J’exhorte donc, avant toutes choses, à faire des prières, des supplications, des requêtes, des actions de grâces, pour tous les hommes, pour les rois et pour tous ceux qui sont élevés en dignité, afin que nous menions une vie paisible et tranquille, en toute piété et honnêteté. Cela est bon et agréable devant Dieu notre Sauveur, qui veut que tous les hommes soient sauvés et parviennent à la connaissance de la vérité. Paul de Tarse (Première lettre à Timothée 2: 2-4)
Non seulement, je me sens frappé par les coups qui tombent sur les persécutés, mais encore mes tressaillements sont d’autant plus douloureux que se trouve méconnu et bafoué, non pas un idéal confus, une idée froide et abstraite, mais cet être vivant, personnel, dont le souffle a traversé et porte toute l’histoire d’Israël : Jéhovah, celui que j’appelle le bon Dieu, le Juste par excellence. (…) Comment voulez-vous que je ne me sente pas lié à Israël comme la branche au tronc qui l’a porté ! Monseigneur Jules Saliège (archevêque de Toulouse, 12 avril 1933)
Que des enfants, des femmes, des hommes, des pères et des mères soient traités comme un vil troupeau, que les membres d’une même famille soient séparés les uns des autres et embarqués pour une destination inconnue, il était réservé à notre temps de voir ce triste spectacle. Pourquoi le droit d’asile dans nos églises n’existe-t-il plus ? (…) Dans notre diocèse, des scènes d’épouvante — l’expression a été remplacée par « émouvantes » après que Mgr Saliège ait reçu des pressions — ont eu lieu dans les camps de Noé et de Récébédou. Les Juifs sont des hommes, les Juives sont des femmes. Les étrangers sont des hommes, les étrangères sont des femmes. Tout n’est pas permis contre eux, contre ces hommes, contre ces femmes, contre ces pères et mères de famille. Ils font partie du genre humain. Ils sont nos frères comme tant d’autres. Un chrétien ne peut l’oublier. Monseigneur Jules Saliège (archevêque de Toulouse, 23 août 1942)
Des scènes douloureuses et parfois horribles se déroulent en France, sans que la France en soit responsable. À Paris, par dizaines de milliers, des Juifs ont été traités avec la plus barbare sauvagerie. Et voici que dans nos régions on assiste à un spectacle navrant ; des familles sont disloquées ; des hommes et des femmes sont traités comme un vil troupeau, et envoyés vers une destination inconnue, avec la perspective des plus graves dangers. Je fais entendre la protestation indignée de la conscience chrétienne et je proclame que tous les hommes, aryens ou non aryens, sont frères parce que créés par le même Dieu ; que les hommes, quelle que soit leur race ou leur religion, ont droit au respect des individus et des États. Or les mesures antisémitiques actuelles sont un mépris de la dignité humaine, une violation des droits les plus sacrés de la personne et de la famille. Monseigneur Pierre-Marie Théas (évêque de Montauban, lettre pastorale, 30 août 1942)
The central ambiguity is that the Germans warned the Jews and let most of them escape. Lidegaard claims this was because the Danes refused to help the Germans, but the causation might also have worked in the other direction. It was when the Danes realized that the Germans were letting some Jews go that they found the courage to help the rest of their Jewish community escape. Countrymen is a fascinating study in the ambiguity of virtue. The Danes knew long before the war that their army could not resist a German invasion. Instead of overtly criticizing Hitler, the Social Democratic governments of the 1930s sought to inoculate their populations against the racist ideology next door. (…) The Danish response to the Nazis illuminates a crucial fact about the Holocaust: the Germans did not always force the issue of extermination where they faced determined resistance from occupied populations. In Bulgaria, as Tzvetan Todorov has shown in his aptly titled book The Fragility of Goodness, the Jews were saved because the king of Bulgaria, the Orthodox Church, and a few key Bulgarian politicians refused to assist the German occupiers. Why did a similar civic sense of solidarity not take root in other countries? In Holland, why did 80 percent of Dutch Jews perish? And what about France: why did liberty, equality, and fraternity not apply to the citizens driven from their homes by French police and sent to deportation and death? These questions become harder to answer in the light of the Danish and Bulgarian counterexamples. One possible explanation is that the German occupation’s presence in Denmark was lighter than in either France or Holland. The Danes, like the Bulgarians, kept their king and maintained their own government throughout the occupation. Self-government gave them a capacity to defend Jews that was never possible in the occupied zones of France or Holland. Both the Danish king and the Danish government decided that their best hope of maintaining Denmark’s sovereignty lay in cooperating but not collaborating with the German occupiers. This “cooperation” profited some Danes but shamed many others. The Danish population harbored ancestral hostility to the Germans, and the occupation reinforced these feelings. The Germans, for their part, put up with this frigid relationship: they needed Danish food, and Danish cooperation freed up German military resources for battle on the Eastern Front, and the Nazis wanted to be liked. They wanted their “cooperative” relationship with Denmark to serve as a model for a future European community under Hitler’s domination. From very early on in this ambiguous relationship, the Danes, from the king on down, made it clear that harming the Jews would bring cooperation to an end and force the Germans to occupy the country altogether. The king famously told his prime minister, in private, that if the Germans forced the Danish Jews to wear a yellow star, then he would wear one too. Word of the royal position went public and even led to a myth that the king had actually ridden through the streets of Copenhagen on horseback wearing a yellow star on his uniform. The king never did wear a star. He didn’t have to wear one, because, thanks to his opposition, the Germans never imposed such a regulation in Denmark. When, in late summer in 1943, the order came down from Eichmann to the local German authorities in Copenhagen that they had to rid the city of its Jews, these authorities faced a dilemma. They knew that the Danish politicians, police, and media—that Danish society as a whole—would resist and that, once the cooperation of the Danes had been lost, the Germans would have to run the country themselves. The Germans in Copenhagen were also beginning to have second thoughts about the war itself. By then the German armies had been defeated at Stalingrad. While the Gestapo in Poland and Eastern Europe faced the prospect of defeat by accelerating the infernal rhythm of extermination in the death camps, the Gestapo in Denmark began to look for a way out. The local Gauleiter, a conniving opportunist named Werner Best, did launch the roundup of the Jews, but only after letting the Jewish community find out in advance what was coming, giving them time to escape. He did get his hands on some people in an old-age home and dispatch them to Theresienstadt, but all but 1 percent of the Jewish community escaped his clutches. It is an astonishing number. When Adolf Eichmann came to Copenhagen in 1943 to find out why so many Jews had escaped, he did not cashier the local Gestapo. Instead he backed down and called off the deportations of Danes who were half-Jewish or married to Jews. Lidegaard’s explanation for Eichmann’s volte face is simply that the institutions of Danish society all refused to go along. And without their cooperation, a Final Solution in Denmark became impossible. Totalitarianism, not to mention ethnic cleansing and ethnic extermination, always requires a great deal of collaboration. When they got wind of German plans in September 1943, the Danish government resigned, and no politician agreed to serve in a collaborationist government with the Germans thereafter. After the roundups of Jews were announced, leading Danish politicians of different parties issued a joint statement declaring, “The Danish Jews are an integral part of the people, and therefore all the people are deeply affected by the measures taken, which are seen as a violation of the Danish sense of justice.” This is the political culture of “countrymen” with which Lidegaard explains the extraordinary determination—and success—of the Danes in protecting their Jewish population. Such general support across Danish society seems to have empowered the Jews of Copenhagen. When the Gestapo came to search the Jewish community’s offices in September 1943, the community treasurer, Axel Hertz, did not hesitate to ask the intruders, “By what right do you come here?” The German in charge replied, quite candidly: “By the right of the stronger.” And Hertz retorted: “That is no good right.” Jews in Denmark behaved like rights-bearers, not like victims in search of compassion. And they were not wrong: their feeling of membership in the Danish polity had a basis in its political culture. When the Germans arrived to begin the deportations, Jews had already been warned — in their synagogues — and they simply vanished into the countryside, heading for the coast to seek a crossing to neutral Sweden. There was little or no Jewish communal organization and no Danish underground to help them. What ensued was a chaotic family-by-family flight, made possible simply because ordinary members of Danish society feigned ignorance when Germans questioned them, while sheltering families in seaside villages, hotels, and country cottages. Danish police on the coast warned hiding families when the Gestapo came to call, and signaled all-clear so that boats bearing Danish Jews could slip away to Sweden. The fishermen who took the Danish Jews across the Baltic demanded huge sums for the crossing, but managed to get their frightened fellow citizens to safety. When the Gestapo did seize Jewish families hiding in the church of the small fishing village of Gilleleje, the people were so outraged that they banded together to assist others to flee. One villager even confronted the local Gestapo officer, shining a flashlight in his face and exclaiming: “The poor Jews!” When the German replied, “It is written in the Bible that this shall be their fate,” the villager unforgettably replied: “But it is not written that it has to happen in Gilleleje.” Why did the Danes behave so differently from most other societies and populations in occupied Europe? For a start, they were the only nation where escape to a safe neutral country lay across a narrow strait of water. Moreover, they were not subject to exterminatory pressure themselves. They were not directly occupied, and their leadership structures from the monarch down to the local mayors were not ripped apart. The newspapers in Copenhagen were free enough to report the deportations and thus to assist any Jews still not in the know to flee. The relatively free circulation of information also made it impossible for non-Jewish Danes to claim, as so many Germans did, that “of this we had no knowledge.” Most of all, Denmark was a small, homogeneous society, with a stable democracy, a monarchy that commanded respect, and a shared national hostility to the Germans. Denmark offers some confirmation of Rousseau’s observation that virtue is most easily fostered in small republics. Lidegaard is an excellent guide to this story when he sticks close to Danish realities. When he ventures further and asks bigger questions, he goes astray. At the end of his book he asks: “Are human beings fundamentally good but weak? Or are we brutal by nature, checked and controlled only by civilization?” He wants the Danish story to answer such questions, but it cannot bear such weight. There simply are no general answers to the question of why humans behave as they do in times of extremity. What Lidegaard’s story really demonstrates is that history and context are all. Denmark was Denmark: that is all one can truthfully say. Lidegaard makes the argument, in his conclusion, that had resistance been as strong elsewhere in Europe as it was in Denmark, the Nazis might never have been able to drive the Final Solution to its conclusion. (…) Jews met different fates in each country the Nazis occupied—or at least the rates of destruction and escape varied. But it does not follow that what the Danes did other peoples could have also done. The Germans faced resistance of varying degrees of ferocity in every country that they occupied in Europe. Where they possessed the military and police power to do so, they crushed that resistance with unbridled cruelty. Where, as in Denmark, they attempted a strategy of indirect rule, they had to live with the consequences: a populace that could not be terrorized into doing their bidding, and could therefore be counted on to react when fellow citizens were arrested and carried away. One uncomfortable possibility that Lidegaard does not explore is that the Nazis sought a strategy of indirect rule precisely because they saw the Danes as fellow Aryans, potential allies in an Aryan Europe. This would explain why the Nazis were so comfortable in Copenhagen and so shaken by Danish resistance. The Poles they could dismiss as Untermenschen, and the French as ancient enemies; but to be resisted by supposed Aryans was perversely disarming. Why else would a ferocious bureaucrat such as Eichmann melt before Danish objections to the arrest of Jews married to Danes? One paradoxical possibility is that the Nazis bowed to Danish protests because their delusional racial anthropology led them to view the Danes as members of their own family. To their eternal credit, the Danes exploited this imagined family resemblance to defy an act of infamy. Countrymen is a story about a little country that did the right thing for complicated reasons, and got away with it for equally complicated reasons. It is a story that reinforces an old truth: solidarity and decency depend on a dense tissue of connection among people, on long-formed habits of the heart, on resilient cultures of common citizenship, and on leaders who marshal these virtues by their example. In Denmark, this dense tissue bound human beings together and indirect rule made it impossible for the Germans to rip it apart. Elsewhere in Europe, by contrast, it was destroyed in stages, first by ghettoizing and isolating the Jewish people and then by insulating bystanders from the full horror of Nazi intentions. Once Jews had been stripped of citizenship, property, rights, and social existence—once they could appeal only to the common humanity of persecutors and bystanders alike—it was too late. There is a sobering message in Lidegaard’s tale for the human rights era that came after these abominations. If a people come to rely for their protection on human rights alone, on the mutual recognition of common humanity, they are already in serious danger. The Danish story seems to tell us that it is not the universal human chain that binds peoples together in extremity, but more local and granular ties: the particular consciousness of time, place, and heritage that led a Danish villager to stand up to the Gestapo and say no, it will not happen here, not in our village. This extraordinary story of one small country has resonance beyond its Danish context. Countrymen should be read by anyone seeking to understand what precise set of shared social and political understandings can make possible, in times of terrible darkness, acts of civil courage and uncommon decency. Michael Ignatieff
Constater que 75 % des juifs de France ont été sauvés ne revient pas à exonérer le maréchal Pétain. Berlin avait stratégiquement besoin de Vichy – qu’il s’agisse du maintien de l’ordre ou de l’économie de guerre –, et Vichy aurait donc sans doute pu s’opposer aux déportations. Il n’en demeure pas moins, quelles qu’aient été les intentions d’un régime pratiquant l’antisémitisme d’État, qu’en soi, le maintien d’un appareil étatique a eu un effet positif pour la survie des juifs de France. Jacques Semelin
