A DISTANCE FROM THE HOLOCAUST Protecting the Dead Francine Prose henever I write a sentence of this I feel the dead enter the room. I feel them crowding behind me to peer over my shoulder, to read what I have written, to grumble and complain. The theme of the dead?s conversation_is that I know nothing about it. There is no argument about this?certainly not from me. I write a few more sentences, each intended to keep the dead from misinterpreting the last, and then I write more, explicating these, and my essay branches endlessly like some fantastic fairy-tale tree on which, as the dead watch without particular interest, I am quite free to hang myself. I rush immediately to explain to the dead that I mean only ?guratively. Every metaphor confronts me with my ignorance of the fact. But isn?t that what we hope for from the dead?that we no longer have to explain? We?d like to believe that they understand or at least no longer care. But not these dead, not these. These dead are ours to take care of, and oh, the protectiveness! We imagine that we can cause them further injustice and pain; the prospect is humbling and frightening. We believe we owe it to these dead to keep them in living memory; we feel this is important, although their death is painful to write about and is never greeted by anyone as welcome news. Worst are the moments we even doubt the purpose of this record keeping, this witness bearing; we wonder if memory has any sway over how anyone acts. The numbers of the dead are what?s hardest to imagine. My of?ce could hold thirty at most, standing, rush-hour style. That would leave 5,999,970 to wait out on the stairs and through the hall and out the door through the yard to the road. If the dead stood single ?le along the side of the road, I could go down and get in my car and drive slowly past them forever. If the dead were massed in the ?elds, how much land would they cover? I think of crowds I?ve been part of, crowds I?ve seen ?lmed from Francine Prose is tbe author of seven novels. Her most recent book, a collection ofsbort stories, is Women and Children First (Fawcett, 1988). This essay was commissioned for Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, edited by David Rosen- berg, to be publisbed in [be fall of 1989 by Times Boo/es, a division of Random House, Inc. 48 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 above, waves of people coming and coming?nothing close to six million. Nor do I want to imagine: the actual faces, the children. Two nights after I write these words, I am watching TV. My husband ?ips through the channels and stops at a documentary about a group of now-elderly Hungarian concentration camp survivors who return to the camps as tourists. On the screen a woman says, ?My mother and father and sister died here.? She is a little homely, she wears eyeglasses and a scarf, she says this as if it were a simple fact. Then she says something I don?t quite catch about ?nding her parents? shoes. I say to my husband, don?t want to see this.? ?You?re writing about it,? he says. The room is dark, it is warm in my bed. It is late; I am half asleep. don?t want to see it,? I say. All I know ?rsthand about the Holocaust is how I learned to perceive it?how I envisioned it as a child, and how my sense of it changed and later changed again. My personal idea of the Holocaust is, it goes without saying, an in?nitely small corner of the subject, hardly worth exploring, a contribution to the literature not worth making except in the hope of its touching on something larger. When I think about the Holo- caust, of how my View of it has shifted, I recognize something about how we apprehend suffering; how the suffering of others becomes part of our consciousness, part of how we perceive the world; how the pain of others is alternately an objeCt of curiosity, indifference, envy, titillation; and how this pain may ?nally become real to us, almost as real as our own pain. I am interested in the growth of our senses of empathy and of evil, of history, possibility, memory, and obligation. I am watching another ?lm, again on docu- mentary about (among other things) how the legacy of the Holocaust affects young Germans today. The ?lm- maker, the daughter of a Dachau survivor, asks the granddaughter of a Dachau Kommandant how it is possible that her grandfather?by all accounts a good man, a loving man, kind to his family?could pat his grandchildren on the head and go off to his daily work. Waiting for the granddaughter?s reply, I ?nd I am holding my breath. For this is the central question, the question that all my thoughts about the Holocaust keep running into like a wall: the question of how it could happen. At issue here is nothing less than the mystery of evil, the genesis of morality, of empathy, the civilizing power of knowledge and of love. To consider this ques- tion is to fear that all my concern with moral education and the ability to apprehend and empathize'with others? suffering is ?nally beside the point. The granddaughter has been crying; her nose and eyes are red. She says she does not understand, though she has tried and tried. She says: could two souls inhabit one body, maybe something, something like that? of the voluptuous. It seems