Those Who Forget the Past Read online

  Perhaps that was just bluster as well; nonetheless, Rafsanjani was speaking casually of the elimination of the Jewish state and up to five million Jews. The language of extermination— of a second Holocaust—was not entirely new. Indeed, after I’d read and quoted the “second-Holocaust” passage, I recalled a conversation I’d had ten years ago in Jerusalem about the run-up to the Six-Day War with Emil Fackenheim, the late much-admired “theologian of the Holocaust.” Fackenheim was describing the apprehension of an existential threat he’d felt at the time of Purim, in April 1967, two months before the outbreak of the war. Purim is a holiday celebrating Jewish deliverance from slaughter, but (as I’d described it in Explaining Hitler) with “Nasser about to blockade Israel’s ports, a growing threat of a three-front attack to come, with the world indifferent if not hostile, it looked to Fackenheim as if a second Holocaust was in the works.”

  “That was the crisis,” Fackenheim told me, “where I first put forward the 614th commandment,” as it has come to be known (an addition to the 613 rules of Jewish orthodoxy): “Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.” (In a sense, every postwar act of anti-Semitic violence or incitement—or indifference to them—can be considered a posthumous victory for Hitler.)

  It was that crisis that prompted Fackenheim, an escapee from Hitler’s Sachsenhausen concentration camp, to take an action quite the opposite from Roth’s “Diasporist”: he left Canada, where he’d been living and teaching since the end of World War II, and went to live in imperiled Jerusalem. Nonetheless, what Fackenheim and the Diasporist (who advocated a reverse migration—the return of European Jews in Israel to their homelands) had in common was a willingness to face the possibility, to think about the unbearable and speak the unspeakable. Here’s what Roth’s Diasporist said—these are the lines from the novel which I found on David Artemiw’s website and quoted in my New York Observer column:

  The meanings of the Holocaust are for us to determine, but one thing is sure—its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven [Israel] should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East. . . . But a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will—it must. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less farfetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago.

  “Much less farfetched.” Say what you will about the Diasporist’s outrageous “solution” to this prospect. Is it in fact utterly “farfetched” now to say that a second Holocaust is possible? Not if you listen to the rhetoric in the mosques and media of the Middle East these days.

  Reports of Hitler’s Final Solution were, of course, considered “farfetched” at the time. Anyone who reads David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff’s heartbreaking book A Race Against Death, about the efforts of a small group of Jews to alert the American government to the mass murder being planned and executed in Europe—and the incredulity, obstinacy, and yes, equanimity they found in response—will come to understand that the prospect of a genocide, even as it was happening and as escapees from the death camps were testifying to it, was dismissed as “farfetched,” as “atrocity stories,” as self-interested propaganda, ethnic special pleading.

  As Bill Keller pointed out in a piece in The New York Times Magazine (May 26, 2002) about the possibility of terrorist use of nuclear weapons, “The best reason for thinking it won’t happen is that it hasn’t happened yet, and that is terrible logic.” But when something has already happened once, in secrecy, and is now advocated openly, gleefully, it is less improbable that it will happen again. To let the words “second Holocaust” frighten away consideration of a worst-case scenario seems foolish, “terrible logic.” The best way to avoid the “worst case” is not to deny it but to study how to prevent it.

  Yet the words seemed to be at the heart of the controversy. There were three kinds of reactions to my essay quoting Roth’s “Diasporist.” Some found merit in my argument that one hidden source of resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe is the burden of guilt Europeans feel about their culture’s widespread complicity with the Final Solution.

  Another reaction, especially important to me, came from certain Holocaust survivors. Some wrote or called to express relief that someone had raised the issue. Somehow, having faced the abyss once, they tended to be the ones who were unafraid—or perhaps unsurprised—to face the possibility again. They would not look away.

  But a more curious reaction was the purported shock and horror at uttering the words “second Holocaust” at all. Obviously I was not the first; nor, it turns out, was Roth. In Michael Oren’s important book Six Days of War, he speaks, in a postscript interview, of his parents believing back in 1967 that “a second Holocaust was about to occur.” Every all-out war poses this threat to the people of Israel.9 An existential threat, a “genocidal” threat (Yehuda Bauer’s term), a “worst-case scenario”—again, the words are less important than the possibility they describe.

  In some respects, I could understand the resistance to the phrase: it was akin to my reaction to the video of Daniel Pearl’s murder. I didn’t want to watch it. I suspect at some level I was angry not just at those who made it but at those here who made it available: it represented an ugly truth I preferred not to have to gaze at directly. In addition, peremptory rejection of a worst-case scenario gave those who did so the excuse of not having to consider the many less-than-worst-case scenarios— however horrific—and permitted a return to equanimity. (Another evasion was the false identification of Palestinian “suicide bombers,” rather than, say, Iranian and Pakistani nukes, as the source of the worst-case threat.)