Là où l’État et l’Église refusèrent de sanctionner la discrimination, comme au Danemark, la résistance interne fut la plus forte. Lorsque l’État ou la bureaucratie administrative locale commencèrent à coopérer, la résistance de l’Église fut essentielle pour empêcher l’obéissance à l’autorité, légitimer la subversion et/ou contrôler directement la collaboration. La protestation de l’Église s’avéra être le seul élément présent dans tous les cas où la collaboration de l’État fut arrêtée – comme en Bulgarie, en France et en Roumanie… La majorité des Juifs échappèrent à la déportation dans chaque État occupé par ou allié avec l’Allemagne dans lequel le chef de l’église dominante se prononça publiquement contre la déportation avant ou dès qu’elle commença. Malheureusement, les Pays-Bas (dont je discute longuement) ne réagirent pas comme l’aurait laissé présager le niveau d’antisémitisme d’avant-guerre. De la reine et du gouvernement en exil (ou des dirigeants politiques aux Pays-Bas) à la bureaucratie de la fonction publique qui exécutait les ordres allemands, il y eut peu de leadership. Cela conduisit à une coopération élevée de l’État dans l’enregistrement des Juifs. La méthode d’identification juive la plus efficace et presque infaillible fut conçue non pas dans le Reich, mais aux Pays-Bas, par un fonctionnaire néerlandais d’avant-guerre qui se rendit à Berlin avec la permission de son supérieur pour montrer son innovation à la Gestapo : ‘Selon les dires de la Gestapo elle-même, sa carte d’identité était encore plus difficile à reproduire que son homologue allemande.’ Bien qu’il y ait eu au début des protestations de l’église dans l’église protestante dominante, ce ne fut pas une protestation publique ni vocale. Les dirigeants de l’Église n’en informèrent pas leurs fidèles car ils ne lurent pas publiquement leur protestation contre la déportation des Juifs, s’en remettant à une demande allemande de ne pas la lire en chaire. Faute de leadership pour la résistance, ce n’est qu’au printemps 1943 que les Néerlandais formèrent un mouvement de défense pour les personnes cachées lorsqu’ils furent eux-mêmes menacés de déportation et de travail forcé en Allemagne. Il était trop tard pour aider les Juifs hollandais – à ce moment-là, il en restait moins de la moitié. Deák a raison de dire qu’environ 20 % seulement des Juifs néerlandais ont été sauvés, mais il se trompe sur le bilan bulgare. Environ 20% des Juifs sous domination bulgare ont fait partie des victimes, y compris ceux des territoires anciennement en Grèce et en Yougoslavie occupés par l’État bulgare, comme il l’explique plus tard dans sa critique. Dr Helen Fein
Helen Fein (…) soutient à juste titre que l’antisémitisme d’avant-guerre eut une influence significative sur le sort des Juifs sous l’occupation allemande mais, comme elle le déclare elle-même, il y avait aussi de nombreux autres facteurs, comme par exemple le comportement des dirigeants de l’église locale, l’attitude des gouvernements en exil et si le pays en question disposait ou non d’une bureaucratie efficace. Ce dernier cas a malheureusement été le cas aux Pays-Bas. Pourtant, du moins à mon avis, le facteur le plus important pour le traitement des Juifs était de savoir si oui ou non un pays de l’Europe dominée par les nazis était capable de maintenir un certain degré de souveraineté. En Italie, en Hongrie, en Roumanie, en Slovaquie, en Bulgarie, en Finlande, en France à Vichy et au Danemark, les gouvernements ont utilisé les Juifs pour négocier avec les nazis puis avec les Alliés. La vie des Juifs fut sacrifiée ou épargnée selon la force extérieure à laquelle le gouvernement voulait plaire. Dans les pays totalement vaincus comme la Norvège et les Pays-Bas, qui étaient sans gouvernement et sans souveraineté, les bureaucrates et les policiers locaux firent exactement ce que les nazis voulaient qu’ils fassent en procédant à l’élimination des Juifs. Dans d’autres pays, une partie de la population locale aida les Allemands à tuer ou à rassembler les Juifs, comme cela s’est produit en Pologne, en Ukraine et dans les pays baltes. En conséquence, les plus grands pourcentages de Juifs survécurent dans les pays alliés avec l’Allemagne pendant la guerre. En Bulgarie, à la suite de nombreuses brutalités initiales et d’intentions antisémites proclamées, le gouvernement pro-allemand décida d’épargner la vie des Juifs bulgares. Et les Allemands impuissants n’y purent rien. En conséquence, pour autant que nous le sachions, aucun des quelque 50 000 Juifs bulgares ne fut livré aux Allemands ou tué chez lui, bien que qu’un grand nombre d’entre eux souffrirent beaucoup dans les camps de travaux forcés locaux. Helen Fein parle des Juifs sous domination bulgare; moi, je parle des Juifs bulgares. Les 11 143 Juifs que le régime bulgare a remis à Eichmann en 1943 vivaient dans les parties de la Grèce et de la Yougoslavie occupées par l’armée bulgare ; ils étaient citoyens yougoslaves et grecs et ne parlaient pas bulgare. Les actions des principaux responsables bulgares envers les nazis et les juifs restent un sujet de controverse intense. Parmi eux se trouvaient le Premier ministre Filov, le ministre de l’Intérieur Gabrovski, le député Dimitur Peshev et, le plus puissant et le plus controversé de tous, le roi Boris III. (…) Nous en savons moins sur la Bulgarie pendant et juste après la guerre que sur la plupart des autres pays européens. Yasharoff, par exemple, soutient que son père, en défendant Peshev, a souligné le rôle de Peshev en tant que sauveur des Juifs et que cela a adouci le verdict de ses juges communistes. Tzvetan Todorov, l’auteur de La fragilité de la bonté, le livre dont j’ai parlé dans ma critique, pense le contraire. Yasharoff est convaincu que Peshev a personnellement ordonné aux autorités locales d’arrêter les préparatifs de la déportation des Juifs bulgares en 1943 ; pourtant il est difficile de croire que le vice-président de l’Assemblée nationale aurait eu une telle autorité, en particulier dans un pays que Yasharoff qualifie d’État fasciste. Mais la Bulgarie était-elle vraiment un pays fasciste pendant la guerre ? Oui, si l’on en juge par quelques-unes des actions de sa police ; non, si l’on considère qu’elle disposait d’un parlement fonctionnel avec des partis d’opposition, dont les députés s’opposèrent souvent fortement au gouvernement. Cependant, parce que le gouvernement ne pouvait prendre aucune mesure majeure en Bulgarie sans le consentement du roi, Boris III devrait porter la responsabilité à la fois de la déportation des Juifs thraces et macédoniens et du sauvetage de leurs homologues bulgares. En tant que sauveur de certains Juifs et en tant qu’homme responsable du meurtre d’autres, Boris ne différait pas vraiment beaucoup de chefs d’État contemporains tels que le maréchal Pétain de France et l’amiral Horthy de Hongrie. (…) La leçon de l’histoire bulgare est mieux expliquée par Omer Bartov dans La Nouvelle République (13 août 2001) lorsqu’il écrit : « La différence entre la vertu et le vice est bien moins radicale qu’on ne voudrait le croire. Parfois, la bonté la plus efficace… est réalisée par ceux qui se sont déjà compromis avec le mal, ceux qui sont membres de l’organisation même qui a lancé la machine vers l’abîme. » Dimitur Peshev, qui était membre du parti politique au pouvoir en Bulgarie et qui vota pour les lois antisémites originales, était ce genre de personne. István Deák
Des pressions païennes formidables vont s’exercer sur nous-mêmes et sur nos familles pour tenter de nous entraîner à une soumission passive à l’idéologie totalitaire. Si l’on ne parvient pas tout de suite à soumettre nos âmes, on voudra soumettre tout au moins nos corps. Le devoir des chrétiens est d’opposer à la violence exercée sur leur conscience les armes de l’Esprit. Pasteur André Trocmé (1940)
Between 1943 and 1944, the Mufti [of Jerusalem] concentrated his activities on the Jews of the Balkans, in Eastern Europe. He prevented the rescue of Jews from Hungary, from Romania, from Bulgaria, from Croatia; and he thwarted the immigration of Jewish orphans to Palestine. He protested to the Nazis that not enough resources were being devoted to preventing the escape of Jewish refugees from the Balkans. This has been widely testified to. Here is one example. Wilhelm Melchers, a Nazi official who testified at the Nuremburg Trials on 6 August 1947, said: « The Mufti was making protests everywhere – in the offices of the Foreign Minister, the Secretary of State and in other SS Headquarters ». These protests had an immediate effect, as a rule. Far example, on 15 May 1943, the Mufti personally delivered to Ribbentrop a letter protesting against the plan to arrange the emigration of 4,000 Jewish children from Bulgaria. Ribbentrop succumbed to the Mufti’s pressure. He quickly arranged for a telegram to be sent to the German Ambassador in Sofia, by which he prevented the emigration from taking place. The tragic result, of course, was that 4,000 Jewish children were condemned to death. (Rapport de l’ONU, 5/12/1985)
C’est la souveraineté nationale, imbécile !
Suite à notre dernier billet sur la légende Aubrac comme illustration du mythe qui a entouré la Résistance pendant la dernière guerre en France et l’apparent manque de combativité de la majorité de la population française …
Petit retour sur les travaux de l’historienne américaine Helen Fein, dont l’analyse des différentes réponses nationales des pays européens face au génocide juif (« Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust« , 1979) pourrait être éclairante.
Comparant les destins différents des communautés juives sous le nazisme, elle montre en effet que les pays où celles-ci s’en sont “le moins bien sorties” sont apparemment ceux où il n’y avait pas eu d’institutions (politiques, religieuses) appelant à résister.
Comme par exemple les Pays-Bas ou la Pologne (dont les dirigeants et élites s’étaient exilés en Angleterre et/ou avaient été décimées par les assauts conjoints des Nazis et des Soviétiques) qui ont eu le pire bilan par opposition au Danemark où, « protégé » par son aryanité, un Christian X avait explicitement pris position contre la déportation et dont la population juive (avec l’aide de leurs voisins suédois) a été très largement épargnée.
La France, avec son régime collaborationniste mais une partie de ses élites résistantes – notamment dans le clergé -, ayant eu une position intermédiaire.
Un peu comme la Bulgarie, dont les autorités religieuses avaient bien résisté mais qui finit par abandonner, suite notamment à l’intervention personnelle du Grand Mufti de Jérusalem et « oncle » d’Arafat – exflitré lui aussi par la France après guerre – , “ses” juifs thraces et macédoniens.
Une France donc où le régime a, en simplifiant, “sauvé” une bonne partie de ses juifs nationaux sur le dos (ie. en les livrant ou les abandonnant aux nazis) de ses juifs réfugiés …
D’où l’intéressant contre-exemple du cas très particulier de ces villages des Cévennes de descendants de huguenots, avec leur longue tradition de “résistance” religieuse (comme Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, révélé au grand public par le documentaire de Pierre Sauvage, qui sauva quelque 5 000 juifs sous l’Occupation, mais il existe, parait-il un tel village de Justes aux Pays-Bas et les Polonais sont, avec les Hollandais, les premiers sur la liste de Yad Vashem – merci madimaxi) …
On a ainsi l’impression qu’avec beaucoup de résistants, notamment au début, qu’ils sont quasiment livrés à eux-mêmes, aucune, sauf exceptions, institution politique, syndicale ou religieuse (hormis l’appel – de l’extérieur, non nécessairement à une résistance intérieure et pendant que le PCF négociait secrètement le maintien de sa presse avec l’ennemi – du 18 juin) n’appelant à résister et qu’ils s’improvisent résistants avec les moyens – très limités – du bord, certains dans les campagnes ou aux frontières, à partir de leurs pratiques locales faisant passer leur résistance comme une sorte de braconnage ou contrebande “glorifiée”.
Ce qui souligne encore plus leur courage mais aussi la faiblesse de leur nombre et donc à nouveau… le “manque de combativité” de la majorité.
Et bien sûr le décalage avec les récits largement idéalisés que, pour les raisons que l’on sait, on en a fait après coup et… le choc quand la vérité sort peu à peu.
Voir aussi la critique du film de Pierre Sauvage sur Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (« Les Armes de l’esprit »):
« Les Armes de l’esprit »
L’Humanité
Le 17 octobre 1990
De Pierre Sauvage au cinéma « Saint-Germain-des-Prés »
Si on avait laissé faire le temps et l’oubli, c’est tout juste si le nom de Chambon-sur-Lignon aurait eu droit à quelques lignes dans les manuels d’histoire de France, chapitre Deuxième Guerre mondiale, sous-chapitre occupation allemande et déportation. Grâce au film documentaire de Pierre Sauvage, les correcteurs de mémoire auront désormais la tâche plus rude.
« Les Armes de l’esprit », c’est l’histoire d’un aller-retour. Le passé éclaire le contexte par le noir et blanc des archives, et la couleur du reportage d’aujourd’hui donne la parole aux acteurs d’une histoire discrète mais glorieuse. De 1940 à 1944 les habitants d’une petite commune de la Haute-Loire défient Pétain, sa police, ses milices, ses lois antisémites, en accueillant, en cachant, en protégeant des familles juives françaises et étrangères. Le faussaire du village, Oscar O. de son vrai nom, Dr Jean-Claude Plunne de son nom de planque, spécialiste de la fabrication de faux-papiers, estime à cinq mille le nombre de Juifs sauvés au Chambon. Le cinéaste franco-américain Pierre Sauvage sera parmi les rescapés.
A l’origine d’une résistance trop méconnue, il y a cette terre cévenole avec derrière elle quelques siècles d’insoumission, ces Huguenots protestants qui ont appris à vaincre les persécutions et la peur, et il y a des hommes, héros ordinaires qui jaillissent à la lumière. Le pasteur du Chambon, André Trocmé, fera de son temple le lieu où apprendre à dire non sera parole d’évangile. Et quand l’une de ces femmes au visage doux qui a échappé aux trains de Nuit et brouillard se souvient, c’est pour dire : « Ce n’était pas au fait que nous étions juifs qu’ils réagissaient, mais au fait que nous étions pauvres. »
Voir encore:
Heroes and Victims
István Deák
NY Review of Books
May 31, 2001
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
Jan T. Gross
Princeton University Press, 261 pp., $19.95
The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust
Tzvetan Todorov, translated from the French by Arthur Denner
Princeton University Press, 190 pp., $26.95. To be published in July 2001.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Nazis: Persecution, Deportation, and Murder, 1933–1945
Michel Reynaud and Sylvie Graffard, translated from the French by James A. Moorhouse, with an introduction by Michael Berenbaum
Cooper Square Press, 304 pp., $27.95
In 1941 Polish townspeople and farmers who had been persecuted by the Soviet occupation forces took their revenge on their innocent Jewish neighbors by torturing them and burning them alive. In 1943 Bulgarian right-wing politicians saved virtually all the Jews in their country and were later rewarded for their efforts by execution or imprisonment under the Communist government. Throughout the war German religious zealots refused to say “Heil Hitler,” preferring to be guillotined by the Nazis to serving in the war.
Such are the major themes of the three books under review. They raise questions that defy clear answers. Why did Poles, who had suffered badly under the Soviet occupiers, choose to kill those even more downtrodden than they were? Do murders committed by semiliterate Polish farmers, craftsmen, and day laborers belong in the same category as murders committed by educated and trained German policemen, as Jan Gross seems to suggest in Neighbors? Does the suffering freely accepted by German Jehovah’s Witnesses belong in the same category as that of the Jews, who were not asked what they thought of the Führer and were not allowed to recant? Why did the Bulgarians succeed in saving Jews while the Dutch, who were also not generally anti-Semitic, failed abysmally, with a nearly 100 percent Jewish survival rate in one country and only about 20 percent in the other?