perhaps incredible and certainly perverse to say that about an un- speakable horror. Part of this feeling was simply the product of childish misapprehension, the synesthetic blurring that causes children to confuse what they hear with the circumstances in which they hear it. I learned about the Holocaust as children hear of a storm when their own house is unthreatened. They hear: it is windy and unsafe outside. They hear: we are fortunate? inside it is warm. Like many American Jewish children, I felt that had I been born in another place at another time, I too would have been killed, and this astonishing idea?that there existed people who would kill me just for being me?gave me a sense of vulnerability and especially of evil. But the knowledge that one might be dead if some alternate self had lived in another place is not useful information to the child, ?rst because the child has quite a concrete sense of self, and also because the self ?nally balks when asked to imagine not being itself. This idea of lucky, narrow escape and its concomitant terrors meant less to me than what I sensed intuitively when my mother and father spoke of the Holocaust: that this was something dark, mysterious, forbidden, tragic?at once terrible and exciting. And so, for me, the Holocaust became invested with an air of the romantic. It was terrible and glamorous, dark-toned and nostalgic, a black-and-white or sepia ?lm in which it was always raining. I knew that it was serious (my parents made that clear), a subject for adult discussion that ended suddenly with warning looks over the children?s heads. It was emotionally high-charged but historically abstract. I was born in Brooklyn, two years after the war. No one in our family?not one person we knew?had been killed. There was a building not far from our house in which war refugees lived?the poorest apartment house or a long time the Holocaust had for me an aura on the poorest block, on the tagged, Flatbush Avenue edge of prosperous Ditmas Park. For me, the entire block was charged with mystery and fascination. Walking past, I used to stare into the hallways, at the tile floors and landlord-green walls; to look was to stand on the edge of a pit I could jump into if I wanted. In summers the refugees sat on the stoop and in folding chairs. A kid named Armand lived there; he was in our third grade. We all knew he was different from us, but I can?t now remember how. I refused to connect these people with the Holocaust I imagined, the Romeo and Juliet Holocaust of The Diary of Anne Fran/e. I cannor remember how old I was when I ?rst read Anne Frank?s diary. Perhaps I was nine or ten. I read it from cover to cover and went back and read it again. For years I reread it every few months till I knew my favorite 7 parts by heart. These were not the passages other people cherished, those expressions of strength and courage and unwarranted faith in humanity. Rather, they were the sections that dealt with Anne?s romance with Peter Van Daan. For me the book was the story of a girl who had a love affair and a girl who died, and in retrospect I am not sure I knew the difference; it is never so easy to confuse sex and death as when we are young and have had no experience of either. For me the unfolding drama of Anne?s infatuation with Peter was inextricably con- nected with what I knew of her subsequent fate, and something in me saw this con?uence as extremely attrac- tive. I think that I would have been willing to suffer the death if I could have had the romance. There is much that is pornographic ahont photographs of disastrous a?eath ?some connection heyona? their ohoions power to fascinate and shock. This is what I mean by voluptuousness, this connection of tragedy with pleasure and abandon, at an age when what we secretly feel about suffering is that we don?t have enough, when whether a life is tragic or comic means less than that it is dramatic. This longing to drown in some warm ocean of (imagined) suffering is part of childhood and adolescence. Late childhood, adolescence?one way to know you were alive was to stick yourself with a pin. The Holocaust was and still is an extremely sharp pin, with which even adults can stick themselves, although for different reasons. I was glad that no one in our family had died in the Holocaust, but, having no real experience of a PROTECTING THE DEAD 49 family member?s dying, I also felt cheated; to have suffered even a minor loss would have made my connec- tion with history much more ?rsthand and authentic. At that age I resembled the famous phOtograph of Anne Frank, and I would stare at her picture for hours till I felt it was my own. It gave me a kind of half-scary, half-pleasurable chill, and, as I look at it now, I can recapture some of that sensation: that peculiar, heady mix of melancholy and exaltation. I knew something about the Holocaust and about why the Franks and the Van Daans were forced to hide in that attic. I knew the number (six million), knew of the camps and the images: the barbed wire, the striped suits, the shaved skulls, the sunken eyes. I can?t remember precisely how I first heard about the Holocaust, but I somehow suspect that my earliest knowledge was connected to an early form of