Writing About the Unspeakable

By Stefan Kanfer

Survivors and historians recall the years of the Holocaust

The best now, after so much has been set forth, is, perhaps, to be silent; not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate, to the unspeakable.

--George Steiner, Language and Silence

A special poignance clings to the critic's plea, so reasonable only 16 years ago. Today the option of silence is lost in the collision of melodrama and documentary. The Holocaust has been the subject of a top-rated TV miniseries, of William Styron's bestseller Sophie's Choice, Lina Wertmuller's film Seven Beauties and Arthur Miller's melodrama Playing for Time, of countless paperbacks tastefully decorated with barbed-wire designs. Funds are currently being solicited for the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust project in Los Angeles: "This multiscreen, multichannel sound, audiovisual experience of the Holocaust will utilize a 40-ft.-wide and 23-ft.-high screen in the configuration of an arch, three 16-mm film projectors, eighteen 35-mm slide projectors and pentaphonic sound, all linked to a central computer which will control all functions simultaneously. It will be a definitive educational medium on the subject."

"Definitive," remarks Commentary Editor Robert Alter, "except for the omission of a computerized convector-current olfactory unit to waft about in seven pre-sequenced patterns the odor of rotten bread, potato peels and scorched flesh."

Given this surfeit, can there be room for yet another word on the unspeakable, yet another theory about the incomprehensible? The answer, as always, depends upon the speaker. In The Terrible Secret (Little, Brown; 262 pages; $12.95) the man in the witness stand is necessary and impeccable. At the beginning of his phosphorescent volume, Historian Walter Laqueur quotes a war correspondent in 1945: "It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That something was the archipelago of Europe's death camps, where Nazi virulence reached its terminals: the medical experiment, the gas chamber and the crematorium.

When the correspondent and his colleagues recorded inhuman sights --mounds of hair and gold teeth, rooms of crutches, emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood, ovens used for children--the world stared in disbelief. Today it seems difficult to understand the incredulity. For if more than 6 million Jews, gypsies and other "undesirables" perished in the camps, how was it possible to keep the Final Solution a secret from their neighbors, from soldiers and intelligence agents and the foreign press? In part, says Laqueur, with a screen of euphemisms and evasions. Even in Germany, Jews were not executed, they were officially "resettled," "removed," given "special treatment." Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister for Propaganda, told loyal journalists how to respond to investigations of the Final Solution: Cite British atrocities in India.

Still, by the summer of '42, too many cables had been intercepted, too many codes broken. The Holocaust became an open secret. In August the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland sent Washington reports of a German plan to kill 4 million victims by chemical means. But the Ambassador appended a postscript: the cable should be regarded as "wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears." Even among the knowledgeable, there was an unwillingness to accept truth. Willem Visser't Hooft, founding secretary general of the World Council of Churches, provided a haunting rationale for moral numbness: "People could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror ... It is possible to live in a twilight between knowing and not knowing."