Before World War II, there were some 50,000 Jews in Bulgaria, making up less than one percent of the population—approximately the same low proportion of Jews as in Germany and Italy, and not at all comparable to the vastly greater Jewish presence in Austria, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Russia. Is there a direct relationship between the proportion of Jews in a country and the extent of popular anti-Semitism? We might think so when we consider the relatively mild fate of the Jews in wartime Bulgaria and Italy; but the case of Germany obviously suggests otherwise. Other factors must have influenced the extent of popular anti-Semitism. Bulgarian Jews, mostly of Sephardic origin, were tradesmen and artisans, with only relatively few businessmen, landowners, bankers, lawyers, and professors among them. In contrast to France or Poland, for instance, no Jews were to be found in the Bulgarian army officer corps or in the state administration.
Unlike Jews in Hungary or Poland, Bulgarian Jews did not take an important part in the Bulgarian Communist movement. Thus they represented neither a political nor an economic challenge to non-Jews. Also, because there were so few Jewish journalists, artists, moviemakers, theater people, and writers in Bulgaria, right-wing critics of modern culture could not blame the Jews for immorality, secularization, corruption, and criminality. In addition, Bulgarians had more important minorities to worry about, such as the Macedonians, whose secret organizations had long been engaged in bloody terror, and also Turkish-speaking and Bulgarian-speaking Muslims.
With no Jews in important positions, there existed only minuscule anti-Semitic movements in Bulgaria. And yet Jews had much to fear. As Tzvetan Todorov explains in his strongly argued introduction to The Fragility of Goodness—a book that is largely a collection of documents—Bulgaria adopted some of the harshest anti-Jewish legislative measures in Europe. In October 1940, during the authoritarian rule of King Boris III, a Law for the Protection of the Nation severely restricted Jewish activities, and in 1941 many more such measures followed: Jews had to obey a curfew; many of them were expelled from their homes; others were forcibly conscripted into work gangs, and all were required to wear the yellow Star of David.
The worst persecution, however, did not happen in Bulgaria itself. In 1941, Bulgaria joined in Hitler’s Yugoslav and Greek military campaigns and was rewarded with the right to occupy and administer the province of Thrace in northern Greece as well as much of Macedonia and Kosovo in the former Yugoslav state. Even though Bulgaria was not allowed to annex these territories, the government conferred Bulgarian citizenship on their inhabitants, except for the Jews. This was a prelude to the deportation of the 11,384 Jews who, following their mistreatment by Bulgarian gendarmes, were handed over to Adolf Eichmann’s local representative in March 1943. The victims ended up in Auschwitz and Treblinka, where nearly all were killed. The men chiefly responsible for this outrage were King Boris III and Prime Minister Professor Bogdan Filov. The prime minister was friendly to Germany, but Boris, a member of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family, which had produced many European kings and queens, including the descendants of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, disliked the Nazis. Bulgarians today still argue over the motives for Boris’s behavior toward the Thracian and Macedonian Jews as well as the sudden change of policy in 1943 by which he stopped the deportation to Germany of the Bulgarian Jews. Not for nothing was the King often referred to as “wily Boris.”
In Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania, governments allied with Germany alternately promoted and sabotaged the deportation of Jews, mostly but not always because of the changing war situation. But in these government decisions, the public had at best a very limited part. Not so in Bulgaria, where, in 1940, the anti-Semitic Law for the Protection of the Nation caused a public uproar. The first collective protest came from the country’s leading writers and other intellectuals. It is true that in Hungary writers and artists such as the composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály were the first to protest the anti-Jewish laws. But in Bulgaria, strong protests were made to the National Assembly by professional organizations, politicians, and religious leaders. And, instead of petering out as they did in other countries, the protests increased. Government officials, the public, and the Jews themselves all ignored the law ordering the Jews to wear the Star of David. The deportations of Jews began in the spring of 1943, with the arrest of the Thracian and Macedonian Jews as a first step, to be followed by de-portations from Bulgaria itself. Huge street demonstrations erupted in Sofia, led by the heads of the Orthodox state church. Stefan, the metropolitan of Sofia (the equivalent of an archbishop), sent telegrams of protest to the King, and Kyril, the metropolitan of Plovdiv, is said to have warned that he would lie down on the rails in front of the next deportation train. When the authorities arrested the Jews of Kyustendil, a town not far from Sofia, a delegation of its leading residents went to the capital to plead the case of their fellow citizens. Not only were these Bulgarians free of anti-Semitism, they were also brave people and great humanitarians.
Yet, as Todorov explains, the protests would, by themselves, not have prevailed against the determination of Prime Minister Filov and several key members of his cabinet to deport Jews. What counted, Todorov shows, was that the Kyustendil delegation appealed directly to Dimitur Peshev, the vice-chairman of the National Assembly, and that Peshev took up their cause. When Todorov writes about “the fragility of goodness,” he is referring to the decision taken by Peshev, a conservative nationalist politician and a leading member of the party in power, to risk his position and life by politely, diplomatically, and yet resolutely turning against his own government. Carefully avoiding members of the opposition parties, he invited fellow members of the government party to sign a statement arguing that the Jews were no problem for Bulgaria, and that handing over the Jews to the Germans was against the nation’s honor and interest. Forty-two other deputies signed the statement, although about a dozen of them later got cold feet. Still, all this was enough to cause Boris III and the country’s other leaders to hesitate, and they postponed the deportations. Meanwhile, Metropolitan Stefan invited Bulgaria’s chief rabbi to live in his house. It is hard to find a comparable gesture anywhere else in Europe. By the summer of 1943, the King, too, was siding with the opponents of deportation. Even though Peshev was thrown out of his party and the King died under mysterious circumstances in August 1943, there were no deportations. As happened in Denmark and Italy, even the German ambassador in Sofia began to reflect Bulgarian views on the Jewish question in his dispatches. Thousands of Jews were sent to the countryside to do forced labor, but virtually all were alive and unharmed when the Soviet army arrived in September 1944.
The Communists soon took over the country, killing many members of the country’s elite and putting on trial all the deputies from the wartime ruling party. As Todorov shows, of the forty-three deputies who had signed Peshev’s pro-Jewish declaration, the Communists sentenced twenty to death; most of the others were given long prison terms. Peshev himself was sentenced to fifteen years but was freed less than two years later. Among those executed were Deputy Ikonomov, who had been the first to sound the alarm on behalf of the Jews, and Deputy Petrov, who had fought hard in the National Assembly against the Law for the Defense of the Nation. Metropolitan Stefan was forbidden to carry on his pastoral activities.
During the Nazi alliance, not a single one of these brave men had been harmed. Now the Communists wiped them out while some in the Jewish community looked the other way. After two Jewish lawyers refused to represent Peshev at his trial, a third accepted; this courageous decision caused him later to be disbarred. Ironically, as Todorov explains, it was not what Peshev had done to save the Jews that persuaded the Communist court not to sentence him to hanging. What saved him was that earlier, as minister of justice, he had blocked the execution of a left-wing opposition leader. Subsequently, most Bulgarian Jews emigrated, mainly to Israel, which left Bulgaria as judenfrei as all the other East Central European countries are today, except for Hungary and Romania. Under Communist rule, the wartime persecution of the Bulgarian Jews was barely mentioned, and when it was, their survival was attributed to the Communist Party. In history textbooks and in the press, wartime concentration camps were said to have held only political prisoners, while it was said of Auschwitz that “prisoners of all nationalities” had been killed.
After considering the claims and counterclaims regarding the survival of the Bulgarian Jews, Todorov rightly concludes that although the King was responsible for the death of nearly 12,000 Jews, he deserves credit for blocking German demands for deportation. This was a remarkable achievement, but the larger credit belongs to Dimitur Peshev and his fellow deputies who, in turn, would have been unable to act without popular support and, especially, without the support of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Compared to the lethargy of Pope Pius XII and of the Catholic prelates in Germany and East Central Europe, the Bulgarian church leaders were models of decency and strength.
But who today remembers these saviors? Peshev, whose brief memoirs appear in the documentary section of Todorov’s book, is one of the thirteen “Righteous” Bulgarians who have been honored by the State of Israel. But he and his heroic colleagues and their tragic fate have been largely ignored by historians of World War II. In reconstructing what happened to such decent men in his native Bulgaria, Todorov, a much respected French philosopher and social critic, is also pursuing his longstanding aim of showing that goodness can thrive under atrocious conditions. In fact, he believes it is under such conditions that goodness is most genuinely present, a view that he persuasively presents in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, a masterful comparative study of the Nazi and Soviet camps.
2.
If the Bulgarian story is that of quiet diplomatic maneuvering by clever politicians on behalf of their fellow citizens, the story of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany is that of a direct confrontation between two implacable ideologies, one representing unbending pacifism, the other unbounded ruthlessness. Unlike the Bulgarians, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were not trying to help or defend anybody. As we learn from The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Nazis, their only wish was to do God’s will, a position that brought them into direct confrontation with the Nazi regime. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, a religious sect founded in the United States in 1872. According to its eschatological doctrine as it was preached in the 1930s, the “end of days” was approaching and would be preceded by war and other great crises. In the eyes of the Witnesses, the Nazis fulfilled all the requirements for a warlike, destructive regime that would hasten the arrival of the Apocalypse. As citizens of Jehovah’s Kingdom, the Witnesses could not possibly swear allegiance to this or any other government or do military service in any form.
In 1933, there were about 20,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany; some of their regional branches at first tried to make an accommodation with the Nazi regime, emphasizing their own anti-Bolshevism and their opposition to the established churches, which the Nazis also detested. They began to be persecuted systematically in 1935; thereafter, thousands were thrown into concentration camps. Not that this was inevitable. The slightest sign of repentance would have sufficed for them to avoid the camps. When the war broke out, those who refused to do military service were singled out for the harshest treatment. According to Michel Reynaud and Sylvie Graffard, the Nazis executed at least two hundred Witnesses, mostly by the guillotine, as befitted Aryan citizens of the Reich. Between 2,500 and 5,000 died in the camps. For the Nazis, the Witnesses posed frustrating problems; they were not criminals, homosexuals, or Communists but hard-working German peasants and artisans. Some of those sentenced to death sang psalms on their way to the guillotine, confident that they would soon meet with their Maker. In the camps the members of the sect kept themselves clean, worked hard, and had no thoughts of escaping. The SS, which at first feared their proselytizing efforts and therefore dispersed the Witnesses in many camps, gradually discovered their value as gardeners, cooks, maids, and even babysitters. In his introduction to The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Nazis, Michael Berenbaum writes: “Witnesses could serve as barbers and shave their oppressors, holding a razor blade to their throat.” The authors of the book, who are not themselves Witnesses but have unconditional respect for them, say very little about this bizarre aspect of the Witnesses’ story. Other survivors occasionally mention the Witnesses in their memoirs as men and women with purple or violet triangular patches who would not participate in any plot to escape, who kept to themselves, and whom the SS fully trusted. Some survivors recall that Witnesses sometimes offered a helping hand to other inmates in the camps. Michel Reynaud and Sylvie Graffard have done admirable research in collecting information about the Witnesses, and in interviewing the few surviving members of the sect who were in the camps. They write that the Witnesses would not even make shoelaces for the soldiers; that, especially in the early years of Nazi rule, Witnesses were whipped and tortured in the camps by guards who ordered, “Raise your arm! Raise your arm!” Yet very few were willing to give the Nazi salute. The authors report that publications by the Witnesses were also banned in Italy, France, and Belgium during the war, and that at Nuremberg the Nazi idealogue Alfred Rosenberg defended the mistreatment of the Witnesses by referring to the US, where, during the war, some Witnesses who were conscientious objectors were held in prison camps. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were indeed badly treated in the US.
Unfortunately, Reynaud and Graffard’s book is repetitious and poorly organized; but it is the most informed account of the persecution of the Witnesses that we have. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were true martyrs in the traditional sense of the word, similar to the early Christians who would rather be devoured by lions than make a modest offering at the altar of a Roman emperor. They were also similar to the Jews of medieval times, who would rather be burned alive than abandon their faith. The history of such fervent willingness to endure persecution suggests how wrong it is to say that Jewish victims of Nazism are martyrs. Whether religious or irreligious, baptized or unbaptized, submissive or defiant, the Jews were under irrevocable sentence of death; they were victims. To call them martyrs, that is, people who were given a chance to choose between life and death, is to deny the absolute evil of the Nazi system.
3.
Jan T. Gross’s horrifying and thoughtful book Neighbors is about Poles and Jews, the two major victims of World War II. In his introduction, the author writes that he wants to show how “one day in July 1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women, and children.” According to his account, the members of the Gentile Polish population of Jedwabne, located in the poverty-stricken Bial/ystok province in northeastern Poland, either took part in the most bestial forms of torture and killing or cheered on the killers. With the exception of a single family, no one helped the victims. Although a handful of German gendarmes were present in the region, Gross states, Poles alone committed the crime, with the tacit approval of the Germans but without their participation. No wonder that when Gross published this devastating accusation in Polish and in Poland a year ago, an intense debate took place which, far from being over, seems to be gathering momentum. Fresh evidence and new polemical articles appear in Poland virtually every day.
Jan Gross, who is a professor of politics and European studies at New York University, was born in Poland. He participated in the democratic student movement of the 1960s, for which he was briefly imprisoned. Having witnessed government-inspired anti- Semitism, he left the country in the late 1960s. As an American scholar, he has published fine studies on the Soviet and the German occupation of World War II Poland. Several years ago, while in the Warsaw Jewish archives, he came across a deposition by Szmul Wasersztajn, dated April 1945, which described in detail the horrors inflicted in Jedwabne. Wasersztajn had himself escaped the massacre by hiding. His revelation led Gross to study the records of two court proceedings that took place in 1949 and 1953, respectively, in provincial courts of Communist Poland, against about two dozen Jedwabne defendants charged with carrying out the massacres. During the last few years, other eyewitness accounts by both Jewish and Gentile inhabitants of the town have been found. A memorial book about survivors in Israel was published in 1980 and the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Arnold conducted interviews in 1998 with those willing to remember what happened in the town on July 10, 1941.
While all this means that the monstrous events at Jedwabne were not completely unknown in Poland after World War II, no one seems to have been interested in investigating them further. Nor had the public taken notice of them. Such lack of awareness might seem inconceivable; yet until recent stories were published, I wonder how many Americans had ever heard of what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the end of May 1921, when the city’s whites, incited by the press and by politicians, massacred several hundred innocent blacks. Although I am a professional historian, I heard of this atrocity only last year, forty-four years after I arrived in the US. The Tulsa massacre, moreover, took place when the United States was at peace, whereas Jedwabne occurred during a terrible war, under alternating cruel occupations, and in the midst of total administrative and political chaos. According to Wasersztajn and others, the Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne lived in relative harmony until the late summer and fall of 1939, when, following the Hitler– Stalin pact of August 23, first the Germans and then the Soviet Red Army occupied the town. There can be no doubt about the horrors of Soviet occupation in the eastern half of Poland, which had immediately been incorporated into two of the Soviet Union’s western republics. In an excellent earlier study, Revolution from Abroad, Gross describes how the Communist authorities brutally deported 1.25 million people from Eastern Poland, mostly Poles, but also Jews and others, to Siberia; many of them died. The principal victims were from the Polish social, political, and military elite. Gross also writes that the Soviet NKVD executed about 100,000 people, nearly a tenth of the total male population. As he writes in Revolution from Abroad, “Very conservative estimates show that [between 1939 and 1941] the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction.”