sexuality, to being shown snapshots of my father as a handsome, young soldier in the Philippines, and being told the reasons why he?d risked his life in the war. My father was brave; he did what he had to. Hitler was killing the Jews. It took only childish logic to make history come full circle: my father had joined the army to save Anne Frank. The lesson I was meant to learn was that we were fortunate, but that we must never take our good fortune for granted, because this could happen to us. Another Holocaust coald happen anywhere?even here, where you might least expect it. This was the history of the Jews. have referred to the Holocaust as a pin with which to stick yourself, and it functioned this way, I think, for my parents, who saw themselves very much as Jewish, although they?d left their immigrant parents? neighborhoods, stopped keeping kosher and going to shul. They were in many ways religious people, though-? both doctors?they considered themselves modern and scientific, and thought it quaint and a little absurd to imagine a God in a heaven. But when they felt in danger of assimilating too much, they?d stick themselves with that pin of the Holocaust and, punctured, fall back on'the comfort (comfort born, characteristically, of uneasiness) of their Jewish identity. I don?t mean to imply that the idea of the Holocaust was for them?-child?an instrument of sensation. They were too wise, too experienced for that, and could no more view it that way than I can at my age now. Both were gifted with great reservoirs of compassion; both found it painful that anyone should suffer pain. In telling us about the Holocaust, they were saying what fortunate children need to hear: the fact that they are lucky, that fortune should bring a sense of responsibility toward those less fortunate, that elsewhere and at other times there is and has been 50 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 .- 1.01.; great injustice, and ?nally that this reality should be imminent to us all. Also, I suppose, they were offering the Holocaust they did, to remind ourselves of our Jewishness. But children, by nature, reject those pins?that is, when the pins come from their parents. The things that parents worry about, and want us to worry about! I didn?t believe it could happen in this country, that storm troopers would ever march into our house in Brooklyn. I thought my parents back- ward for thinking so, juSt as they?d thought their parents backward for their Old World ideas. Children want to distance themselves from disaster, to disassociate them- selves from the embarrassment and the shame of death. Not only didn?t I believe that it could happen here, but I believed you could outsmart death if you were clever enough. I took (and I think my father did, too) a certain pride in the fact that my great-grandparents brought their families from Russia after the 1905 po- groms. They saw what was coming?wsaw it and got out. The victims of the Holocaust could have been our brothers, our aunts, and cousins, or, in the case of Anne Frank, our sister, our double. But ultimately they were not our family, not our dead; they were, in some crucial way, entirely different from us. This perception of difference was con?rmed when I met my first real Holocaust survivors, that is, the first whose lives seemed to match the romance I had in mind. These were friends of my parents, a married couple?like my parents, both doctors. I met them about the same time I was compulsively rereading Anne Frank. European, sophisticated, multilingual, extremely handsome (Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer), they were the living embodiments of the Holocaust I?d envisioned. My parents told us their story, with respect and a certain pride, because they recognized it as a srory with so much narrative power that some might even rub off and cling like glitter to the teller. It is ennobling just to know people whose lives have been touched and narrowly saved by history and great drama. -. . .. So we learned how they were hidden by Polish peas- ants, how her mother had been lost in the camps and found after the war, how he had wanted to be a concert pianist?afterward he never played. This may not have been their story at all?but it?s what I remember hearing. And mostly what I remember was how glamorous it sounded; how romantic, dramatic?how much like the Holocaust movie I had dreamed up in my head. I was, as they say, a sensitive child: compassionate, easily hurt, neither stupid nor unfeeling. What I want to make clear is that I was never unaware that all this involved real suffering, suffering on a scale that I found nearly impossible to imagine?and still do. But the knowledge was abstract for me, distanced; only much later did it become what I would call ?real.? What interests me now is what such knowledge means, the complex epistemology of how a protected American child comes to apprehend it: how the knowledge of the Holocaust?and of suffering in general?is romanticized, sentimentalized, glamorized, personalized, abstracted, denied, internalized, and ?nally?if not understood? then seen, insofar as possible, without the blinders of sentiment and confusion. The other side of voluptuousness is curiosity