"What needs to be remembered whenever the raw numbers of those who die or suffer are tossed about is that each of these numbers represents an individual, a man, woman or child who had physical needs and desires, loves and hates, beliefs and hopes. For more than fifty million individuals in the Second World War, these hopes were savagely disappointed. And even the survivors were scarred for life."
-- Bart D. Ehrman, 2008
“Ned, my mother is Jewish.” My impulse was to say one of two things: that my Jewish blood-brother, dead for a year by then, had told me that joke or that I told Irish jokes. He cut me off, almost testily, with a further rebuke. Not all jokes are harmless. Of course, I went on to say something really awkward like, “Sorry, you did not seem Jewish…” It was a while before we spoke again, my best friend and I.
A quarter of a century later, I was out to dinner with a drop-dead beauty in New York City, a glistening example of good German-Swiss stock (an origin I shared on my mother’s side). We were talking about “Life is Beautiful” – a heart-felt and bittersweet film of a parent’s undying love while he himself was dying. She looked at me and said, “You know Ned, why do people keep harping about the holocaust?" Date over, though it was another forty empty minutes before I called for the check. The issue was not her insensitivity but her honesty; I felt the same sometimes.
This afternoon, as part of the Jewish Cinema Festival here in México, I watched a film recommended to me by a lovely couple whom I had met on the evening of the premiere, “A Film Unfinished”. This is the accumulation of footage taken by nazi film-makers inside the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1942. Since the film is silent, it is narrated by readings from the journal of one of the Jewish elders in that ghetto; the later court testimony of one of the film-makers; other diary excerpts; and, three survivors of that ghastly ghetto. Like a "Frontline" installment on the holocaust.
Unlike most “real film footage” of war or catastrophe, which tends to be less horrific than those portrayed in fictional flics, these images are much harsher than even those of the “Pianist” or “Schindler’s List”. This essay (my apologies for its length) seeks to record just how hard it can be, for me at least, to take in the enormity of what one is witnessing, even if only vicariously. This letter is not meant to be self-centered nor do I really want to be judgemental.
If this re-telling connects with other people, great. If not, no harm done. My first reaction that I noticed was a lot shifting in my seat. Then I settled into the detachment; I was viewing what I was viewing and that is it, utter passivity in the face of documented evil. The reels did not feel real; besides the people looked horrible. It all felt a million miles away. Yet, I know this old trick of shutting-down, “I am really watching something that is only supposedly true; not part of me with no part in my life.”
So I made myself get out of myself and look closely at those ugly, filthy people on the screen. “That girl – she can only be sixteen; that would make her eighty-nine or so today. She probably died within a year…” She had lost half her hair from going hungry; her eyes, two darkening sockets of deathly derangement. Her teeth some hideous shade of grey. “What had she known as an eight year old? What had been her dreams? What was she hoping for? Had she had even a chance for intimacy with a boyfriend?”
Doing this with about twenty people of both genders and all three generations crammed inside that ghetto, the images flickered across the screen in all manner of expressions, mostly those of hunger, resignation, dread, defeat and death. The next trick in avoiding a dark corner of life did not take long to manifest: return to the physical.
Drowsiness crept over me; it was a struggle for me to stay awake and stay engaged in this exercise of conscience; I could only do it about half of the time. Frankly, I was very annoyed with my doing anything I could to escape the hollow feeling inside that I could have been on either side of that camera – a sobering realization.
And yet, there is that other side of the camera. The book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners let nobody off of the hook. Nevertheless, I suspect many Germans were not exterminationist anti-semites, but were people who were scared; the Nazis had the guns and, if you mouthed off, you would be heading east, too, if not fortunate enough to be killed on the spot.
Their complicity proved as deadly but remains a bit more understandable. This kind of film provokes, within me at least, a kaleidoscope of feelings, contentions, memories and internal arguments that vary by angle, changing by day into night. When my family first moved to an area of Pittsburgh where most of the Jewish families lived, I remember meeting a boy across the street. We were hanging out and talking, as twelve year olds were wont to do.
