Always,
Darkness Visible
By
AHARON
APPELFELD
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
January 27, 2005
Jerusalem, Israel
IN
January 1945, 60 years ago today, the wheels of
destruction in Auschwitz stood
still.
The
few people left alive describe the prevailing
silence as the silence of death. Those who came
out of hiding after the war - out of the forests
and monasteries - also describe the shock of
liberation as freezing, crippling silence.
Nobody was happy. The survivors stood at the
fences in amazement. Human language, with all
its nuances, turned into a mute tongue. Even
words like horror or monster seemed meager and
pale, not to mention words like anti-Semitism,
envy, hatred. Such a colossal crime can be
committed only if you mobilize the darkest dark
of the soul. To imagine such darkness apparently
needs a new language.
"Where
were we?" "What did we go through?" "What's left
of us?" the survivors wondered. Primo Levi tried
to use images of Dante's hell; others turned to
the works of Kafka, especially "The Trial" and
"In the Penal Colony."
In
the penal colony of Auschwitz, the Jew was not
condemned because of his old or new beliefs, but
because of the blood that flowed in his veins.
In the Holocaust, biology determined a person's
fate. In the Middle Ages, the Jew was killed for
his beliefs. A Jew who chose to convert to
Christianity or Islam was saved from his
suffering. In the Holocaust, there was no
choice. Observant Jews, liberal Jews, communist
Jews and Jews who were sure they weren't Jews
were crammed into the ghettos and camps. Their
one and only offense: the Jewish blood in their
veins.
The
Holocaust stretched over six years. Such long
years there probably never were in Jewish
history. Those were years when every minute,
every second, every split-second held more than
it could bear. Pain and fear reigned, but even
then, in the midst of hunger and humiliation,
the amazement sprouted: "Is this
Man?"
During
the Holocaust, there was no place for thought or
feeling. The needs of the hungry and thirsty
body reduced one to dust. People who had been
doctors, lawyers, engineers and professors only
yesterday stole a piece of bread from their
companions and when they were caught, they
denied and lied. This degradation that many
experienced will never be wiped
out.
Under
conditions of hunger and cold, the body, we
learned in the camps, is liable to lose its
divine qualities. That too was part of the
wickedness of the murderer: not only to murder,
but first to humiliate the victim utterly, to
exterminate every shred of will and faith, to
turn him into a despicable body whose soul had
fled, and only then, that degradation complete,
to murder him. The lust to debase the victim
until his last moments was just as great as the
lust for murder.
In
1945, the ovens were extinguished. Jean
Améry, a prisoner of Auschwitz and one of
the outstanding thinkers on the Holocaust, says
in one of his essays: "Anybody who was tortured
will never again feel at home in the
world."
Great
natural disasters leave us shocked and mute, but
mass murder perpetrated by human beings on human
beings is infinitely more painful. Murder
reveals wickedness, hatred, cynicism and
contempt for all belief. All the evil in man
assumed a shape and reality in the ghettos and
camps. The empathy that we once believed modern
man felt for others was ruined for all
time.
In
1945, the great migration of the survivors
began: a sea of bodies, killed many times over
and now resurrected. Some wanted to return to
their countries and their homes, and some wanted
to go to America, and some wanted to reach the
shores of the Mediterranean and go from there to
Palestine. Even then, in that strange
resurrection, the first questions arose: What is
a Jew? Why are we persecuted so bitterly and
cruelly? Is there something hidden in us that
condemns us to death? Many felt - if an
individual may speak for the many - that the six
years of war were years of profound trial. We
had been in both hell and purgatory and we were
no longer what we were.
Some
entered hell as pious people and came out of it
just as pious. That position deserves respect.
But most survivors - myself, and especially the
young - were outside the realm of faith, and
from the first stages of the liberation, we were
engaged with the question of how to go on living
a life with meaning. The temptation to forget
and be forgotten and to assimilate back into
normal life lurked for every survivor. We can
barely grasp and internalize the death of one
child. How can we grasp the death of
millions?
For
the sake of sanity, the survivors built barriers
between themselves and the horrors they had
experienced. But every barrier, every distance,
inevitably separates you from the most
meaningful experience of your life, and without
that experience, hard as it may be, you are
doubly defective: a defect imposed on you by the
murderers and a defect you perpetrated with your
own hands.
God
did not reveal himself in Auschwitz or in other
camps. The survivors came out of hell wounded
and humiliated. They were betrayed by the
neighbors among whom they and their forefathers
had lived. They were betrayed by Western
culture, by the Germans, by the language and
literature they admired so much. They were
betrayed by the great beliefs: liberalism and
progress. They were betrayed by their own
bodies.
What
to hold onto to live a meaningful life? It was
clear to many that the denial of one's Judaism,
which characterized the emancipated Jew, was no
longer possible. After the Holocaust it was
immoral.
No
wonder many of the survivors went on to Israel.
No doubt, they wanted to get to a place where
they could leave their victimhood behind and
assert responsibility over their fate, a place
where they could connect with the culture of
their forefathers, to the language of the Bible,
and to the land that gave birth to the
Bible.
This
is not a story with a happy ending. A doctor who
survived, from a religious background, who
sailed to Israel with us in June 1946, told us:
"We didn't see God when we expected him, so we
have no choice but to do what he was supposed to
do: we will protect the weak, we will love, we
will comfort. From now on, the responsibility is
all ours."
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