Farmers were hard hit by Soviet confiscations of land as well as by anti-Soviet partisan activity and the even more violent retribution by the Soviet army and police that followed. It is no wonder that, following the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, many people in the region—Poles, Ukrainians, and Belorussians—received the Germans as liberators. Similar events took place, one might add, in the Baltic countries and in Bessarabia (today’s independent Moldova), all of which the Soviets had occupied as a result of the Hitler–Stalin Pact.
As Gross explains in Neighbors, no sooner did the Germans arrive in eastern Poland at the end of June 1941 than rumors spread that the new masters of the land had given permission for Polish Gentiles to kill the Jews. By then, the German police had been shooting thousands of Jews in towns not far from Jedwabne. It seemed to many inhabitants of Jedwabne that the time had come to take revenge for what they perceived to have been Jewish-Communist oppression. Besides, there was now the prospect of acquiring Jewish riches. Much of Neighbors is devoted to a detailed discussion of how the pogrom started a day or two after the arrival of the German troops, and how it culminated in an orgy of killing on July 10. Even before then, peasants came from neighboring hamlets driving empty wagons in the hope of taking over some booty from Jews. On July 10, under orders of the self-appointed new mayor, Marian Karolak, the chief culprit in what followed, young men armed with clubs, knives, and axes burst into Jewish homes, beating, kicking, and driving all the Jews they could find to the town square. One man stabbed eighteen Jews; others cut off heads, gouged out eyes, and slashed open the stomachs of their victims. Others forced young Jews to carry and then to bury a large statue of Lenin before killing them. All this was observed, according to Wasersztajn, by laughing spectators. Finally, all the survivors were driven into a peasant’s barn and burned alive. The spectators bludgeoned to death those who tried to escape.
While speculating on the significance of these events, Gross dismisses the argument that the Communist regime in the region included many Jews, or that Communist oppression had a major part in arousing the fury of the villagers. He concludes that they acted both out of sheer greed and because of their age-old hatred for the “killers of Christ” and “the shedders of the blood of Christian children.” It seems hard, however, to square this assessment with the scene described above involving the statue of Lenin, or the extreme savagery of the killing. Gross adds that no priest in the region was willing to lift a finger on behalf of the Jews, even though in Catholic Poland local priests would have had sufficient prestige to have stopped the atrocities.
Gross does not claim that all Poles were similar to the inhabitants of Jedwabne, but he points out that spontaneous atrocities occurred elsewhere, that violent anti-Semitism flared up again after World War II, and that the single family that had harbored Jews in Jedwabne was subjected to such hatred and even physical attacks that, after the war, they decided to leave Poland and now live in Chicago. In a clear allusion to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s famous collective indictment of the German people, Gross uses the term “willing executioners” in reference to the Poles of Jedwabne.
This seems to me an unfortunate choice of words. Not surprisingly, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” The statement is untrue when applied to the Polish or even to the German people as a whole; in any case it contradicts Goldhagen’s controversial argument that the German people were a unique breed of killers. The reception of Gross’s book in Poland has been nothing short of astonishing: it seems to have evoked more favorable responses than negative ones. Here we must remind ourselves that, since the eighteenth century, Poles have tended to see themselves as a martyr nation, occupied, humiliated, and oppressed by aggressive imperial powers. Many times in modern history, whether under Russian or other foreign rule, it was a punishable offense for a Pole to refer to his own country as Poland. While imprisoned or executed at home, Polish patriots fought in many parts of the world “For Your Freedom and Ours,” as they liked to put it. During World War II in Europe only Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Poland never surrendered to the Nazis, even though Poles were simultaneously persecuted by the Soviet Communists. More than a million non-Jewish Poles were killed in German prisons and camps; thousands upon thousands died fighting alongside the British, American, and Soviet armies. During the Warsaw uprising, between August and October 1944, nearly a quarter of a million people perished. At the end of the war, Poland became the subject of a deal in which the Western allies accepted both Soviet domination of Polish territory and the shift of the entire country’s borders from East to West at an immense cost in Polish, German, and Ukrainian lives.
Because of the hospitality extended by the old Polish kingdom, Poland historically harbored more Jews than all the other European countries combined. Although there was a tremendous rise of political anti-Semitism in independent Poland during the interwar years, Jewish political and cultural activity also flourished there. Against this background, Gross’s accusations have been devastating. The recent revelations of collaboration with the Nazis throughout Europe, and of Europe-wide participation in the Holocaust, seem to have made it more possible for many Polish intellectuals, young people, politicians, and clergymen to accept the notion that their countrymen had not been innocent either. Today the president as well as the government of Poland, and even the Catholic primate, Cardinal Glemp, are apologizing for crimes of which nearly all Poles had been unaware until the publication of Jan Gross’s writings. Moreover, not only these people but even most of Gross’s critics praise him for bringing into the open an appalling episode in Polish history.
There are, of course, those who denounce Jan Gross and his book. In their objections one can sometimes detect the old charge of a Jewish “worldwide conspiracy.” But these voices are not the loudest today. With some justification, other critics are asking for moreevidence and confirmation. Asking questions about a crucial historical event does not make one automatically an anti-Semite, yet this is how some of Gross’s Western supporters have chosen to view those raising questions about parts of his work. No book of history should be treated as Holy Writ, especially not a book which is based on a limited number of documents. If the published objections to Jan Gross’s account, one of the most prominent claims is that he pays too little attention in Neighbors to the horrors of the Soviet occupation. In truth, for a more forceful description of why this occupation drove some people to extremes of violence, one must turn to Gross’s own Revolution from Abroad as well as to other sources. When he discusses the most controversial of all questions in Jewish–Polish relations, namely that of Jewish participation in Soviet rule, Gross presents convincing evidence that Jews in Bial/ystok province were only marginally involved in Soviet oppressive measures, and that the Jews of Jedwabne were entirely innocent. However, Gross’s critics in Poland, especially the well-known historian of World War II Polish resistance movements Tomasz Strzembosz, argue that, in eastern Poland as a whole, a disproportionate number of Jews were involved in Communist police actions and police crimes. In Neighbors Gross says somewhat less than he says in his Revolution from Abroad about the joyful reception many of the Jews gave to the Soviet Red Army in September 1939, or about the large number of Jews in the Polish Communist movement. It was quite natural for many Jews to rejoice over the arrival of the Soviet Red Army in September 1939: if nothing else, it saved them from Nazi rule. It was also predictable, in those circumstances, that many Jews would work for the Soviet regime, some of them as militiamen or political policemen. Gross is correct, of course, in stating that the Soviets deported thousands of Jews to Siberia and that, in desperation, thousands of Jews applied for Soviet permission to move to the Nazi-held zone in Poland. But why deny that any Jews participated in Communist crimes? Jews, like everyone else, behave in a variety of ways. Some critics argue that Wasersztajn, who was in hiding, could not have seen all the horrors he claims to have witnessed. Others wonder about evidence from the trials in 1949 and 1953 which, according to Gross himself, were perfunctory affairs. (Marian Karolak, who should have been indicted for the major crime of ordering murder, was arrested by the Germans for theft during the war and disappeared.) The trial in 1949 lasted only two days, and in court the defendants complained of having been severely beaten by the police during their interrogation. The trial in 1953 involved a single defendant. Altogether, only one person was sentenced to death, but he was not executed, and within a few years all the accused were set free. Some historians, among them Tomasz Strzembosz, assert that Gross has misread some of the trial documents regarding the participation of Germans in the mass killing. He claims that there are more sources on Jedwabne in other Polish archives that Gross did not consult, and that Gross did no research in the German archives.
The main issue in contention is whether or not there were more than a handful of German soldiers, gendarmes, or Gestapo men on July 10 in Jedwabne. Gross says that there were fewer than a dozen of them and that all they did was take photographs of the massacre (photographs that haven’t been found). In response to the debate over Gross’s sources, the government-sponsored Institute of National Remembrance in Poland sent a historian to look into the relevant German archives; so far, he has found no conclusive evidence confirming or denying the presence of German soldiers in Jedwabne.
The question of German presence leads to another difficult issue, namely why the Jews did not defend themselves. As Gross writes, Jews made up two thirds of Jedwabne’s population. The Poles had no firearms. When some Polish writers raised this question, Jan Gross answered bitterly, arguing that the Jewish heads of families had to look after their wives and children. Yet is it not precisely in defense of their families that people tend to risk their lives? It is well known that, in extremis, some Polish Jews dared to confront even heavily armed SS soldiers; one can ask why the town’s Jewish blacksmiths, for instance, did not grab iron bars to fend off the attackers. They may have been hopelessly outnumbered, but the fact that they did not fight back may also suggest that there were more
than a handful of armed Germans present at that time. In brief, there is good reason for research and debate on the Jedwabne massacre to continue.
Gross is entirely right to point out that many Poles who bravely opposed the Nazis were anti-Semitic, and that many who did so even killed Jews. At least one of the Jedwabne murderers was later sent to Auschwitz. Conversely, the founder of Zegota, the one organization in Poland and in Europe as a whole that had as its sole purpose the saving of Jewish lives, was herself a zealous anti- Semite. She repeatedly expressed her wish that the Jews she was protecting would disappear from Poland after the war. None of this explains the horrifying behavior of the one hundred–odd Jedwabne farmers and artisans who did the killing; nor does it explain the abominable behavior of the onlookers. Gross himself finds no satisfactory explanation for what took place. What is clear is that many, many Eastern Europeans participated in German-initiated killings in those years. Even more Europeans rejoiced over what was happening to the Jews, or at least turned their backs on them. Pogroms similar to that in Jedwabne occurred elsewhere in Poland.
COMPLEMENT:
One Country Saved Its Jews. Were They Just Better People?
The surprising truth about Denmark in the Holocaust
Michael Ignatieff
The New Republic
December 15, 2013
This magnificent book states its central argument in its title. Danish Jews survived Hitler’s rule in World War II, when other European Jews did not, because Danes regarded their Jewish neighbors as countrymen. There was no “us” and “them;” there was just us.
When, in October 1943, the Gestapo came to round up the 7,500 Jews of Copenhagen, the Danish police did not help them to smash down the doors. The churches read letters of protest to their congregations. Neighbors helped families to flee to villages on the Baltic coast, where local people gave them shelter in churches, basements, and holiday houses and local fishermen loaded up their boats and landed them safely in neutral Sweden. Bo Lidegaard, the editor of the leading Danish newspaper Politiken, has retold this story using astonishingly vivid unpublished material from families who escaped, and the testimony of contemporary eyewitnesses, senior Danish leaders (including the king himself), and even the Germans who ordered the roundups. The result is an intensely human account of one episode in the persecution of European Jews that ended in survival.
The story may have ended well, but it is a complex tale. The central ambiguity is that the Germans warned the Jews and let most of them escape. Lidegaard claims this was because the Danes refused to help the Germans, but the causation might also have worked in the other direction. It was when the Danes realized that the Germans were letting some Jews go that they found the courage to help the rest of their Jewish community escape. Countrymen is a fascinating study in the ambiguity of virtue.
The Danes knew long before the war that their army could not resist a German invasion. Instead of overtly criticizing Hitler, the Social Democratic governments of the 1930s sought to inoculate their populations against the racist ideology next door. It was in those ominous years that the shared identity of all Danes as democratic citizens was drummed into the political culture, just in time to render most Danes deeply resistant to the Nazi claim that there existed a “Jewish problem” in Denmark. Lidegaard’s central insight is that human solidarity in crisis depended on the prior consolidation of a decent politics, on the creation of a shared political imagination. Some Danes did harbor anti-Semitic feelings, but even they understood the Jews to be members of a political community, and so any attack on them was an attack on the Danish nation as such.
The nation in question was imagined in civic terms rather than ethnic terms. What mattered was a shared commitment to democracy and law, not a common race or religion. We can see this in the fact that Danish citizens did not defend several hundred communists who were interned and deported by the Danish government for denouncing the Danish monarchy and supporting the Hitler-Stalin pact. The Danes did nothing to defend their own communists, but they did stand up for the Jews.
The Danish response to the Nazis illuminates a crucial fact about the Holocaust: the Germans did not always force the issue of extermination where they faced determined resistance from occupied populations. In Bulgaria, as Tzvetan Todorov has shown in his aptly titled book The Fragility of Goodness, the Jews were saved because the king of Bulgaria, the Orthodox Church, and a few key Bulgarian politicians refused to assist the German occupiers. Why did a similar civic sense of solidarity not take root in other countries? In Holland, why did 80 percent of Dutch Jews perish? And what about France: why did liberty, equality, and fraternity not apply to the citizens driven from their homes by French police and sent to deportation and death? These questions become harder to answer in the light of the Danish and Bulgarian counterexamples. One possible explanation is that the German occupation’s presence in Denmark was lighter than in either France or Holland. The Danes, like the Bulgarians, kept their king and maintained their own government throughout the occupation. Self-government gave them a capacity to defend Jews that was never possible in the occupied zones of France or Holland.
Both the Danish king and the Danish government decided that their best hope of maintaining Denmark’s sovereignty lay in cooperating but not collaborating with the German occupiers. This “cooperation” profited some Danes but shamed many others. The Danish population harbored ancestral hostility to the Germans, and the occupation reinforced these feelings. The Germans, for their part, put up with this frigid relationship: they needed Danish food, and Danish cooperation freed up German military resources for battle on the Eastern Front, and the Nazis wanted to be liked. They wanted their “cooperative” relationship with Denmark to serve as a model for a future European community under Hitler’s domination.
From very early on in this ambiguous relationship, the Danes, from the king on down, made it clear that harming the Jews would bring cooperation to an end and force the Germans to occupy the country altogether. The king famously told his prime minister, in private, that if the Germans forced the Danish Jews to wear a yellow star, then he would wear one too. Word of the royal position went public and even led to a myth that the king had actually ridden through the streets of Copenhagen on horseback wearing a yellow star on his uniform. The king never did wear a star. He didn’t have to wear one, because, thanks to his opposition, the Germans never imposed such a regulation in Denmark.