He asked about my family and I went through the usual stuff – ethnic backgrounds of my parents, where I was in school, where we had previously lived and even religions. I asked him about his family. His parents were Jewish; his dad from Poland and his mother from Cleveland. They had ended up in Pittsburgh. So, I wondered out loud whether he ever visited his paternal relatives in Europe. He said no, quite casually stating almost all of his father’s family had “died" and no one knew where the others were.
Just that matter-of-fact. Being pretty thoughtless, perhaps immature, I felt nothing about what my acquaintance was telling me; perhaps, I was just too young to get it. Even forty-five years later, I hope that is the explanation. But my new acquaintance seemed so casual about it. This film today – “A Film Unfinished” – went a long way toward answering definitively why the Jews in that ghetto had not put up more of a fight and had not done so far earlier than mid-1943.
RESPONSE: by mid-1942, these people were half-starved and really could do very little but make it through another day. The more energetic ones were pre-occupied with a desperate struggle each day to bring some comfort to so many, particularly loved ones, suffering so much. Had I been a parent, my primary allegiance would have been toward the protection and, to the very limited extent possible, comfort of my little ones. As an unmarried adult, my focus would have been on parents or other elders.
These people had not been casual; they had been crushed. The unendurable simply had become the everyday. Back to the German side of the camera. It was a year or two after Kristallnacht. My mother was nine or ten years old. She and her two little sisters were busy growing up in the middle of that Jewish part of Pittsburgh, right in core of that community; perhaps one of the largest refugee destinations between New York and Miami.
They were trailing “spies” – these men wearing frumpy looking black clothes, with pirouetting black curls streaming down the sides of their heads, out from under their big black, funky fedoras. Definitely alien spies. (At least, that is how I remember story; almost certainly exaggerated by me over time.)
My grandfather had always been proud of his German Swiss ancestry. He was a gentleman, refined and charitable. When he heard about these mad-cap pursuits by his daughters, he was not furious; they were children, after all. Yet he was firm: leave these people in peace. Something terrible was happening in Germany, he informed them. He did not know what or how bad it was, I suspect, but he knew it was atrocious.
Sometime before, my grandfather had made his way to a ski resort owned by an equally proud German-American family. The founding patriarch motioned my grandfather into the kitchen of the main lodge. The wireless was on; there was a lot of static as those radio waves arrived from a continent and ocean away. Expectantly, my grandfather’s friend had said, “Listen, Frank…it’s Hitler!” My grandfather excused himself for 'he had to return home'. He never set foot in that ski lodge again; nor did he count that man as a friend.
Something terrible was happening in Germany, alright. Yet, that man who owned that ski lodge was not a monster. He was a good family man. His children and theirs would make him proud. Unlike my grandfather, however, he had likely never worked closely, celebrated birthdays and done all the rest with Jewish colleagues and neighbours.
That thought and this movie today brings me back to square-1. What Germany – and far too many Germans – did can never be countenanced. On the other hand, that Germany did it does not condemn Germans as uniquely evil; of course, they are not. Instead, it throws down a formidable gauntlet to the rest of us who deem ourselves as civilized.
The Bundeswehr Major and I had been chatting over dinner on his civil-military base in the Takhar Province of Afghanistan. He was a good man, earnestly serving his country as Germany sought to contribute to the peace and eventual prosperity of northern Afghanistan. Many of the Germans I had worked with over the years were a bit defensive about the excesses of their country through two World Wars. Understandable.
Having worked in German or German-Swiss banks for the better part of my banking career, I had done a lot of soul-searching about working for them. My boarding school Latin teacher provoked the eventual acceptance, if not resolution, of the lingering doubts. He had been recruited into the Milgram experiments ten years before he was teaching me about declensions and conjugations. He had dropped out quite early in the process.
Under the “direction” of an actor garbed in the vestments of authority (reminiscent of other, recent blood-drunk impostors), many people had consented to inflict pain on a test subject (also an actor) who received increasingly powerful electric shocks for each wrong answer to questions posed by the true analysand. Fortunately, no pain was inflicted on the failing test-taker. A great deal of pain, unethically, had been visited on most of the test-givers who had not suspected that they themselves were the subjects of an experiment on compliance to authority.
