Some
Jewish Responses to Reflections on the Holocaust
After reviewing dozens of books on the
Holocaust, it seems time to sum up my impressions, starting with a discussion
of how Jews respond to such a world-shattering crime. This is not a research
paper, although I have done a great deal of scholarly research, and especially
tried to read historical, fictional, journalistic and especially contemporary
thoughtful writings by people who lived within or on the edges of the Shoah. At
times, I have ventured to read books, interviews and autobiographies of the
perpetrators, their children and the apologists for the Holocaust. Wherever
possible, though, I have avoided those who merely theorize, write by formula
only filling the gaps with specific names of people, places, things and events,
and the authors who seek to exploit the sufferings of others and show know
understanding or compassion for the people they write about.
1. Religion and Culture
On the one hand,
there is, of course, no single Jewish response to the Holocaust. There might be
six million, one for each of the victims, but then you would have to factor in
all those Jews who escaped before the Shoah began those who were already
relatively safe in different parts of the world, and all the Jews who were born
since the end of World War Two. Not only
do you have three or four opinions for each person, considering that as they
become adults, parents, grandchildren, and move around in the world, their
views change; but there has never been a single set of beliefs or pattern of
practice common to all the people who consider themselves Jews or are so
designated by others. And yet, on the other hand—because that is the way Jews
argue with and among themselves, there is always an “on the other hand”—the
arguments and debates are the very essence of Jewish tradition.
So what is the
Jewish response to the Holocaust? One thing is certain, there is no single
religious approach to the question. For some people who went into that hell on
earth and never came out, well, we won’t ever know for sure, even when they
left a few scraps of comment and confession, or when those near them who
survived listened to what they said and later tried to record those opinions.
We know that sometimes a victim’s religious beliefs were tried and tested and
in some way or other came out the stronger for their ordeal, and at other times
the horrors they experienced ripped away their faith in a God and in the
efficacy of the Law they had studied all their lives previously. For those who
had lived in a more or less assimilated and secular way before they were
incarcerated and tortured by the Nazis, their experience showed that there was
no point to believing in a religion that could not answer the question of why
evil existed in the world, no more so than such terrible times could validate
the morals, ethics, cultural values and aesthetic ideals of German or even
European civilization.
Thus many who
survived and could think their way through what had happened became cynical and
bitter and wished to have nothing more to do with Jews, Judaism and Europe
itself. Others, seeing that virtually no one else in the world, let alone the
next world, came to their aid, thought the only way to protect what remained of
their families or the children of the next generation, was to build a different
kind of Jewish community, sometimes in Israel, sometimes in America, sometimes
behind closed doors and windows, one which shared the memory of the Holocaust
and all the implications it held for any future at all. This could be called
the religion of “Never Again” or a different kind of Zionism than had existed
before the Shoah, one that would be aggressive and strong.
A major motif in
many personal and group accounts of how ordinary Jewish people experienced the
Holocaust is that of the shock of realizing that they were Jewish, if not in a
religious way, then in a racial version of group identity. It is not that these
men and women did not know they were Jewish, but that being so had never really
mattered in their lives.
If they were
intellectuals, scholars or literary writers, their identity was with the
European values they had learned in school, as well as with the moral and
ethical principles they imbibed at home, but never as an exclusionary heritage;
rather, they felt that they could understand and participate in European
culture fully—perhaps more fully than others—because they were not bogged down
in Christian theological debates, had no romantic notions of belonging to the
soil or the folk amongst whom they lived, and could roam, as it were, amongst
German, French or Russian conceptual worlds.
If they felt alienated from the artistic milieu in cafes, bars and
atmospheric bohemian neighbourhoods, they could become critics, editors,
patrons, dealers, museum directors and lecturers in university disciplines they
had invented for themselves, such as Art History and Anthropology.
If they were not
intellectuals but merchants, professionals or civil servants, they knew about
legal restrictions to where they could live, occupations they could enter into
and levels of advancement they could not break through, yet nevertheless found
that they were able to live parallel lives, with most of their circle of
friends and colleagues Jews like themselves, and participated in the contextual
society on terms that were comfortable and acceptable to themselves. They no
longer wore distinctive garments, did not keep strictly kosher at home and ate
in goyish restaurants, they still gave much to charity but not only to Jewish
organizations. If they were excluded from some clubs and brotherhoods, they
invented their own, like B’nei B’rith. They avoided the big hotels and spas
where they were not welcome because they could go to other which were tolerant
and so felt separate but equal. They sometimes married out and no longer felt
compelled to convert in order to feel at ease in the outside world.
It was a shock
when Hitler and his regime began to treat them as a different race, a different
class of citizen, or not even as citizens any longer. They believed for a while
that they could get along in this limited way, and that they could depend on
their neighbours, their friends and colleagues.
However, eventually, aside from a few who began to realize what was
going on and were able to see the writing on the wall, whether they wanted it
or not, they were thrown back on the Jewish community, had to depend on Jewish
charities, and looked for help from Jewish communities overseas.
In the old joke
that tells of a marooned Jewish man who is found on a desert island and shows
to his rescuers what he had done over the many years he has been all alone, the
ship captain asks why there are two synagogues for one person. The answer is that that there is one shul he
goes to and one he wouldn’t be caught dead in. By the late 1930s in Germany and
then in Austria and the once imperial countries of Kaiser and Emperor, there
was no synagogue which most modern assimilated Jews could belong to—and only
one shul in which he would be caught and killed in.
Very quickly, in just
a few years, the scales fell from their eyes. Innocence, naiveté and wilful
ignorance were stripped away. There was nowhere left to turn to, and no one
they could trust. Yet if there were a God and a Law, how could such a deity let
all this happen to his Chosen People, and how could a Law function that had no
state, no police, no army, no teeth to protect them? No one was playing a game
of theodicy to see how to justify the ways of God to man. No voice came out of
the whirlwind to caution and then to instruct Job. No powerful divine arm broke
through the clouds of heaven to stay Abraham’s hand and substitute a ram for
Isaac. The blood stained lintel in Egypt did not signal that the plague of
death would pass over the homes of the Israelites, but the blood-soaked
swastika marked them out for persecution and annihilation.
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