When, in late summer in 1943, the order came down from Eichmann to the local German authorities in Copenhagen that they had to rid the city of its Jews, these authorities faced a dilemma. They knew that the Danish politicians, police, and media—that Danish society as a whole—would resist and that, once the cooperation of the Danes had been lost, the Germans would have to run the country themselves. The Germans in Copenhagen were also beginning to have second thoughts about the war itself. By then the German armies had been defeated at Stalingrad. While the Gestapo in Poland and Eastern Europe faced the prospect of defeat by accelerating the infernal rhythm of extermination in the death camps, the Gestapo in Denmark began to look for a way out. The local Gauleiter, a conniving opportunist named Werner Best, did launch the roundup of the Jews, but only after letting the Jewish community find out in advance what was coming, giving them time to escape. He did get his hands on some people in an old-age home and dispatch them to Theresienstadt, but all but 1 percent of the Jewish community escaped his clutches. It is an astonishing number.
When Adolf Eichmann came to Copenhagen in 1943 to find out why so many Jews had escaped, he did not cashier the local Gestapo. Instead he backed down and called off the deportations of Danes who were half-Jewish or married to Jews. Lidegaard’s explanation for Eichmann’s volte face is simply that the institutions of Danish society all refused to go along. And without their cooperation, a Final Solution in Denmark became impossible. Totalitarianism, not to mention ethnic cleansing and ethnic extermination, always requires a great deal of collaboration.
When they got wind of German plans in September 1943, the Danish government resigned, and no politician agreed to serve in a collaborationist government with the Germans thereafter. After the roundups of Jews were announced, leading Danish politicians of different parties issued a joint statement declaring, “The Danish Jews are an integral part of the people, and therefore all the people are deeply affected by the measures taken, which are seen as a violation of the Danish sense of justice.” This is the political culture of “countrymen” with which Lidegaard explains the extraordinary determination—and success—of the Danes in protecting their Jewish population.
Such general support across Danish society seems to have empowered the Jews of Copenhagen. When the Gestapo came to search the Jewish community’s offices in September 1943, the community treasurer, Axel Hertz, did not hesitate to ask the intruders, “By what right do you come here?” The German in charge replied, quite candidly: “By the right of the stronger.” And Hertz retorted: “That is no good right.” Jews in Denmark behaved like rights-bearers, not like victims in search of compassion. And they were not wrong: their feeling of membership in the Danish polity had a basis in its political culture.
When the Germans arrived to begin the deportations, Jews had already been warned—in their synagogues—and they simply vanished into the countryside, heading for the coast to seek a crossing to neutral Sweden. There was little or no Jewish communal organization and no Danish underground to help them. What ensued was a chaotic family-by-family flight, made possible simply because ordinary members of Danish society feigned ignorance when Germans questioned them, while sheltering families in seaside villages, hotels, and country cottages. Danish police on the coast warned hiding families when the Gestapo came to call, and signaled all-clear so that boats bearing Danish Jews could slip away to Sweden. The fishermen who took the Danish Jews across the Baltic demanded huge sums for the crossing, but managed to get their frightened fellow citizens to safety. When the Gestapo did seize Jewish families hiding in the church of the small fishing village of Gilleleje, the people were so outraged that they banded together to assist others to flee. One villager even confronted the local Gestapo officer, shining a flashlight in his face and exclaiming: “The poor Jews!” When the German replied, “It is written in the Bible that this shall be their fate,” the villager unforgettably replied: “But it is not written that it has to happen in Gilleleje.”
Why did the Danes behave so differently from most other societies and populations in occupied Europe? For a start, they were the only nation where escape to a safe neutral country lay across a narrow strait of water. Moreover, they were not subject to exterminatory pressure themselves. They were not directly occupied, and their leadership structures from the monarch down to the local mayors were not ripped apart. The newspapers in Copenhagen were free enough to report the deportations and thus to assist any Jews still not in the know to flee. The relatively free circulation of information also made it impossible for non-Jewish Danes to claim, as so many Germans did, that “of this we had no knowledge.”
Most of all, Denmark was a small, homogeneous society, with a stable democracy, a monarchy that commanded respect, and a shared national hostility to the Germans. Denmark offers some confirmation of Rousseau’s observation that virtue is most easily fostered in small republics.
Lidegaard is an excellent guide to this story when he sticks close to Danish realities. When he ventures further and asks bigger questions, he goes astray. At the end of his book he asks: “Are human beings fundamentally good but weak? Or are we brutal by nature, checked and controlled only by civilization?” He wants the Danish story to answer such questions, but it cannot bear such weight. There simply are no general answers to the question of why humans behave as they do in times of extremity. What Lidegaard’s story really demonstrates is that history and context are all. Denmark was Denmark: that is all one can truthfully say.
Lidegaard makes the argument, in his conclusion, that had resistance been as strong elsewhere in Europe as it was in Denmark, the Nazis might never have been able to drive the Final Solution to its conclusion. He writes:
Hatred of the different was not some primordial force that was unleashed. Rather, it was a political convenience that could be used as needed, and in most occupied territories the Nazis followed their interests in pursuing this with disastrous consequences. But without a sounding board the strategy did not work. It could be countered by simple means—even by a country that was defenseless and occupied—by the persistent national rejection of the assumption that there was a “Jewish problem.”
This strikes me as only half-right. Anti-Semitism was indeed not “a primordial force” that the Nazis simply tapped into wherever they conquered. Jews met different fates in each country the Nazis occupied—or at least the rates of destruction and escape varied. But it does not follow that what the Danes did other peoples could have also done. The Germans faced resistance of varying degrees of ferocity in every country that they occupied in Europe. Where they possessed the military and police power to do so, they crushed that resistance with unbridled cruelty. Where, as in Denmark, they attempted a strategy of indirect rule, they had to live with the consequences: a populace that could not be terrorized into doing their bidding, and could therefore be counted on to react when fellow citizens were arrested and carried away.
One uncomfortable possibility that Lidegaard does not explore is that the Nazis sought a strategy of indirect rule precisely because they saw the Danes as fellow Aryans, potential allies in an Aryan Europe. This would explain why the Nazis were so comfortable in Copenhagen and so shaken by Danish resistance. The Poles they could dismiss as Untermenschen, and the French as ancient enemies; but to be resisted by supposed Aryans was perversely disarming. Why else would a ferocious bureaucrat such as Eichmann melt before Danish objections to the arrest of Jews married to Danes? One paradoxical possibility is that the Nazis bowed to Danish protests because their delusional racial anthropology led them to view the Danes as members of their own family. To their eternal credit, the Danes exploited this imagined family resemblance to defy an act of infamy.
Countrymen is a story about a little country that did the right thing for complicated reasons, and got away with it for equally complicated reasons. It is a story that reinforces an old truth: solidarity and decency depend on a dense tissue of connection among people, on long-formed habits of the heart, on resilient cultures of common citizenship, and on leaders who marshal these virtues by their example. In Denmark, this dense tissue bound human beings together and indirect rule made it impossible for the Germans to rip it apart. Elsewhere in Europe, by contrast, it was destroyed in stages, first by ghettoizing and isolating the Jewish people and then by insulating bystanders from the full horror of Nazi intentions. Once Jews had been stripped of citizenship, property, rights, and social existence—once they could appeal only to the common humanity of persecutors and bystanders alike—it was too late.
There is a sobering message in Lidegaard’s tale for the human rights era that came after these abominations. If a people come to rely for their protection on human rights alone, on the mutual recognition of common humanity, they are already in serious danger. The Danish story seems to tell us that it is not the universal human chain that binds peoples together in extremity, but more local and granular ties: the particular consciousness of time, place, and heritage that led a Danish villager to stand up to the Gestapo and say no, it will not happen here, not in our village. This extraordinary story of one small country has resonance beyond its Danish context. Countrymen should be read by anyone seeking to understand what precise set of shared social and political understandings can make possible, in times of terrible darkness, acts of civil courage and uncommon decency.
Michael Ignatieff teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
Voir par ailleurs:
LETTRE DE S.E. MONSEIGNEUR L’ARCHEVÊQUE DE TOULOUSE SUR LA PERSONNE HUMAINE
Mes très chers Frères,
Il y a une morale chrétienne, il y a une morale humaine qui impose des devoirs et reconnaît des droits. Ces devoirs et ces droits tiennent à la nature de l’homme. Ils viennent de Dieu. On peut les violer. Il n’est au pouvoir d’aucun mortel de les supprimer.
Que des enfants, des femmes, des hommes, des pères et des mères soient traités comme un vil troupeau, que les membres d’une même famille soient séparés les uns des autres et embarqués pour une destination inconnue, il était réservé à notre temps de voir ce triste spectacle.
Pourquoi le droit d’asile dans nos églises n’existe-t-il plus ?
Pourquoi sommes-nous des vaincus ?
Seigneur ayez pitié de nous.
Notre-Dame, priez pour la France.
Dans notre diocèse, des scènes d’épouvante — l’expression a été remplacée par « émouvantes » après que Mgr Saliège ait reçu des pressions — ont eu lieu dans les camps de Noé et de Récébédou. Les Juifs sont des hommes, les Juives sont des femmes. Les étrangers sont des hommes, les étrangères sont des femmes. Tout n’est pas permis contre eux, contre ces hommes, contre ces femmes, contre ces pères et mères de famille. Ils font partie du genre humain. Ils sont nos frères comme tant d’autres. Un chrétien ne peut l’oublier.
France, patrie bien-aimée France qui porte dans la conscience de tous tes enfants la tradition du respect de la personne humaine, France chevaleresque et généreuse, je n’en doute pas, tu n’es pas responsable de ces horreurs — pour la même raison, ce mot a été remplacé par « erreurs ».
Recevez, mes chers Frères, l’assurance de mon respectueux dévouement.
Jules-Géraud SALIÈGE
Archevêque de Toulouse
À lire dimanche prochain [23 août 1942], sans commentaire. »
Voir aussi:
Lettre de Monseigneur l’Évêque de Montauban,
sur le respect de la personne humaine
Le 26 août 1942
Mes biens chers Frères,
Des scènes douloureuses et parfois horribles se déroulent en France, sans que la France en soit responsable.
À Paris, par dizaines de milliers, des Juifs ont été traités avec la plus barbare sauvagerie. Et voici que dans nos régions on assiste à un spectacle navrant ; des familles sont disloquées ; des hommes et des femmes sont traités comme un vil troupeau, et envoyés vers une destination inconnue, avec la perspective des plus graves dangers.
Je fais entendre la protestation indignée de la conscience chrétienne et je proclame que tous les hommes, aryens ou non aryens, sont frères parce que créés par le même Dieu ; que les hommes, quelle que soit leur race ou leur religion, ont droit au respect des individus et des États.
Or les mesures antisémitiques actuelles sont un mépris de la dignité humaine, une violation des droits les plus sacrés de la personne et de la famille.
Que Dieu console et fortifie ceux qui sont iniquement persécutés ! Qu’Il accorde au monde la paix véritable et durable, fondée sur la justice et la charité ! »
Pierre-Marie Théas
Évêque de Montauban
À lire sans commentaire à toutes les messes, dans toutes les églises et chapelles du diocèse, le dimanche 30 août 1942
COMPLEMENT:
En quoi votre ouvrage, riche de témoignages et d’archives, entend-il réévaluer notre regard sur l’histoire de la Shoah en France ?
Jacques Semelin : Dans notre mémoire collective, les juifs qui ont échappé à la mort sont ceux qui sont revenus de déportation. Mon propos n’est ni de minimiser l’horreur du génocide de 25 % des juifs de France ni de raconter une « histoire rose » du sauvetage des juifs en France. Mes témoins ont perdu des êtres chers durant cette période.
Mon travail d’historien a simplement consisté à montrer comment 75 % des juifs vivant en France ont échappé à la déportation. Ce chiffre est connu des spécialistes mais pas des Français, comme j’ai pu m’en apercevoir au cours de mon enquête.
Là où je romps avec l’explication mémorielle, c’est que le nombre de Justes français – 3 500 environ – ne peut pas expliquer à lui seul la survie d’au moins 200 000 personnes perçues comme juives. Je suis désolé de contredire, sur ce point, les présidents Jacques Chirac et François Hollande ! J’ai cherché à déplacer le regard des Justes, titre mémoriel certes important, vers ces hommes et ces femmes qui ont dû se débrouiller, plus ou moins bien, pour survivre au quotidien face à la persécution et aux arrestations.
Quelle part a joué l’entraide individuelle dans cette survie ?
Plusieurs facteurs individuels très importants entrent en compte, comme la nationalité : 90 % des Français juifs n’ont pas été déportés, contre 50 à 60 % des juifs étrangers vivant en France. Ce fut une découverte et une surprise pour moi. Les Français juifs étaient intégrés dans la société, ils parlaient français, avaient davantage de moyens financiers et pouvaient faire appel à de la famille, des amis, des voisins. Ils n’avaient d’ailleurs parfois pas conscience que la persécution pouvait les viser.
La nationalité et les ressources n’expliquent cependant pas tout. C’est le point central qui se dégage de mes témoignages : une forme de solidarité fut indispensable. Prenons l’exemple de cet instituteur du nord de la France qui, voyant arriver à l’école un enfant avec l’étoile jaune, lui dit de partir avec ses parents dans le Sud, en zone dite libre, ce qu’ils feront.
Là, ils seront accueillis jusqu’à la fin de la guerre par une famille d’agriculteurs. Cette famille a été reconnue comme Juste. Mais l’instituteur qui a pris quelques minutes pour parler à l’enfant juif a joué un rôle déterminant. Il ne s’agit pas d’un acte de résistance mais d’entraide.
Cette solidarité des petits gestes s’est manifestée à travers quatre figures clés : l’ange gardien, l’hôtesse, le faussaire et le passeur. Ce pouvait être un agriculteur, un instituteur, une assistante sociale, un concierge, un employé des chemins de fer ou un prêtre.
La religion a-t-elle joué un rôle dans cette solidarité ?
Je souligne trois facteurs déterminants : les croyances religieuses, l’esprit républicain et le patriotisme. Le rôle pionnier des protestants est connu, en particulier à travers les pasteurs du Chambon-sur-Lignon (Haute-Loire) et la Cimade.
Mais il ne faut pas oublier les initiatives précoces de catholiques comme l’abbé Devaux à Paris ou à Lyon le jésuite Pierre Chaillet, fondateur des Cahiers de Témoignage chrétien. On ne peut pas juger l’Église catholique sur le silence du pape Pie XII ou des Églises nationales : il faut aussi regarder les comportements de la base.