Under the “direction” of an actor garbed in the vestments of authority (reminiscent of other, recent blood-drunk impostors), many people had consented to inflict pain on a test subject (also an actor) who received increasingly powerful electric shocks for each wrong answer to questions posed by the true analysand. Fortunately, no pain was inflicted on the failing test-taker. A great deal of pain, unethically, had been visited on most of the test-givers who had not suspected that they themselves were the subjects of an experiment on compliance to authority.
While I admired that teacher’s moral toughness and hoped I would emulate him later in life, I always had a sinking uneasiness that I might well have done the same as those others not quite as strong – those up-to-two-thirds of the subjects that “went all the way”, thinking all the while that they might be killing someone. As my life went on and studies in twentieth century history came my way, I realized that Germany provided both an odious example and a profound challenge.
That was what I was saying diplomatically to the Major in Afghanistan, “Let's think back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Greater Germany – Germany, Austria and northern Switzerland – was arguably the greatest civilization on earth: in the arts, in technology, in the sciences, in philosophy, in just about everything. Who could have imagined in 1900 that, within fifty years, this civilization would engulf the world in two world wars and commit these awful acts? My feeling is that, if something like this could happen in the greatest civilization on earth, it could happen anywhere." Update from May 2016.
And it has, repeatedly. Perhaps not on the same scale, but it has. The cruelest irony I find in post-holocaust history of heinous crimes against humanity is that those who focus their indignation on people are more likely to be trapped by the dark-side of human nature. After all, except for truly evil people so inured to their humanity that their souls have been extinguished by many depredations, most of us have what is magnificent and malevolent within us, just as Blaise Pascal had implied so long ago. Yet watching this “Film Unfinished” left me drowsy, avoiding reality, feeling slightly nauseated.
And it makes me think about the unfinished work that is the world we live in today. Too often – to the point that I am sick of hearing it – people whine about the absence of clear-cut good-versus-evil struggles that have made so many recent military adventures messy, confusing, thwarted, traumatic and, most tragically, immoral. Frankly, that smacks of being an excuse. We saw that excuse emerge in Cambodia; in the Balkans; and, in Rwanda. In each case, the great democracies again failed to act.
In our day, the timely use of military power might well have abated the appalling situation in Syria, bleeding white for four years now and in Iraq. This power, used at an earlier and better time need not have been solely or primarily kinetic (i.e., bangs and bullets). In both cases, a concerted effort to pressure the now disgraced shi´ite partisan dictator, Nuri al-Maliki, to honour the election of 2010 (when the U.S. had 75,000 troops in-country) and by exercising the humane use of power in the refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, might well have – I believe would have – saved thousands of lives.
It was clear, even at the time, that President Assad’s tactics were odious and beyond the countenance of civilized men and women. Additionally, it was clear at the time that Prime Minister al-Maliki was making a power grab at the expense of the Sunni minority, who had sided eventually with the U.S. against al-Qaeda. Former interim Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, won the election of 2010. As a secular Shi´ite, with a track record of solid performance and an allegiance to Iraq ahead of ayatollahs, Ayad Allawi had the trust of wide segments of the population.
Yet President Obama not only failed to act in either case, he refused to admit to the moral gravity of the situation in Syria and (eventually) Iraq, casting the choice as a binary function of either exercising no military power (even non-kinetically) or launching an invasion. This consistently articulated choice was disingenuous and led to the death of so many more people. The same indecision unto death has whetted Russian aggression into her old empire.
Policy analysts assert that the U.S. policies of sanctions provide the most efficacious means by bring down the Russian economy; I am not convinced. Again, a firmer and non-kinetic military response may have contained the aggression and given vital assurance to N.A.T.O.'s newest democracies, nations like Poland, Romania and the Baltics, many of whom have stood by the U.S. Someday, I suspect, I will be watching a similar film about Syria and, yes, I will likely be shifting in my seat, shutting down, getting drowsy and feeling a slight nausea – all in an hour’s time.
