Holocaust questions

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by David Weiss Halivni

Among my rejections of popular beliefs concerning the Shoah, I count the following two:

I reject the idea that every survivor must have a sense of moral guilt. The assumption is that the only way you could survive was by resorting to some act which was not quite ethical, or which was somehow not in line with the standards you ought to follow; and if you accept this assumption, then you must have survived at the expense of someone else. "Lo mineh velo miktzato!" - this is not so in whole or in part! I can say categorically that I do not feel guilty for having survived. I am grateful to Almighty God that I survived, and I do not feel that my survival impacted adversely on the life of anyone else. There was one instance in which I was given cigarettes to distribute and some of them did not reach their destination, but other than this I can think of nothing I did that caused anyone else any suffering. There were people, of course, who survived by all kinds of moral compromises, but I daresay most survivors of concentration camps have no reason at all to feel such guilt.

Here allow me to insert a parenthetical appeal on behalf of those few who survived the concentration camps themselves. I often feel uncomfortable, to the point of being annoyed, when people claim to be survivors who actually escaped the camps. Not that I begrudge them their claims. Obviously, if they make such claims they have a need for them, and God knows, by all normal standards they suffered appallingly. Still, I want to specify that those who survived the camps themselves - Majdanek, Treblinka, Auschwitz - one can count them; these people survived on totally different terms from those who went to a foreign consulate in '38 to struggle for a visa. Even if the visa was first rejected, or they almost missed it, or perhaps if they had come one hour, one minute, one second later, they would not have escaped and would have been sent to the camps - theirs was a totally different experience.

I often say that anyone whose lungs absorbed, on the ramp, on the station platform of Auschwitz, the smoke effusing from the chimneys of the crematoria - those who looked, or could not look, in Mengele's face, when right and left meant death and life - these are different people who have known a different kind of abandonment. That's not knocking on the door and begging, "Give me a visa." There is a different story for those who walked those ramps. Marching down that short road from the train to the crematoria cannot be duplicated by any other experience, whether the victims were aware or not aware. In fact, I remember one man from Sighet who had somehow saved a bottle of schnapps, and when he arrived at the ramp he drank it and became intoxicated on the spot. He had the presence of mind to know what was about to happen, and he saved his bottle for this eventuality. Similarly, those older women who took their daughters' children with them in the selection so that at least one person would have the chance to survive - these people showed enormous personal orientation, and with this orientation comes the enormity of the abandonment.

So, in a sensitive understanding, we must make this distinction. Let the others write books, movies, plays, whatever helps. Hitler's evil hand reached Jews, and other people, in all kinds of ways, throughout the world. Other peoples tell similar stories - refugees tell them - and our age, unfortunately, is full of such stories; but survivors of the camps themselves are different people who have experienced a different transformation. I think that this, for the record, should be made clear.

Finally, my rejection diminishes, and I stand to be corrected by those who have a keener eye and are better trained in the social sciences. Nevertheless, I have not noticed any special characteristic unique to the survivors, and this despite the unique experience. Second to my work in Talmud, I follow the literature of Holocaust survivors closely, and I have not discovered anything of a predictable nature so that one might say: He or she is a survivor, therefore such and such will be the case. Of course, most survivors were anxious to rebuild their families, to regain the recognition in society that they lost. There are not many academicians among the survivors. There are some - more than one might suspect - but still relatively few. Probably this is because those who survived were constrained, as I was, to start their secular studies anew, from the elementary level and in a new language. Still, I do not see a common stripe that one might say arises from being a survivor.

However, having said that, I still believe that a sensitive survivor - and particularly one who has the opportunity or the leisure to pursue intellectual activity - must work, should work, under the influence of mutually contradictory forces. A sensitive survivor must recognize that there was a collapse of norms. Everything we held dear, everything we thought must be, and everything we thought must be pursued turned to naught. The Shoah signifies that whatever one considered the pattern of life one should choose - the ideal standard - collapsed. And if you are sensitive, in the face of this collapse you must reexamine what you stood for. You can put it as a test: If not for the Shoah, what would you be doing? If the answer is, "The same," then know that this is wrong. If you were teaching literature, for example, that literature failed, betrayed you. Something must be changed. Something must be different, intellectually - cannot be the same, should not be the same. So somebody who studied Talmud before and studies Talmud after has this problem. Something must be different.