La charité chrétienne envers son prochain l’a souvent emporté sur l’anti-judaïsme, la compassion envers les persécutés sur la stigmatisation. La protestation de Mgr Saliège, le 23 août 1942, a eu un effet multiplicateur et une dimension internationale méconnue, puisque notamment le New York Times s’en est fait l’écho. Il faudrait réévaluer notre mémoire collective sur le rôle de l’Église catholique, à l’image de Sylvie Bernay avec ses travaux sur les « diocèses refuges » .
L’argument du nombre de Français juifs sauvés n’est-il pas, déjà, le principal argument des défenseurs du maréchal Pétain ?
Constater que 75 % des juifs de France ont été sauvés ne revient pas à exonérer le maréchal Pétain. Berlin avait stratégiquement besoin de Vichy – qu’il s’agisse du maintien de l’ordre ou de l’économie de guerre –, et Vichy aurait donc sans doute pu s’opposer aux déportations. Il n’en demeure pas moins, quelles qu’aient été les intentions d’un régime pratiquant l’antisémitisme d’État, qu’en soi, le maintien d’un appareil étatique a eu un effet positif pour la survie des juifs de France.
Qu’est-ce qui vous a conduit à travailler sur ce sujet ?
C’est Simone Veil qui m’a décidé, en 2008, à me lancer dans cette vaste fresque, opérant ainsi un lien entre mes deux domaines de recherches, la résistance civile et les massacres de masse. Le plus grand défi intellectuel et émotionnel consistait à articuler la grande histoire et les histoires individuelles. Mes rencontres avec les survivants m’ont porté pour raconter des histoires de vie, et finalement la vie au-delà de la souffrance.
[…] des chrétiens est d’opposer à la violence exercée sur leur conscience les armes de l’Esprit. Pasteur André Trocmé […]
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LA DESTRUCTION DES JUIFS EUROPÉENS N’ÉTAIT PAS UNE QUESTION DE HAINE (Quel blanchiment pervers de l’enseignement de l’Holocauste quand en ignorant les forces anti-libérales de la gauche et les politiques anti-juives du Moyen-Orient, il devient une couverture pour l’antisionisme et alimente même l’idéologie hideuse à laquelle il prétend résister ?)
THE DESTRUCTION OF EUROPEAN JEWRY WAS NOT ABOUT HATE (What perverse laundering of Holocaust education when ignoring the left’s anti-liberal forces and the Middle East’s anti-Jewish politics, it becomes a cover for anti-Zionism and even feeds the hideous ideology it pretends to resist ?)
« The Soviets in their Gulag and forced famine in Ukraine killed more than the Nazis did in their death camps. Weaponizing the Holocaust against Nazism detracts attention from other ongoing anti-Jewish and anti-Western forces. It thus becomes an instrument of politics under the pretense of avoiding politics. Demonizing the right minimizes anti-liberal forces of the left and conceals the record of applied socialism as well as that of Middle Eastern varieties of anti-Jewish politics. Facing history would require the kind of analysis that science undertakes when it isolates the variables to learn the exact causes of a disease as a means of seeking cure and prevention. The prevention of anti-Jewish politics begins with studying of all of its kinds, asking, cui bono — whom does it benefit? We would not get far in fighting Covid-19 if we understood ourselves merely to be fighting sickness writ large. (…) Holocaust education as currently defined introduces Jews at their lowest point in history — as victims, humiliated, suffering, starved, pursued, despised, and turned to ashes. (…) Historically speaking, Jews are demonstrably the opposite of victims (…) Any true « Never Again » project would trace this unprecedented historical example of self-emancipation. Instead, it tells half the story and distorts the half that it tells. (…) The perversity of teaching about the Holocaust rather than American and Jewish struggles for freedom extracts the wrong lesson from a horrifying precedent. (…) The liberal conscription of the Holocaust as a moral exemplum was misguided from the start, and as presently conceived, it conceals rather than confronts anti-Jewish aggression, falsifies both the nature of anti-Jewish politics and the nature of the Jewish people, advances political causes under false pretenses, and cultivates identification with victims rather than with the soldiers who protect and, if necessary, liberate the victims. »
Ruth Wisse
« Is there any evidence that Holocaust education decreases hatred of the Jews among those Americans who are susceptible to it? In reality, anti-Semitism in the United States has spread in tandem with increased teaching about the Holocaust. And there is really no sound theoretical underpinning for this expanding educational initiative. Societies that concentrate on their self-improvement generally rely on positive instruction and reinforcement. Jews teach the Torah and the Talmud as a means of encouraging behavior within those guidelines. The Bible, the Constitution, and Poor Richard’s Almanack were traditional American sources of moral education, good citizenship, and democratic values. A pedagogical fixation on hate, by contrast, has been associated with societies like fascist Germany and Soviet Russia that wish to direct blame and hate against designated alien or undesirable groups. How did teaching about hate to prevent hate become an American priority? Already 30 years ago, in a Commentary Magazine article titled « How They Teach the Holocaust, » noted historian and intellectual Lucy Dawidowicz raised serious concerns about the distorted curricula and questionable outcomes of Holocaust-related projects like Facing History and Ourselves. Consulted as an authority on what she called the « war against the Jews, » Dawidowicz undertook a thorough study of these materials, leading her to question the wisdom of encouraging « oppression studies » in the absence of any robust teaching of history. Essential reading for anyone approaching this subject, her study identified problems ranging from the failure to suggest that anti-Semitism had any history before Hitler to teaching American children raised in unprecedented freedom and permissiveness that « obedience to the law is not necessarily the determinant of a moral person. » What’s more, Holocaust education is routinely appropriated for activist agendas. (…) Pitiable refugee and admirable Israeli were two sides of the liberal image of the Jews that prevailed for the quarter-century after the Second World War. America had come to the rescue of what was known as the Free World and, in simplest terms, had defeated evil and liberated the good. Jews were the emblem of those it had rescued, yet at the same time — here was the happy surprise — they were no longer in need of rescuing because they were doing it themselves in a spunky way reminiscent of the founding of the United States. The Arabs were cast as the evil forces — multiple countries declaring war against the smallest among them, almost half a billion Muslims raging against 6 million fewer Jews than the world’s 16.5 million before the war. The asymmetry was overwhelming, yet the transformed Jews were holding out like their archetypal David against Goliath. Their liberation was easy to appreciate as a great liberal cause. Even more important from the liberal perspective, for the first time since the dawn of Emancipation, anti-Jewish politics was now also out of favor on the political left. Inherent in the teachings of Marx and all their offshoots was opposition to the Jewish amalgam of peoplehood and religious civilization. Bolshevism outlawed these manifestations of Judaism in Hebrew and Zionism. The Soviet Union hailed the Arab attacks against the Jews of pre-state Palestine as the start of an Arab revolution and turned anti-Zionism into a Soviet cause. Among its passionate adherents were Jewish internationalists in the communist cells of New York and Hollywood who claimed that only communism could defeat the fascists. These trends penetrated American elite circles in the 1930s and ’40s but then subsided with revelations of Stalin’s crimes, the Gulag prison system in Russia, and Soviet spying abroad. Thus, the decline of Soviet communism, even more than the defeat of Nazism, rehabilitated the reputation of Jews and Israel among liberals. Once the Communist Party became inactive, it took several decades before the New Left once again injected anti-Zionism into American culture. (…) So-called « realists » of the American State Department, who weighed competing economic and political benefits in the Middle East, had almost always tilted toward the Arabs, but the Cold War against the Soviet Union also tipped Congress favorably toward the Jews. (…) The Jackson-Vanik approach represented a hard liberalism that could stand against communist political repression. Hard liberalism generally sides with the Jews against their enemies, who are always simultaneously the enemies of liberal democracy. All enemies of liberalism may not be anti-Jewish, but all anti-Semites and anti-Zionists are anti-liberal. This political axiom means that hard liberalism will stand against a hostile left as resolutely as it does against a belligerent right. One could say that defense of the Jews — whether in their dispersion or in their homeland — is the surest test of liberal resolve; when that resolve collapses, we get the rise of anti-Jewish politics. And it is just then, too, that we find the rise of Holocaust education. The change from that robust Exodus view of the Jews to the split between the bad Zionists of Israel and the good Jews of Auschwitz occurred in the same country — America — under the same system of government with more or less the same institutions. (…) Edward Said introduced anti-Zionism into higher education. Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a colleague and eventual successor of Lionel Trilling — regarded by some as the most influential American critic of his generation (…) Said greatly surpassed Trilling in influence, but he did so in large part by distancing himself from Western civilization. His 1978 book Orientalism theorized that Western scholarship about « the East » was essentially a product of the prejudices of the imperialist, colonialist societies that produced it. He included Jewish scholars in Western civilization and Israel as part of Western colonizing culture that kept the Arabs as subjugated subalterns. As a political activist, his primary examples of subjugated subalterns were the Palestinians — among whom Said included himself. « Port Said » became the point of entry through which anti-Western ideology, headed by anti-Zionism, penetrated and came to dominate theory in the humanities and social sciences. Middle East scholar Martin Kramer describes how Said turned Middle East studies into a « subsidized, thousand-man lobby for Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian causes. » (…) Said’s impact on critical theory coincided with the rise of the left in American higher education and the culture it promoted in the media and the arts. The growing number of tenured radicals in the universities coincided with a rapid shift from a civil-rights ideal of equal opportunity to the affirmative-action ideal of equal outcome. Whereas equal opportunity that admitted individuals based on merit allowed Jews to advance according to how well they could prove themselves, equal outcome counted Jews in proportion to their tiny percentage in the general population and so effectively reduced their numbers. As the theoretical basis for socialism collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites, the theories of Orientalism and anti-Zionism replaced it, attacking capitalist democracy for perceived discrimination based on racial, gender, and minority status. The politics of grievance surged among disaffected groups, calling liberal democracy a sham — a cover-up for the subjugation of blacks, Latinos, and women. Anti-Semitism had flourished in Europe because Jews were an easy, time-honored, and visible mark, and the same has proven true in America, where Jews and the Jewish state stand in for capitalists, imperialists, whites, and the patriarchy. Not coincidentally, since the 1970s, Arab and Muslim groups, academic and political Arabists, Islamists, and a portion of American Muslims raised on anti-Zionism have revved up the war against Israel in America. When Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago published The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007, its function was not just to imply that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was improperly manipulating American foreign policy, but to conceal the dramatic increase of Arab efforts in the opposite camp. Mitchell Bard’s 2010 book The Arab Lobby exposed what Walt and Mearsheimer had hidden from view — namely, the Arab lobby’s far better funded « petrodiplomatic complex » in Washington and buy-in at American universities. Bard’s chart of funding shows the many millions that Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Arab countries strategically pump into several dozen American universities like Georgetown, the University of Virginia, and George Washington University — more than $40 million to Harvard alone. This funding seeps down into curricula of high schools, like the ones in Newton, Massachusetts, that use the anti-Israel materials these universities produce. These developments, in time, transformed the post-war images of the Jew from victim-turned-hero to exploiter and villain. Holocaust education of the time fit anti-Zionism like the protective sheath of a sword. Of course (…) Nothing I am saying here questions the obligations of commemorating the dead and establishing every detail of the historical record. Rather, the potential for corruption begins with the impulse to make the Holocaust a universal symbol of evil, Nazism synonymous with « hatred, » and Holocaust education a redemptive American pursuit. Journalist Judith Miller, then reporting for the New York Times, described how the idea of a national Holocaust Memorial was initially promoted by Jewish officials in the Carter administration. Relations between Jimmy Carter and the Jewish community at the time had plummeted. Carter had angered American Jewish leaders by endorsing a Palestinian state. He had also defied the pro-Israel lobby in approving the sale of F-15 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia. People were therefore surprised when Carter changed his earlier opposition to the memorial project and supported the construction of the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall. But it was no surprise: One should have appreciated the leverage this gave him to steer its mission in the universalizing direction he preferred. The phrase associated with the Holocaust memorial project, « Never Again, » left unspecified the agents and means of deterrence, and even the goal itself. The Never Again Act defines « the Holocaust » as « the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators » and applies it equally to other classes of people that were targeted because of their perceived « ‘racial inferiority,’ such as Roma, the disabled, Slavs, » and groups that were « persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals. » But these included categories are not compatible. The anti-Semitism that originated in Germany and percolated in other European countries was an ideology, a movement, and a strategy that organized politics explicitly against the Jews. In countries as different as France, Austria, Russia, and Poland, candidates and parties ran on platforms of anti-Semitism, explaining social crises as the fault of the Jews. The Nuremburg Laws and the Final Solution were unambiguously directed at the Jews. In fact, some of the groups included among the Nazi targets collaborated with Nazis in the extermination of the Jews, and some produced their own versions of anti-Jewish politics. By mischaracterizing a historical process, the inclusive formulation ensured that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum would neither address anti-Semitism nor confront its current practitioners. To put it bluntly: The museum depoliticized, de-historicized, and universalized a political and historical process to prevent teaching anti-Semitism or the war against the Jews. On a visit to the museum shop in the 1990s, expecting to purchase a standard work on anti-Semitism, I was told that the shop did not carry « political material » or anything related to history after 1945. But this policy was disingenuous, since the museum also selectively eliminated information about that period. For example, there was no discussion of the decision of Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, to coordinate his efforts in Palestine with those of Hitler in Europe. Al-Husseini’s collaboration with Hitler included organizing Muslims in Europe to fight with the Nazis and urging the inclusion of Jewish children in the Final Solution. No less relevant was the haven Arab countries offered Nazis after the war in aligned efforts to spread anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world. In direct contrast to the assumptions of Holocaust education, anti-Semitism served some Arab and Muslim leaders as a positive model of what can be done to the Jews. And yet this most consequential aspect of the period is erased, lest it interfere with the museum’s laundered idea of « hatred. » In the early years of planning the museum project, Wiesel was defeated in his attempt to keep the focus on anti-Semitism. He eventually quit the Holocaust Museum commission, but without going public about his scruples. He tried to split the difference by saying the « universality of the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness: The Event is essentially Jewish, yet its interpretation is universal. » This sounds like a liberal version of the Crucifixion. The term « holocaust » means a burnt offering — a sacrifice by fire — and the sacrificed Jews became the secular-liberal version of martyred Jesus who died for the betterment of humankind. Christians believe that the martyrdom and resurrection of Christ are redemptive, but they also erected a religious structure that makes certain demands on its adherents. Liberals imagine the immolation of the Jews as a similar teaching on a larger scale, but as an article of faith with no specific application. The present conception and application of Holocaust education is not only flawed but harmful to the Jews and America alike. First, the destruction of European Jewry was not about hate. The mass murder of 6 million Jews began as part of an electoral process in which a party came to power by organizing politics against the Jews. The politics of grievance and blame may indeed foment hatred, distrust, envy, rage, fear, and violence, but it is primarily a political instrument for gaining, wielding, and extending power. Anti-Semitism draws on centuries of anti-Jewish teaching and opposition, but it assumes greater political potency when leaders need to win the allegiance of voters and followers. Hitler ran on this platform and used it in the conquest of other nations, inviting their citizens