, I don’t think I can ever set foot in Auschwitz, or be a part of any death camp tour. But I did visit Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, years ago. I had walked in, with full knowledge and in complete control. These were images and artefacts from humanity’s darkest hour. Nothing could surprise or shock or break me. Nothing did. Except that the images and artefacts, the train carriage, the shoes, the clothes, someone’s spectacles… the names and the names and the uncountable names had come alive, tangible again. They never left me. I still dream of standing inside Yad Vashem every other night.

About The Author

Sudeep Paul

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