Have foes and even sympathetic friends “ended” the Holocaust?

By David Strom

Probably the best known and most widely read book on the Holocaust is The Diary of Anne Frank. It is from this book, play or movie of the same title, that most Americans receive their knowledge of the Holocaust. Readers and viewers come away from the story of Anne Frank with this thought in their minds:  “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” a line that does not appear in the book as climatically as in the play. We are given a naïve and distorted “feel good view of life” with a very false historical ending. Exactly how Anne died, we are not sure. We do know that along with a million other Jewish
children, she was systematically starved, possibly beaten and that she witnessed the death of members of her family. Before her tragic death, she probably did not retain a childlike outlook like the one portrayed in the play based on her diary toward the Nazis who brutalized them. Did she still believe that these humans were “really good at heart”? Doesn’t this overly optimistic and idealized view lead to the “end of the Holocaust”?

Professor Jan Romein of Dutch History at the University of Amsterdam wrote in 1946, just one year after the end of the war.

“The way she [Anne Frank] died is unimportant. More important is that this young life was willfully cut off by a system of irrational cruelty. We had sworn to each other never to forget or forgive  his system as long as it was still raging, but now that it is gone, we too easily forgive or at least forget, which ultimately means the same thing.”

The popular movie Schindler’s List helped the general public learn more about the ugly realities of the Holocaust. While it depicts a horrible time in human
history, it also demonstrates the power of the individual to do what is right in a world of evil. By focusing on Schindler’s great deed of humanity and the
deeds of the survivors in maintaining for Schindler a decent way of life until his death, we easily lose sight, possibly deliberately, of the important fact: There
were too few Schindler’s during the Holocaust to save the slaughtered Jewish millions. Movies and books, by mainly focusing on the heroism of the few,
diminish the horrendous actions and non-actions of the vast majority of the Nazis and their sympathizers. Does this lack of accountability lead to the end
of the Holocaust?

President Ronald Reagan laid a wreath at the Waffen-SS cemetery in Bitburg in 1985, but not just any cemetery. Reagan visited an SS cemetery. This ceremonial act, according to author Rosenfeld, hastened the end of memory of the Holocaust. This ill-advised gesture of “forgive and forget” led to an outpouring of understandable anger from the remaining survivors of the Holocaust, citizens of the world, and world politicians. President Reagan quickly added a visit to death camp to placate the enraged world. Was the President signaling to the world and especially the German people, enough of the Holocaust already?

Important survivor-writers like Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Elie Wiesel, and Imre Kertesz have written extensively, in novels, memoirs, and essays, on the Holocaust and “the end of the Holocaust. The survivor-writers were also the victims of the Holocaust. For them they are, what one writer calls, living a “death-life.”  Death/life means a good part of the person died while you were in the hell of the death camp/s. Yet, s/he survived and remained alive in this world. The writer goes on to suggest that it just may be a “neglected legacy of the Holocaust.” Primo Levi acknowledged it when he stated, “I had the sensation that I was living but without being alive.” Ellie Wiesel said it this way: “The problem is not: to be or not to be. But rather: to be and not to be.”

Can the survivor-victims ever escape from the memory of their past? Not all former victims feel that they are still victims. “Some have apparently adapted to the new and better circumstances of their postwar existence and enjoy what looks like a familiar, unexceptional life… What their dreams are like at night only they know, but unless they tell us otherwise, it would appear that such people have not only survived but have gone on to successfully rebuild their lives.”

Others are less fortunate. Some believe they must write about life in the ghettos and camps of Hitler’s Europe. They believe the Holocaust has been downgraded to a footnote in history, distorted, trivialized via “sick” holocaust jokes, or worst of all the Holocaust “did not occur.” They write to keep the memory of the victims alive, to remind the world that a “civilized” society is just a half-step away from barbarism. Forgetting places all of us in an easy position to repeat the deeds
of a very dark yesterday.

The destruction of the Jews in Europe, and possibly the rest of the world, was to be total. And silent. One of the key agents in the mass destruction of the Jews, Heinrich Himmler hoped that the Holocaust would be “an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory.”

Fortunately, many non-survivors wrote, as well. Without the armaments and other tools of war, Jewish fighter/writers found a way to have their disturbing story written and told. The Warsaw Dairy of Chaim Kaplan survived, but he did not. As determined as the Nazis were in murdering the Jews, Chaim Kaplan and other Jewish scribes were as determined to chronicle their misfortune in the “belly of the beast.” Kaplan wrote, “It is difficult to write, but I consider it an obligation and am determined to fulfill it with my last once of energy. I will write a scroll of agony in order to remember the past in the future.” Tortured by their tormentors, they fought back. They wrote. They refused to be silent in the face of the world’s lack of interest and caring. The Nazis hoped to erase all traces of their inhumanity towards the Jewish people by killing all of them.

Are the Nazis winning the battle for our historical memory of the Holocaust? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leader today of Iran, loudly “denies the Holocaust.” What is his purpose in joining with so many other distorters of Holocaust history? Is he only an anti-Semite or worse? Matthias Kuntzel, a critic of the writings and statements of Ahmadinejad writes: “Ahmadinejad ‘denies the Holocaust’ not so much “to revise the past” as to shape the future: to prepare the way to the next Holocaust…. Auschwitz is delegitimized in order to legitimize the elimination of Israel…. Israel must vanish.”

Philip Roth wrote in his novel Operation Shylock in 1993 what many Jews, old and young fear:  “The meaning of the Holocaust… are for us to determine, but one thing is for sure-its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of European Jews who evacuated Europe for a
seemingly haven should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East. A second Holocaust is not going to occur on the continent of Europe, because
it was the site of the first. 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 less farfetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago.”

The Jewish Holocaust must be taught and remembered. It should be mentioned but not included when studying other genocides. The Holocaust stands alone in human history and must not be forgotten or “ended” as its horrible atrocities are minimized or watered down through historical accounts or misguided acts or commemoration that diminish or distort its meaning. Unfortunately, it was “one of a kind” and needs to be remembered and studied that way.

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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University.  He may be contacted at david.strom@sdjewishworld.com