to join in the killing and plundering of the Jews. Some people organized against Jews without hating them. Whereas the analysis of anti-Semitism in fascist, nationalist, communist, Islamist, and other forms of government is indispensable for the understanding of anti-liberal politics, the homogenization of anti-Jewish politics into social psychology misdirects analysis, prevents understanding, and distorts the subject it pretends to teach. Fighting political evil takes political will, which requires political perception. Second, Holocaust education distorts by equating evil with Nazism. The Second World War began with the pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to divide Eastern Europe between them, and the parallels between the two totalitarian regimes included opposition to the Jews, albeit on different grounds. The Soviets in their Gulag and forced famine in Ukraine killed more than the Nazis did in their death camps, and the two systems went head to head in their war on liberals and Jews. (…) Weaponizing the Holocaust against Nazism detracts attention from other ongoing anti-Jewish and anti-Western forces. It thus becomes an instrument of politics under the pretense of avoiding politics. Demonizing the right minimizes anti-liberal forces of the left and conceals the record of applied socialism as well as that of Middle Eastern varieties of anti-Jewish politics. Facing history would require the kind of analysis that science undertakes when it isolates the variables to learn the exact causes of a disease as a means of seeking cure and prevention. The prevention of anti-Jewish politics begins with studying of all of its kinds, asking, cui bono — whom does it benefit? We would not get far in fighting Covid-19 if we understood ourselves merely to be fighting sickness writ large. Third, Holocaust education as currently defined introduces Jews at their lowest point in history — as victims, humiliated, suffering, starved, pursued, despised, and turned to ashes. Nazi energy and ingenuity destroyed a third of the Jewish people, with the cooperation of others, transforming them into the burnt sacrifice of the liberal imagination. Who gave liberals the right to keep using the image of the Jews in this distorted way? (…) Historically speaking, Jews are demonstrably the opposite of victims — they are builders, creators, innovators, facilitators, perpetually adaptive, the model of entrepreneurial resilience under circumstances beyond imagining. By the time Hitler came to power, the Jews had found their own solution by creating through Zionism the infrastructure for their recovered homeland. Once they realized the time was ripe, they applied their energies to doing what had been considered impossible and resurrected their sovereign country. Any true « Never Again » project would trace this unprecedented historical example of self-emancipation. Instead, it tells half the story and distorts the half that it tells. It does violence to the Jewish people and to moral education, which must include the assumption of responsibility for self-protection. Finally, yet by no means least, education that centers on the Holocaust violates the spirit of America, which is about the attainment and protection of freedom and a constant drive for self-improvement. Americans and Jews won their freedom in wars of independence. America fought a civil war against slavery and to remain united. Nazism and communism would rule the world had it not been for American military resistance. Israelis fight for their existence every day of their lives and suffer great losses whenever they relax their vigilance. Now as ever, only the will to fight for the good can defeat the forces of evil, and a peace-loving people that does not train for self-defense will suffer the fate of the Jews of Europe. The perversity of teaching about the Holocaust rather than American and Jewish struggles for freedom extracts the wrong lesson from a horrifying precedent. Representative Maloney doubtless meant well when she introduced the « Never Again Education Act, » but her timing replicated President Carter’s calculated support for the Holocaust Museum as a cover for anti-Zionism. Just three months after the bill was introduced, the Democratic Party refused to censure Representative Ilhan Omar for overtly anti-Semitic pronouncements. Instead, Democrats in Congress cobbled together a resolution condemning anti-Semitism — along with anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against a handful of other minorities — and shoved it onto the president’s desk. Yet anti-Zionism flourishes in the party’s ranks, to the point that its presidential candidates scorn the gatherings of AIPAC and support anti-Israel legislation in the party platform. Support for Holocaust education was presumably intended to show opposition to anti-Semitism, but intentionally or not, this « opposition to hate » feeds the hideous ideology it pretends to resist. Unlike other anti-Jewish ventures that are powered by their declared enemies, this one has the backing of many Jews and well-intentioned liberals, who are often one and the same. When there is so much apparent unanimity on a subject, it may seem perverse to oppose it. The fact that supporters of Nazism are also opposed to Holocaust teaching may wrongly suggest that opponents in general are encouraging the Nazi cause. Many docents, teachers, and others involved in this project obviously trust that Holocaust education will protect Jews — and « other threatened minorities » — from harm. Yet doubts about the Holocaust project were raised from the outset, and — if one needs reminding — consensus does not guarantee the good. The best intentions left untested can have the most damaging results. The decline of formal religion may have created a serious deficiency in moral education, but the Holocaust dare not serve as a lever of conscience. The liberal conscription of the Holocaust as a moral exemplum was misguided from the start, and as presently conceived, it conceals rather than confronts anti-Jewish aggression, falsifies both the nature of anti-Jewish politics and the nature of the Jewish people, advances political causes under false pretenses, and cultivates identification with victims rather than with the soldiers who protect and, if necessary, liberate the victims. (…) As the biblical story of the Exodus has inspired other oppressed peoples to gain their freedom by demanding, « [l]et my people go, » the passage of the Jews from Holocaust to Homeland can teach how a people wins and maintains its freedom. This is the education we need — an education whose meaning is universal. It will take time to revise thinking on this, so we had better begin now. »
Ruth R. Wisse
The Dark Side of Holocaust Education
Ruth R. Wisse
Fall 2020
In January 2019 Carolyn Maloney, Democratic representative from New York, introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to support Holocaust education in the United States. Called the « Never Again Education Act, » it was passed almost unanimously by the House and the Senate and signed into law by President Donald Trump on May 29, 2020. It authorized the expenditure of $2 million annually, for the next five years, to be distributed at the discretion of the director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The stated purpose of the act was to remind us of the enormity of the Holocaust and to further education about the Nazi Final Solution:
As intolerance, antisemitism, and bigotry are promoted by hate groups, Holocaust education provides a context in which to learn about the danger of what can happen when hate goes unchallenged and there is indifference in the face of the oppression of others; learning how and why the Holocaust happened is an important component of the education of citizens of the United States.
This reasoning — that hate groups promote hate and that studying the Holocaust will prevent hate — prompted the establishment of the Holocaust Museum in 1980 and continues to undergird Holocaust education in all its facets. To this has been added the need for resistance to Holocaust denial that proliferates on social media. Currently, 12 states require schools to teach students about the Holocaust, but the new law extends resources to many more schools and teachers, « including those in underserved communities, » to deliver « quality Holocaust education. »
The motivation for the law is by now so widely accepted that its introduction raised almost no objections and only praise from Jewish organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), that are charged with combatting anti-Semitism. The ADL echoed the sentiments of Congress when it said that, through study of the Holocaust, « students can grow as responsible citizens in a democratic society and develop critical thinking, empathy, and social justice skills for the future. » Both cited the spike in anti-Semitism as reason to increase support for Holocaust education.
It’s easy to see why there is so much support for such a project. But is there any evidence that Holocaust education decreases hatred of the Jews among those Americans who are susceptible to it? In reality, anti-Semitism in the United States has spread in tandem with increased teaching about the Holocaust. And there is really no sound theoretical underpinning for this expanding educational initiative. Societies that concentrate on their self-improvement generally rely on positive instruction and reinforcement. Jews teach the Torah and the Talmud as a means of encouraging behavior within those guidelines. The Bible, the Constitution, and Poor Richard’s Almanack were traditional American sources of moral education, good citizenship, and democratic values. A pedagogical fixation on hate, by contrast, has been associated with societies like fascist Germany and Soviet Russia that wish to direct blame and hate against designated alien or undesirable groups. How did teaching about hate to prevent hate become an American priority?
Already 30 years ago, in a Commentary Magazine article titled « How They Teach the Holocaust, » noted historian and intellectual Lucy Dawidowicz raised serious concerns about the distorted curricula and questionable outcomes of Holocaust-related projects like Facing History and Ourselves. Consulted as an authority on what she called the « war against the Jews, » Dawidowicz undertook a thorough study of these materials, leading her to question the wisdom of encouraging « oppression studies » in the absence of any robust teaching of history. Essential reading for anyone approaching this subject, her study identified problems ranging from the failure to suggest that anti-Semitism had any history before Hitler to teaching American children raised in unprecedented freedom and permissiveness that « obedience to the law is not necessarily the determinant of a moral person. » What’s more, Holocaust education is routinely appropriated for activist agendas.
Things have gotten far worse in the intervening three decades. We are required to ask the more basic question of what Holocaust education was intended to do and whether it distorts by definition. This means understanding how this idea and project developed.
VICTIM AND HERO
The big American story following the Second World War was the Allied victory, spearheaded by the United States, over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The big Jewish story was the exodus of refugees from Europe and the re-establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Newsreels at the time showed unimaginably shocking scenes of what had been done to the Jews, followed by scenes of the cruel British blockade of ships crammed with refugees trying to reach Palestine. Arab attacks against the badly outnumbered Jews of Palestine aligned with images of the recently annihilated Jews of Europe, and Jews raising the Israeli flag evoked the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima. One could better sympathize with the survivors knowing that the ingathering of Jews in Israel meant that other democracies would not have to absorb too many of them.
The decisive Allied victory made right-wing anti-Semitism so out of fashion in America that villainy has been portrayed in Nazi uniform ever since. Americans did not fight so hard against fascists in Europe just to have them resurface in their midst. In books and films like Gentleman’s Agreement and Focus (the latter an almost forgotten novel by Arthur Miller), American Gentiles who are mistaken for Jews — as an experiment in one case and inadvertently in the other — experience discrimination and intimidation that expose the evils of local prejudice. In this post-war climate, anti-Jewish quotas were lifted. Anne Frank’s Diary became a classic. The idea of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew came into fashion as the ecumenical model of religion in America.
The popular positive image of Israel in those years found its clearest expression in the 1958 novel Exodus by Leon Uris, which, at the time, was the biggest bestseller in the United States since Gone with the Wind (1936) and was turned into a blockbuster movie starring Paul Newman as the heroic Ari Ben Canaan. The heroine of Exodus is nurse and war widow Kitty Fremont — »one of those great American traditions like Mom’s apple pie » — who accepts a posting in Palestine. Initially, she doesn’t like Jews and feels much closer to their British overseers, but the novel traces her change of heart as she is drawn to two versions of the Jewish experience: Karen Hansen, a young refugee from Denmark whom Kitty wants to take with her back to America, and male hero Ari, the ideal Israeli — tough as nails on the outside but soft and gentle on the inside. Amid many subplots, the main one follows this slightly anti-Jewish American as she falls in love with heroic Israel and wants to adopt the Holocaust survivor.
Pitiable refugee and admirable Israeli were two sides of the liberal image of the Jews that prevailed for the quarter-century after the Second World War. America had come to the rescue of what was known as the Free World and, in simplest terms, had defeated evil and liberated the good. Jews were the emblem of those it had rescued, yet at the same time — here was the happy surprise — they were no longer in need of rescuing because they were doing it themselves in a spunky way reminiscent of the founding of the United States. The Arabs were cast as the evil forces — multiple countries declaring war against the smallest among them, almost half a billion Muslims raging against 6 million fewer Jews than the world’s 16.5 million before the war. The asymmetry was overwhelming, yet the transformed Jews were holding out like their archetypal David against Goliath. Their liberation was easy to appreciate as a great liberal cause.
Even more important from the liberal perspective, for the first time since the dawn of Emancipation, anti-Jewish politics was now also out of favor on the political left. Inherent in the teachings of Marx and all their offshoots was opposition to the Jewish amalgam of peoplehood and religious civilization. Bolshevism outlawed these manifestations of Judaism in Hebrew and Zionism. The Soviet Union hailed the Arab attacks against the Jews of pre-state Palestine as the start of an Arab revolution and turned anti-Zionism into a Soviet cause. Among its passionate adherents were Jewish internationalists in the communist cells of New York and Hollywood who claimed that only communism could defeat the fascists. These trends penetrated American elite circles in the 1930s and ’40s but then subsided with revelations of Stalin’s crimes, the Gulag prison system in Russia, and Soviet spying abroad. Thus, the decline of Soviet communism, even more than the defeat of Nazism, rehabilitated the reputation of Jews and Israel among liberals. Once the Communist Party became inactive, it took several decades before the New Left once again injected anti-Zionism into American culture.
This compressed summary of a much more layered process begins to explain why the Jews and Israel were popular among liberals. So-called « realists » of the American State Department, who weighed competing economic and political benefits in the Middle East, had almost always tilted toward the Arabs, but the Cold War against the Soviet Union also tipped Congress favorably toward the Jews. Jewish and liberal politics merged most firmly in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, introduced in 1972 and passed two years later, denying normal trade relations to countries with non-market economies that restricted freedom of emigration. It put human rights at the forefront of American foreign policy, but it was also specifically targeted at the Soviet Union for denying Jews the right to emigrate to Israel. This was the high point of a liberal alignment between an anti-communist, human-rights-oriented American foreign policy, an anti-communist culture in America, and a movement to free the Jews by allowing them to emigrate to the thriving state of Israel.
Jews in particular might wish to understand that moment and savor it, because it will not come again until the same opposition to radical leftism re-asserts itself in American politics. The Jackson-Vanik approach represented a hard liberalism that could stand against communist political repression. Hard liberalism generally sides with the Jews against their enemies, who are always simultaneously the enemies of liberal democracy. All enemies of liberalism may not be anti-Jewish, but all anti-Semites and anti-Zionists are anti-liberal. This political axiom means that hard liberalism will stand against a hostile left as resolutely as it does against a belligerent right. One could say that defense of the Jews — whether in their dispersion or in their homeland — is the surest test of liberal resolve; when that resolve collapses, we get the rise of anti-Jewish politics. And it is just then, too, that we find the rise of Holocaust education.
The change from that robust Exodus view of the Jews to the split between the bad Zionists of Israel and the good Jews of Auschwitz occurred in the same country — America — under the same system of government with more or less the same institutions. The change is part of a larger tectonic shift with certain specific features.
ORIENTALISM
Edward Said introduced anti-Zionism into higher education. Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a colleague and eventual successor of Lionel Trilling — regarded by some as the most influential American critic of his generation — who had claimed that in the America of the 1950s, liberalism was « not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. » By « liberalism, » Trilling meant a loosely defined political centrism between the conservatism he dismissed and the Stalinism he opposed. One of a cadre of New York intellectuals, Trilling was famously ambivalent about his Jewishness — never denying it, which would have been impossible, but clearly downplaying its value relative to his lifelong commitment to preserving and teaching the best aspects of Western civilization.