Operating in that twilight, the Roosevelt Administration preferred not to bomb Auschwitz, or even the train tracks leading there. Instead, the White House ordered "rescue through victory"--though by the end of the war, only a remnant could be saved. The Soviet Union refused to recognize specific crimes against the Jews, even when 70,000 were murdered at Babi Yar; in Britain, Anthony Eden feared that statements about Nazi slaughterhouses might cause the Germans to "harden their hearts." As Laqueur indicates, it is difficult to see in what additional ways the victims might have suffered. The martyrs themselves were euphemistic; "We can do very little, we must hope for the best" sustained many until they were behind the gates of Auschwitz or Treblinka. The author is not a man to dwell in the conditional: those who might have been saved are gone, and Laqueur is more interested in first causes than in lamentations. No accusations are made; he is well aware that "nothing is easier than to apportion praise and blame, writing many years after the events." His towering subject is approached with calm and humility. But after all the evidence has been presented, all the statistics meticulously compiled, and the lethal indifference of the Allies faithfully recorded, Edmund Burke's 200-year-old dictum reverberates as never before: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Laqueur dislikes the very word Holocaust: holokaustein means to bring a burnt offering, and "it was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind, and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim." Still, the term has entered the world's vocabulary (der Holocaust has been naturalized in German), and survivors themselves employ it. The Holocaust Library, distributed by Schocken Books, for instance, is a nonprofit publishing enterprise created and managed by refugees. Most of the titles belong to the literature of testimony--The Holocaust Kingdom by Alexander Donat (361 pages; $8.95, paperback) typically records the last days of the Warsaw ghetto and the will of a child to appeal the world's sentence of death. The Politics of Rescue by Henry L. Feingold (416 pages; $7.95, paperback) revives the long-dormant question: How could the democracies of the West refuse to admit people whose need for sanctuary was a matter of life and death? In this expanded and updated edition, Historian Feingold sifts through the memorandums of state departments to find that guilt lay not only with insensitive agencies and nations but with some American Jewish organizations, which were aroused too late. "We fell victim to our faith in mankind," recalls library Editorial Chairman Alexander Donat, "our belief that humanity had set limits to the degradation and persecution of one's fellow man." Ghetto Diary by Janusz Korczak (191 pages; $8.95) is the most disturbing of the library volumes. Of the hundreds of memorial stones at Treblinka, only one bears a name: Korczak, a physician, author and head of an orphanage, who, given a chance to escape, chose to accompany his little charges to the gas chambers. The Holocaust Library also tells more heartening tales. Their Brothers' Keepers by Philip Friedman (232 pages; $4.95, paperback) celebrates the Christians who helped thousands of Jews escape because their consciences clamored louder than jackboots and guttural orders.

With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest by Per Anger (191 pages; $8.95) is a tale of transcendental heroism set against the flames of Eastern Europe. A member of the Swedish Foreign Office in Budapest, Wallenberg continually furnished Jews with false papers and helped them flee to neutral territories, sometimes only hours before the Germans arrived. Although he saved tens of thousands, Wallenberg could not save himself. He was arrested by the Soviet troops entering Hungary and vanished into another kind of gulag. His fate is unknown today, and his monument is this sadly abbreviated biography.

Not all books on the Holocaust are of similar moral or aesthetic worth. A lengthening shelf of nonfiction often seems to lessen the intensity of history. In many recent books, Auschwitz becomes mere metaphor, and moral distinctions are blurred in references to Viet Nam, Biafra, the boat people. Other books by survivors seek to remind the world that the Holocaust was a unique and discrete event but use personal experiences for special pleading. Of Blood and Hope by Samuel Pisar (Little, Brown; 311 pages; $12.95) is the account of a survivor who journeyed from Auschwitz to Harvard to a law practice of international renown. The accounts of his early life, of prison, of his rescue by a Negro soldier--a black angel in a tank-shaped chariot--are the stuff of redemptive drama. Thereafter, the narrative becomes a self-congratulatory dropping of names--Jackie Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Rubinstein--"Yes, your life has been a fascinating journey, Sam Pisar," punctuated with lofty pleas for "transideological enterprise" and dire bromides: "The entire planet is being transformed into a chessboard for potential war."

Jack Eisner's The Survivor (Morrow; 320 pages; $11.95) offers no philosophy beyond that of living to the next sunset, a near miracle in the author's ghetto and death-camp days. But his recital of agonies is told in the terse style of a scenario, and the incessant, heightened savagery and betrayals soon lose the power to convince or move the reader.

Yet even these volumes have their value. Those who were in the Holocaust are stamped not merely with the numbers on their arms but with the burning images in their minds. Some could not bring themselves to write about an occurrence of such magnitude until they were distanced from it. All seem to be modern versions of the Ancient Mariner, forever compelled to bear witness and warning.

At a time of the resurgence of swastika graffiti and synagogue bombings, silence is no longer valid, and warnings cannot be regarded simply as distortion or indulgence. The record of Pastor Martin Niemoller, the German theologian, has a desperate and modern ring: "First the Nazis went after the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did not object. Then they went after the Catholics, but I was not a Catholic, so I did not object. Then they went after the Trade-Unionists, but I was not a Trade-Unionist, so I did not object. Then they came after me, and there was no one left to object."

--By Stefan Kanfer

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.