After the Holocaust there was no flood of memoirs. There was little in the way of a uniquely Jewish historical understanding of what had gone on. The academic, political and press consensus was that the Nazis had been mean people who had killed a lot of people, for no particular reason, except that they were against democracy. An echo of that kind of silly stupid rhetoric can still be heard in Bushs speeches when he presumes that Democracy equates with morality and a lack of it with amorality. That is belied by the fact that in WW2 fascist regimes and Fascist nations like Mussolini, Tojo and Franco did more to save Jews than democratic Switzerland or democratic France did, when they handed over Jews to the Nazis to be shot. Most of the Nazis who had been convicted of war crimes were prematurely released under pressure frin the German government. Former Nazis had no trouble finding plenty of countries to take them in from Argentina to Ireland to America, which brought in many of them to fight Communism. Post-WW2 discussions of atrocities were far more likely to focus on Hiroshima and Dresden than on Auschwitz and Dachau. In the Senate, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who before hijacking and wrecking a legitimate investigation into Communist infiltration of America, had stood on the Senate floor thundering demands that the SS perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre of 84 US troops be freed because their confessions had been obtained under duress (shades of Gitmo). The SS men who had murdered American soldiers were eventually all released in a matter of years. As were most of those who had been responsible for the Holocaust. On the Holocaust itself there was a shameful silence. The USSR denied any Holocaust of Jews had taken place. Even decades later when it granted that it had, it limited the number to 3 million, those Jews who had been living in Soviet territories. The rest didnt matter. Many of those refugees had made it out of German territory into the USSR had been shot as German spies. Behind the scenes Stalin was hatching a plan for a Soviet Holocaust of the Jews. One that would permit the USSR to carry off a Holocaust while still keep Communists and socialist around the world loyal to the Soviet Union, using plausible deniability. Up until this point Communism had managed to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews, imprison many more and suppress Jewish culture and religion, while still being claimed by liberal Jews and non-Jews around the world, from Time Magazine to H.G. Wells to the Archbishop of Canterbury. There was no reason, Stalin thought, he couldnt wipe out all the Jews and still remain the worlds beloved, Uncle Joe. The Allies were meanwhile too busy embracing our newfound German allies against Communism to want to hear anything about their crimes. The newly hatched Israeli government was all too willing to sweep the whole thing under the rug in order to build ties with Germany. When future Prime Minister Begin led a march of Holocaust survivors in protest to the Knesset against the German policies of the Labor Socialist government, they were tear gassed by the police. I could tell far worse stories but I will not. No one wanted to hear from those had survived the Holocaust. Today they are dying and we are hearing from them. We are remembering and listening, for what little good it does and still there are still many voices raised in protest that would prefer we didnt. Voices from the right and the left, voices of conservative and liberal Jews. Rabbi Daniel Lapin is outraged that the Holocaust Museum linked Christian anti-Semitism to the Holocaust, as if Germany and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century had been populated entirely by Hindus. David Klinghoffer of course finds all the Holocaust talk to be a bit too much. But we remember. Many thousands of years later we pray at the gravesite of Rachel our mother. Thousands of years later we weep at the remnant wall of the temple. We stand at Masada and each ten day interval between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur we recite piyutim remembering those murdered in the Crusades. We have not forgotten and we will not forget. To the Jewish Klinghoffers of the right and the left, sneering at us, we can only reply to them as we do at the Seder, that is it a matter of Lachem VeLo Lo. It is to us that this matter not to you. It is to us who are a part of it, who feel it in our hearts and our souls. You have no part of it or a part in us. As Naomi said to Orpah, go home. Our home is with the Jewish people, the living and the dead. Yours is elsewhere. Go and find it wherever it may be.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 21:01:35 +0000
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