Said greatly surpassed Trilling in influence, but he did so in large part by distancing himself from Western civilization. His 1978 book Orientalism theorized that Western scholarship about « the East » was essentially a product of the prejudices of the imperialist, colonialist societies that produced it. He included Jewish scholars in Western civilization and Israel as part of Western colonizing culture that kept the Arabs as subjugated subalterns. As a political activist, his primary examples of subjugated subalterns were the Palestinians — among whom Said included himself. « Port Said » became the point of entry through which anti-Western ideology, headed by anti-Zionism, penetrated and came to dominate theory in the humanities and social sciences. Middle East scholar Martin Kramer describes how Said turned Middle East studies into a « subsidized, thousand-man lobby for Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian causes. » In the Humanities Seminar Room of Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center, Said’s portrait hangs with Nietzsche’s.
Said’s impact on critical theory coincided with the rise of the left in American higher education and the culture it promoted in the media and the arts. The growing number of tenured radicals in the universities coincided with a rapid shift from a civil-rights ideal of equal opportunity to the affirmative-action ideal of equal outcome. Whereas equal opportunity that admitted individuals based on merit allowed Jews to advance according to how well they could prove themselves, equal outcome counted Jews in proportion to their tiny percentage in the general population and so effectively reduced their numbers.
As the theoretical basis for socialism collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites, the theories of Orientalism and anti-Zionism replaced it, attacking capitalist democracy for perceived discrimination based on racial, gender, and minority status. The politics of grievance surged among disaffected groups, calling liberal democracy a sham — a cover-up for the subjugation of blacks, Latinos, and women. Anti-Semitism had flourished in Europe because Jews were an easy, time-honored, and visible mark, and the same has proven true in America, where Jews and the Jewish state stand in for capitalists, imperialists, whites, and the patriarchy.
Not coincidentally, since the 1970s, Arab and Muslim groups, academic and political Arabists, Islamists, and a portion of American Muslims raised on anti-Zionism have revved up the war against Israel in America. When Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago published The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007, its function was not just to imply that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was improperly manipulating American foreign policy, but to conceal the dramatic increase of Arab efforts in the opposite camp. Mitchell Bard’s 2010 book The Arab Lobby exposed what Walt and Mearsheimer had hidden from view — namely, the Arab lobby’s far better funded « petrodiplomatic complex » in Washington and buy-in at American universities. Bard’s chart of funding shows the many millions that Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Arab countries strategically pump into several dozen American universities like Georgetown, the University of Virginia, and George Washington University — more than $40 million to Harvard alone. This funding seeps down into curricula of high schools, like the ones in Newton, Massachusetts, that use the anti-Israel materials these universities produce.
These developments, in time, transformed the post-war images of the Jew from victim-turned-hero to exploiter and villain. Holocaust education of the time fit anti-Zionism like the protective sheath of a sword.
Of course, commemoration of the Shoah among Jews began as something quite different. In 1944, when I was in the third grade of a Jewish day school, our principal called a school assembly to explain what was happening in Europe. He said to the several hundred of us: If each of you now took one of your notebooks and wrote on every line of every page the name of a Jewish child, and if I were then to collect all your notebooks, it would still not equal the number of Jewish children who have just been killed in Europe. This conferred a lifetime of responsibility on us to commemorate our counterparts and to compensate for their loss. Community-wide memorial gatherings began the following year, and commemorative texts were inserted into the prayer books. Given that Jews still actively mourn the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and to the Romans in 70 C.E., they are in little danger of neglecting the slaughtered communities of Europe before the end of time.
Once survivors of the war had regained their footing and perhaps started new lives, many felt duty bound to tell their story. Elie Wiesel led the attempt to ensure that their memorialization remains a chapter in the continuing history of the Jewish people. The Nazis’ attempt to destroy the evidence of their atrocities and evade retribution made it all the more important to secure the record, even if one could not bring the perpetrators to justice. Yad Vashem in Israel and other institutions around the world continue this vital task. Establishing all the facts and fighting Holocaust denial remain imperatives.
Nothing I am saying here questions the obligations of commemorating the dead and establishing every detail of the historical record. Rather, the potential for corruption begins with the impulse to make the Holocaust a universal symbol of evil, Nazism synonymous with « hatred, » and Holocaust education a redemptive American pursuit.
HATING IN THE ABSTRACT
Journalist Judith Miller, then reporting for the New York Times, described how the idea of a national Holocaust Memorial was initially promoted by Jewish officials in the Carter administration. Relations between Jimmy Carter and the Jewish community at the time had plummeted. Carter had angered American Jewish leaders by endorsing a Palestinian state. He had also defied the pro-Israel lobby in approving the sale of F-15 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia. People were therefore surprised when Carter changed his earlier opposition to the memorial project and supported the construction of the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall. But it was no surprise: One should have appreciated the leverage this gave him to steer its mission in the universalizing direction he preferred.
The phrase associated with the Holocaust memorial project, « Never Again, » left unspecified the agents and means of deterrence, and even the goal itself. The Never Again Act defines « the Holocaust » as « the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators » and applies it equally to other classes of people that were targeted because of their perceived « ‘racial inferiority,’ such as Roma, the disabled, Slavs, » and groups that were « persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals. »
But these included categories are not compatible. The anti-Semitism that originated in Germany and percolated in other European countries was an ideology, a movement, and a strategy that organized politics explicitly against the Jews. In countries as different as France, Austria, Russia, and Poland, candidates and parties ran on platforms of anti-Semitism, explaining social crises as the fault of the Jews. The Nuremburg Laws and the Final Solution were unambiguously directed at the Jews. In fact, some of the groups included among the Nazi targets collaborated with Nazis in the extermination of the Jews, and some produced their own versions of anti-Jewish politics. By mischaracterizing a historical process, the inclusive formulation ensured that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum would neither address anti-Semitism nor confront its current practitioners. To put it bluntly: The museum depoliticized, de-historicized, and universalized a political and historical process to prevent teaching anti-Semitism or the war against the Jews.
On a visit to the museum shop in the 1990s, expecting to purchase a standard work on anti-Semitism, I was told that the shop did not carry « political material » or anything related to history after 1945. But this policy was disingenuous, since the museum also selectively eliminated information about that period. For example, there was no discussion of the decision of Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, to coordinate his efforts in Palestine with those of Hitler in Europe. Al-Husseini’s collaboration with Hitler included organizing Muslims in Europe to fight with the Nazis and urging the inclusion of Jewish children in the Final Solution. No less relevant was the haven Arab countries offered Nazis after the war in aligned efforts to spread anti-Semitism throughout the Muslim world. In direct contrast to the assumptions of Holocaust education, anti-Semitism served some Arab and Muslim leaders as a positive model of what can be done to the Jews. And yet this most consequential aspect of the period is erased, lest it interfere with the museum’s laundered idea of « hatred. »
In the early years of planning the museum project, Wiesel was defeated in his attempt to keep the focus on anti-Semitism. He eventually quit the Holocaust Museum commission, but without going public about his scruples. He tried to split the difference by saying the « universality of the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness: The Event is essentially Jewish, yet its interpretation is universal. » This sounds like a liberal version of the Crucifixion. The term « holocaust » means a burnt offering — a sacrifice by fire — and the sacrificed Jews became the secular-liberal version of martyred Jesus who died for the betterment of humankind. Christians believe that the martyrdom and resurrection of Christ are redemptive, but they also erected a religious structure that makes certain demands on its adherents. Liberals imagine the immolation of the Jews as a similar teaching on a larger scale, but as an article of faith with no specific application.
THE DISTORTIONS OF HOLOCAUST EDUCATION
The present conception and application of Holocaust education is not only flawed but harmful to the Jews and America alike.
First, the destruction of European Jewry was not about hate. The mass murder of 6 million Jews began as part of an electoral process in which a party came to power by organizing politics against the Jews. The politics of grievance and blame may indeed foment hatred, distrust, envy, rage, fear, and violence, but it is primarily a political instrument for gaining, wielding, and extending power. Anti-Semitism draws on centuries of anti-Jewish teaching and opposition, but it assumes greater political potency when leaders need to win the allegiance of voters and followers. Hitler ran on this platform and used it in the conquest of other nations, inviting their citizens to join in the killing and plundering of the Jews. Some people organized against Jews without hating them. Whereas the analysis of anti-Semitism in fascist, nationalist, communist, Islamist, and other forms of government is indispensable for the understanding of anti-liberal politics, the homogenization of anti-Jewish politics into social psychology misdirects analysis, prevents understanding, and distorts the subject it pretends to teach. Fighting political evil takes political will, which requires political perception.
Second, Holocaust education distorts by equating evil with Nazism. The Second World War began with the pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to divide Eastern Europe between them, and the parallels between the two totalitarian regimes included opposition to the Jews, albeit on different grounds. The Soviets in their Gulag and forced famine in Ukraine killed more than the Nazis did in their death camps, and the two systems went head to head in their war on liberals and Jews.
The Jewish partisan from Vilna, Shmerke Kaczerginski, entered the Vilna ghetto as a communist and found himself under communist rule after the war. As soon as he was able to leave for Western Europe, even as he described his experience as an underground fighter, he felt obliged to disclose what he knew about the murderous essence of the Soviet regime. As a responsible witness who had once believed that communism would liberate all peoples, he compared its evil with Nazism, including in its attempt to eliminate Jewishness and Jewish leadership. He did anecdotally what Hannah Arendt attempted analytically in her 1951 study of totalitarianism in its fascist and communist varieties.
Weaponizing the Holocaust against Nazism detracts attention from other ongoing anti-Jewish and anti-Western forces. It thus becomes an instrument of politics under the pretense of avoiding politics. Demonizing the right minimizes anti-liberal forces of the left and conceals the record of applied socialism as well as that of Middle Eastern varieties of anti-Jewish politics. Facing history would require the kind of analysis that science undertakes when it isolates the variables to learn the exact causes of a disease as a means of seeking cure and prevention. The prevention of anti-Jewish politics begins with studying of all of its kinds, asking, cui bono — whom does it benefit? We would not get far in fighting Covid-19 if we understood ourselves merely to be fighting sickness writ large.
Third, Holocaust education as currently defined introduces Jews at their lowest point in history — as victims, humiliated, suffering, starved, pursued, despised, and turned to ashes. Nazi energy and ingenuity destroyed a third of the Jewish people, with the cooperation of others, transforming them into the burnt sacrifice of the liberal imagination. Who gave liberals the right to keep using the image of the Jews in this distorted way?
When I began teaching at Harvard in 1993, I was told that at least half the entering class had not taken a history course beyond the ninth grade. Yet even the best of students — the ones accepted to places like Harvard — are being forced to learn about the Jews first and foremost as victims of the Nazis. Among those being introduced to Jews in this form are many American Jews who have no other Jewish education, and certainly none as dramatic as this federally supported curriculum.
Historically speaking, Jews are demonstrably the opposite of victims — they are builders, creators, innovators, facilitators, perpetually adaptive, the model of entrepreneurial resilience under circumstances beyond imagining. By the time Hitler came to power, the Jews had found their own solution by creating through Zionism the infrastructure for their recovered homeland. Once they realized the time was ripe, they applied their energies to doing what had been considered impossible and resurrected their sovereign country. Any true « Never Again » project would trace this unprecedented historical example of self-emancipation. Instead, it tells half the story and distorts the half that it tells. It does violence to the Jewish people and to moral education, which must include the assumption of responsibility for self-protection.
Finally, yet by no means least, education that centers on the Holocaust violates the spirit of America, which is about the attainment and protection of freedom and a constant drive for self-improvement. Americans and Jews won their freedom in wars of independence. America fought a civil war against slavery and to remain united. Nazism and communism would rule the world had it not been for American military resistance. Israelis fight for their existence every day of their lives and suffer great losses whenever they relax their vigilance. Now as ever, only the will to fight for the good can defeat the forces of evil, and a peace-loving people that does not train for self-defense will suffer the fate of the Jews of Europe. The perversity of teaching about the Holocaust rather than American and Jewish struggles for freedom extracts the wrong lesson from a horrifying precedent.
BEYOND VICTIMHOOD
Representative Maloney doubtless meant well when she introduced the « Never Again Education Act, » but her timing replicated President Carter’s calculated support for the Holocaust Museum as a cover for anti-Zionism. Just three months after the bill was introduced, the Democratic Party refused to censure Representative Ilhan Omar for overtly anti-Semitic pronouncements. Instead, Democrats in Congress cobbled together a resolution condemning anti-Semitism — along with anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against a handful of other minorities — and shoved it onto the president’s desk. Yet anti-Zionism flourishes in the party’s ranks, to the point that its presidential candidates scorn the gatherings of AIPAC and support anti-Israel legislation in the party platform. Support for Holocaust education was presumably intended to show opposition to anti-Semitism, but intentionally or not, this « opposition to hate » feeds the hideous ideology it pretends to resist.
Unlike other anti-Jewish ventures that are powered by their declared enemies, this one has the backing of many Jews and well-intentioned liberals, who are often one and the same. When there is so much apparent unanimity on a subject, it may seem perverse to oppose it. The fact that supporters of Nazism are also opposed to Holocaust teaching may wrongly suggest that opponents in general are encouraging the Nazi cause. Many docents, teachers, and others involved in this project obviously trust that Holocaust education will protect Jews — and « other threatened minorities » — from harm.
Yet doubts about the Holocaust project were raised from the outset, and — if one needs reminding — consensus does not guarantee the good. The best intentions left untested can have the most damaging results. The decline of formal religion may have created a serious deficiency in moral education, but the Holocaust dare not serve as a lever of conscience. The liberal conscription of the Holocaust as a moral exemplum was misguided from the start, and as presently conceived, it conceals rather than confronts anti-Jewish aggression, falsifies both the nature of anti-Jewish politics and the nature of the Jewish people, advances political causes under false pretenses, and cultivates identification with victims rather than with the soldiers who protect and, if necessary, liberate the victims.
Dawidowicz concluded her study of Holocaust materials by citing the Sixth Commandment: « Thou shalt not murder. » This, she wrote, was « the primary lesson of the Holocaust, » and if invoking a biblical commandment would violate the doctrine of the separation of church and state, « something is clearly wrong with both our system of education and our standards of morality. » I would add to that lesson as it concerns actual or would-be perpetrators a second lesson also — from the side of the victims. As the biblical story of the Exodus has inspired other oppressed peoples to gain their freedom by demanding, « [l]et my people go, » the passage of the Jews from Holocaust to Homeland can teach how a people wins and maintains its freedom.
This is the education we need — an education whose meaning is universal. It will take time to revise thinking on this, so we had better begin now.
Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund.
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-dark-side-of-holocaust-education
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