  “Second Holocaust.” It was almost as if some numinous taboo had been broken; it was as if it evoked a superstitious dread—that to speak of it was to bring it closer. (Of course silence hadn’t done much good for the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust.) It violated a comforting precept: that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. It suggests instead: first time tragedy, second time even worse tragedy. Or perhaps it was an aspect of the mystification of the Holocaust that removes it from history.

  So unwillingness to contemplate an unbearable possibility was understandable, even if it led some to project that fear upon those who spoke of it. Whatever the cause, many found unusual versions of denial when reacting to it. While I have no wish to watch the dismemberment of Daniel Pearl’s body, I don’t try to deny that it happened to Daniel Pearl—or that it’s possible something like it could happen again.

  It is perhaps an interesting problem in scholastic or Talmudic logic: whether a second Holocaust would in any way be “worse” than Hitler’s because of (for want of a better word) its secondness. It wouldn’t make a difference to the victims of either one. But it might say something even more unspeakable than we knew, or were willing to admit, about human nature, just as we learned more than we wanted to know from the first one.

  Interesting questions, but these weren’t the questions raised. Still, I was surprised about the ways in which some chose to avoid the question entirely.

  There was what I came to think of as the “displacement syndrome,” for instance. Some sought to avoid considering whether it could happen in the one place it was most likely to happen.

  Clearly, in my Observer essay, I’d been speaking of the possible consequences of a nuclear exchange, or a nuclear terrorist attack, in the Middle East—on the State of Israel. But when asked to discuss the question on a talk show, I found myself assailed by a leftist critic of the Jewish state, who said I was mistaken to suggest the possibility of a second Holocaust in Europe. (After I corrected that rather disingenuous geographical displacement, he later proceeded to astonish me further by claiming that Europeans felt no guilt about complicity in the Holocaust. When I challenged him on that assertion, he replied that, well, some European nations, like Portug
al, were not complicit. Thank God for the Portuguese!)

  So that was the European displacement of the worst-case scenario. Then there was the American displacement. There was, for instance, the implication by a columnist at a New York paper that I was concerned that a second Holocaust might take place in America. In July 2002 he wrote a column calling essentially for more equanimity among American Jews. He cited some recent survey which showed that the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the past year in America had been relatively small. He cited Leon Wieseltier’s May 27, 2002, New Republic essay “Against Ethnic Panic: Hitler Is Dead.” So American Jews should stop fretting, the columnist lectured us, and not get all concerned, like that fellow in the Observer who, he left the impression, believed that we were in danger of a second Holocaust in America.

  It was a variation on the displacement syndrome: displacing the locus of concern about a second Holocaust from Israel, where it might actually happen, to America, where there was no suggestion (not from me) that it would.

  All of which allowed him to preserve his equanimity— which, stunningly, seemed to extend to the denial that the nuclear extermination of five million Jews would even be a Holocaust. I’m not making this up. After I read his column I called him up, since I’d had lunch with him once, in Jerusalem in fact. It turned out to be a strange conversation, one that revealed an even more desperate desire for equanimity than I could have inferred from his column. It was Holocaust displacement by means of redefinition.

  When I questioned him about his characterization of my “second Holocaust” column and went over key passages, he conceded I wasn’t suggesting the possibility of a mass murder in America, but in the Middle East, in Israel. But, he added, even if a nuclear weapon was detonated in Tel Aviv, wiping out most of Israel’s five million Jews, it would be inaccurate to call this “a Holocaust.”

  Huh?

  That’s right, a true Holocaust involved “rounding up people,” he maintained, the way the Germans did, before killing them. That was the key, he explained to me, the “rounding up.” A missile strike or terrorist-nuke scenario would not involve rounding up and therefore could not be called a “Holocaust” no matter how many million Jews it killed. He seemed almost touchingly fixated in an ingenuous way on the notion that the essence of a Holocaust was to be found in the “rounding-up” process, not the mass murder to follow. No rounding up, no Holocaust, apparently, no matter how many millions were deliberately murdered.

  But isn’t the point of a missile strike to kill the maximum number of people without the inconvenience of rounding them up? I asked him, a bit incredulous that he would be advancing this as somehow a consequential distinction.

  No, he insisted, a missile strike that wiped out the Jews of Israel wouldn’t be a Holocaust; it would be “an act of war.” How could he know? A handoff of a nuke to a terrorist group and its detonation wouldn’t necessarily be an act of war. It would be an act of terrorism, of deliberate extermination. “Act of war” implies a response, at the very least mutual combat. But he was insisting that a nuclear strike on Israel could result only from “an act of war”—implying the mutual tragedy of combat. It was the moral relativism of those who use the phrase “cycle of violence.” He was in effect displacing the blame—or at least half of it—to the victims. In any case, it appeared he was more comfortable thinking of the death of five million Jews as coming from an “act of war” than from one of those old-fashioned “rounding-up” Holocausts. Equanimity at all costs—even at the cost of intelligibility.