and indifference?the ways in which the self steps back and watches itself and the world. Distance is what allows us to look at the photographs, to confront the violation, the nakedness of the dead. There is much that is porno- graphic about photographs of disastrous death?some connection beyond their obvious power to fascinate and shock. Something private and secret is happening here?but we are allowed to look. In order to look at death, one has to stand back, to distance oneself; it is easier than imagining that this could happen to us. Some years ago in a library, in a city far from my home, I found a stack of magazines from India; this was just after Bhopal and the bloody Sikh?Hindu riots. I remember staring, hypnotized, at the legions of the dead, the dead of Bhopal laid out in rows, the Sikhs left strewn about. What made me keep looking was partly horri?c interest, partly the recognition that I was free to look; I remember fearing that someone would come in and catch me. It might as well have been conven- tional pornography. I?m sure that this mixture of distance, horror, pity, curiosity, and titillation is how I ?rst saw pictures of the Holocaust dead. I remember seeing them in sze magazine?though this is a vague memory and may not be true. But I do recall that pull of fascination, of seduction, that fear I might keep looking and never be able to stop. Only still photographs exert this power; in ?lm the editing does the turning away for you?the moving of the camera intercedes and breaks the spell. In college I went with my boyfriend to see the movie Night and Fog. I remember that it left me feeling heavyhearted, queasy, and also irritated with my boyfriend, who was not Jewish and could not have experienced it as I did. But how did I experience it? I was able to watch it through, to detach myself on some level that is no longer available to me. ne summer, when I was in high school, I went 0 ?shing for the ?rst time. I drove with a friend to the North Shore of Long Island, and there, from a bridge; we caught blow?sh. That day they were so plentiful that we just had to lower our hooks in the bay. Blow?sh are remarkably sweet-tasting, but their most unusual quality reveals itself in death. Taken from the water, they puff up like bladders and bounce like balls on the ground. I watched this happen again and again with interest and indifference as, heady with our own success and a kind of primal acquisitiveness, we went on catching ?sh. We caught a bucketful, then another, and continued ?shing until we had caught more than I and my friend and our families could possibly eat. I can?t remember what our mothers did with what was left over. My point is not that we went ?shing but that We took more than we needed, and it never occurred to us that what we were taking was life. It was in every other way an uneventful day, one I had wholly forgotten until, in preparation for this essay, I began thinking about the ways, the stages, in which suf- fering comes to seem real. I was trying to think ifI had ever knowingly caused real suffering, or known of suf- fering and done nothing to stop it. Except for romantic suffering, and the torments I visited on my brother as a child, my conscience was mostly clear?except for that one day, ?shing. Clearly no meaningful analogy can be drawn between killing a few dozen ?sh and causing the deaths of millions of people. It is absurd to even distantly connect irresponsible ?shing with being a Dachau Kommandant. Yet what struck me was that, even for a clay, I had been able to suppress my awareness that I was causing death and pain. And I know I could not do that now. It is hard for me to believe that the person I know as myself could have spent a clay watching living creatures die for no reason. But it happened twenty-?ve years ago, who- ever that person was. Now, when the TV channels ?ip by and land on the documentary about the elderly survivors, it is so dif?cult for me to watch that, even though it relates to what I am writing, I refuse to see it. I know that afterwards I will not be able to sleep. (Continued on p. 124) PROTECTING THE DEAD 51 still exists to say: We lived here once. A shadowy presence is better than none at all. In East Berlin's Museum of German History, the Nazi period is presented under two headings: 193369, ?The establishment of the Fascist dictatorship, and the battle of the German anti-Fascists under the leadership of the Communist party"; 1939- 45, ?\onrld War II, the war against fascism, and the liberation of the German people from fascism." You wouldn?t know from the exhibit that the Jews had any part in this history; there isn?t even the obligatory yellow star under glass. Just a list of famous people who were forced to leave: Albert Einstein, Arnold Zweig, Kurt Weill, Arnold Schonberg, the great names. Down the street, at the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism, a small crowd gathered to watch the changing of the guard: goose-stepping soldiers in helmets and boots. In the sobriety of East Berlin, their little ceremony provided a moment of diversion. They were absurd?and disturbing. We live by symbols, had said. Inside the memorial, an imitation Greek temple with an ?eternal flame," the Unknown Soldier and Unknown Resistance Fighter are each honored by a plaque; but the Jews, with a ?ne irony, are entirely invisible. The Germans themselves, we are given to understand, were the victims of fascism and militarism. The East Germans, that is. ?Luther was persecuted in West Germany? is a sentence I heard in East Berlin. The truth, or part of it, is in the keeping of a few who escaped to tell?but only for a little while longer. Out? side the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapesr, a woman of about sixty-?ve found us looking through the fence at the Memorial Garden. ?They shot men right here on this street,? she began, without introduction. ?And not only here. They lined up Jews near the Danube and shot them. Bodies ?oated on the river like ?sh. The Danube was red. They shot little children. ?Kill them in the name of Jesus!? they shouted. I heard it." She was dressed in a frilly white blouse and wore too much lipstick. ?My father owned a jewelry store,? she answered before we asked. took a gold cross from the showcase and put it on. I could hide behind that." In America you don?t hear stories like hers on the street. When you meet a stranger, you talk weather, traf?c, cars. It takes a while till you begin to tell your nightmares. This Ancient Mariner had a story that couldn?t wait. She held us at the corner of Dohtiny and \?Uesselenyi with her glittering eye: we must hear her out. Our need to hear was as strong as her need to tell. We had to receive her words exactly as she gave them to us. On the streets of Budapest at noon we performed this rite. When she dies, who will tell her story? 'k 124 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 Everywhere we traveled in Eastern Europe, the ghosts of the past accosted us. Full of fury, they fastened upon us with a prophetic intensity, spoke their piece, and often vanished without even saying their names. They had something urgent to tell?the real truth, we say, to disringuish it from the false one. \Vhat does it mean to tell the truth abOut the pasr? Can it be done? Who is able to do it? I know how much I myself distort?by selection of detail, by emphasis, by tone of voice?even when I talk about something that happened yesterday. Even when I am trying to be truthful. It takes an effort to be truthful about something that happened [orig ago, something that still hurts. What I found in Eastern Europe often seemed to me deliberate distortions of the truth. I returned home with a sense of outrage?and almost immediately started doubting the scratchings in my notebook. Did I really see what I thought I saw? After all, we spent only an afternoon at Auschwitz; perhaps if we?d spent a whole day there, we?d have come away with different impressions. There must have been a road sign pointing the way to Birkenau, though we didn?t ?nd it. Surely there was some corner of the exhibit in East Berlin that I missed. Back at home, I wavered between anger and doubt. The anger made me want to write down what I?d seen; the doubt made me hesitate. What did I think I could learn, after all, by visiting the burnt house of European Jewry? To see an Open can of Zyklon and a crematorium oven is to under- stand less, nor more about the Nazis. And the Jews whose lives were desrroyed have also left us with ques- tions we cannot answer. Forty years after the destruction, from a comfortable distance, we debate their actions, their inaction. I had often asked my husband, ?Why did your parents wait so long before leaving? Why did your relatives stay?? In my confusion about what I'd experienced, the plight of the European Jews became, ?nally, a little more real to me. I could see them paralyzed by doubt; I could hear them assuring one another, ?This isn't happening. This can?t last.? El PROTECTING THE DEAD (Continued from p. 51) Everything has changed. The other documentary? the one by and about the yOung Canadian woman, the daughter of the Dachau survivor, who visits Ger- many and interviews the granddaughter of the Dachau Kommandant?is impossible not to watch. It asks the essential, crucial questions: questions about evil, about compassion, about the apparent presence and absence of a moral sense. When the ?lmmaker asks the Kommandant?s grand- daughter how it is possible that a man who is kind to his grandchildren could go to his job, day after day, the job of killing Jews, I?as I?ve said?hardly breathe. For me it is the question that everything keeps breaking on, like waves pounding and pounding the same unyielding rock. This question is tied to all I have been thinking about empathy and morality, about the ways in which suffering stops seeming abstract, glamorous, distanced, until others become so real to us that we could no more hurt their children than our own. Interspersed with the interviews is footage of the camps and the war: two young men with the faces of skulls, an old woman being humiliated, pushed around on a street. I think I see something being hooked roughly behind the old woman?s shoulder, a bayonet or just an umbrella. But this is just an impression, because I am not really looking. A grown woman, the mother of children, I am hiding my eyes like a child. For me the knowledge that the suffering and