  Until that moment I hadn’t realized just how frightening the very phrase “second Holocaust” could be. I’m tempted to say superstitious fear of these words was the real “ethnic panic.” I dwell on this because it occurred to me that this desperation to avoid conceding that another Holocaust, by any definition, was ever possible, even in Israel, was akin to pre–World War II equanimity and denial. The voice of those Jews who urged other Jews to be quiet about reports of death camps in Europe for fear of arousing anti-Semitism here. The mind-set that buried the reports from the death camps on page 12, as Deborah Lipstadt10 has demonstrated. Don’t be too “ethnic,” too ethnically conspicuous. Was the fear of ethnic panic really panic over ethnicity?

  Perhaps accusing Jews of ethnic panic may have made the columnist feel more tough-minded, more steady-nerved than all those allegedly panicky Jews whose concerns he dismissed. But I was hearing echoes of the past: the voice of those Jews who were somewhat embarrassed about other Jews’ speaking up on behalf of fellow Jews. The journalist Ben Hecht (co-author of The Front Page), who worked with Peter Bergson in the early forties to bring Hitler’s Holocaust to the attention of the world, wrote bitterly about such behavior. The New York Times, to its credit, apologized for not following up on the ominous reports.

  Most cruelly—and wrongly—however, this “rounding-up” columnist made those who raised a voice of concern sound as if they were afraid for themselves here in America rather than concerned for families in Israel who had to worry when they saw their children go out for a pizza that they might not come back. (Was that ethnic panic?)11 His column implied that since American Jews had nothing to fear for themselves at this point, why should they get all upset on behalf of the fate of fellow Jews half a world away? (I’m alright, Jack.)

  This was one of the earliest manifestations of a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as “Holocaust shame.” It begins with Holocaust inconsequentialism—one shouldn’t mention the far, far distant past, in which Hitler murdered six million, in discussing the fate of the five million Jews of Israel. But the columnist— and others who take this line—goes on to try to shame those who do refer to the Holocaust for having done so.

  Often, the word “shame” in one of its forms is used: as Tony Judt did in an October 23, 2003, New York Review of Books piece calling for the dissolution of the Jewish state. American Zionists, Mr. Judt wrote, have “shamefully” exploited the Holocaust in arguing that Israel should be a refuge for Jews.

  Leon Wieseltier didn’t use the word “shame” in his “Ethnic Panic” essay, but using the word “panic” (and the phrase “the fright of American Jewry” as well) was a similar attempt to shame those who believed the past should have admonitory consequences for the present.

  I will let readers consider for themselves the differences between me and Wieseltier and between Wieseltier and Ruth R. Wisse on these questions. (I have refrained, out of fairness, from reprinting herein my own June 10, 2002, response to the Wieseltier essay, but those interested can find it on the Observer website, at http://observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=5949.)

  Nonetheless, I’ve come to feel that “the second-Holocaust debate,” as it’s been called, raised an important question: how much weight should be given to the Holocaust in influencing the policy of the Jewish state—and the world’s opinion of that policy?

  To some, no Hitler and Holocaust comparisons are allowed. It happened, but it shouldn’t have any policy implications. Arab media could laud Hitler and the Holocaust (when they weren’t trying to deny it happened), but Jews in Israel should not take it into account when deciding on measures of self-preservation.

  And was it true that “Hitler is dead”? Not in Islamist media. Was the re-legitimization of Hitler by prominent voices in the Middle East something to be dismissed as merely trivial, then? Ruth Wisse makes the point that in certain crucial ways the hatred in the Middle East for Israel, for Jews, for the Jewish state, is far worse than the hatred that preceded and made possible Hitler’s genocide.

  For one thing, Hitler never advertised, never boasted about, and never celebrated his mass murder of Jews. He broadcast his hatred, but he did not broadcast the ongoing extermination process. In fact he took pains to distance himself from the death camps. To carry on the killing process in great secrecy and official denial. Hitler was, as I pointed out in my book, the first Holocaust denier.12

  But today in the Middle East, Hitler’s mass murder of Jews is publicly celebrated
by some, and a second mass murder openly sought by others. Today in the Middle East the murder of Jews by a “suicide bomber” is marked by parties for the families who receive blood-money bonuses for their child’s hideous act. It is not just an individual act of fanaticism spurred by the false promise of paradise, it is a practice backed by an entire culture.

  How much should the Holocaust be used as a rationale for a Jewish state’s existence, for its attempts at self-defense? It would seem that self-defense by any people is a legitimate goal, whether they’ve had a Holocaust in the past or not.

  But to ignore that particular past is, to say the least, difficult. Of course it is possible to make too much of the Holocaust in the sense of sacralizing and mystifying it. Making it an event beyond all comparison, Jonathan Rosen has suggested, removes it from history almost as effectively as the Holocaust deniers.13 This may be the source of the misconception of those who believe no Hitler comparisons should be allowed; Hitler is dead, there will never come another one in the same category of evil as Hitler, and therefore we can learn no lessons, make no contemporary comparisons to Hitler and his Holocaust— they must inevitably be disproportionate with the graven image of evil some turn Hitler into. A mystifying inversion of worship.