the evil of the Holocaust were real (by which I mean not Hollywood, not glamorous) had to exist before I could truly understand that the issues the Holocaust raises are the most important there are. Everything turns on the question of how the Kommandant could take his granddaughter on his lap and the next day order the killing of Children. The hope is: if this could be under- stood, it could somehow be changed. I think of these questions obsessively, though I often try not to. I will not go to see Shoah. Some years ago, when I read D. M. Thomas?s The White Hotel, I skipped the chapter about Babi Yar. When a Holocaust ?lm is on television?the one about the elderly Hungarian woman ?nding her parents? shoes?I ask my husband to keep switching channels. I say that I have enough of those pictures in my head. I don?t want or need any more. But the pictures are always present. Whenever I talk about history, the Holocaust is there. It is part of what I mean when I tell students to study history. When I tell them to take fewer writing workshops and more history courses, I mean the Holocaust, I mean the Middle Ages, I mean the empires and wars and shifting alliances through time and all over the world. I mean a sense of perspective; I would not want them to get out of school with an undeveloped sense of evil. Clearly it is possible to live without scenes from Leni Riefenstahl ?ashing intermittently through one?s mind, images of mass rallies, roaring crowds, Hitler?s mad- puppet rhetoric. But it is not possible for me. So many things recall these images?the rhetoric of certain poli- ticians and preachers, the ?ag~waving and chanting on the ?Morton DowneyUr. Show.? It would certainly be more pleasant not to have these images in my head, but wanting that is like wishing for a different color, a different body, a different past. I hree years ago I agreed to cotranslate, from the Polish, A Scrap of Time, a book of stories about the Holocaust by a Polish Israeli writer named Ida Fink. After I agreed, I had many second thoughts, mostly about my reluctance to have ?more of those pic- tures in my head.? But often, as I worked on the book, it occurred to me that one of the things that art can do is to seduce us into hearing bad news, news we would rather not hear. The intensity of Ida Fink?s short stories and something unique in their voice?a voice at once absolutely soft-spoken and absolutely urgent, totally ac- cessible and yet charged throughout with that ?strange. ness? we recognize as art?were powerful and extremely moving and seductive enough to make me willing to work that closely with their painful (more painful for being quiet and exquisitely rendered) subject matter. I found the work?the freedom to tinker with lan- guage, with the meaning and usage and cadence of words?enormously satisfying. But at times it was very hard work?winter afternoons when I worked on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, and the sentences I pushed word by word toward greater clarity and grace evoked a world of fear and sorrow that seemed suddenly so immediate that I felt as if it were some sorrow in my own life, one I was familiar with and that refused to disappear; and I?d feel unhappy, then weepy, then tired, and I?d close my eyes and fall asleep till my children came home from school. One story, in particular, I could barely get through. I?d ?nish a sentence and then put the manuscript down and fall asleep and later try again, and again ?nd myself nodding off into that borderline narcolepsy through which the panicky desire to ?ee becomes the heavy, compelling urge to escape into sleep. In this story, a man and a woman wake to hear the rumbling of the trucks that will take them to the camps. While they wait, they talk about the possibility of saving their small daughter, the futility of hiding, their doubts about having brought the child into the world they ?nd themselves in. Before long they are rounded up, and they set out marching, the father carrying the child. In a rush of pure instinct, the father puts down the child and tells her to run, run to safety; the child runs and is shot, and the father must match on bearing her body. In 1978, when our ?rst son was born, we named him after Bruno Schulz?a great genius, a Polish Jewish writer shot, almost on a whim, by an SS of?cer. I had read all of Schulz?s work, starting with Street of Crocodiles, then his Senatorz'um Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Reading Schulz, I felt that powerful admiration, that near-euphoria one feels in the presence of a Master, a feeling not entirely unlike the emotions of falling in love. I read everything of his I could ?nd?that is, his TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 125 two books?and what little about him I could discover. \Y/hen I think now of his un?nished novel, The Maritza/3, lost in the Holocaust, when I think that if nor for the war, Schulz might still be alive?and who knows what he'd have written in the years since then?I feel a surge of what by now I?ve learned to recognize as real grief, adult grief. Now our son Bruno is ?shing. Our younger son Leon watches. \Y/e have all talked, a little solemnly, about not catching anything we won?t eat. I am not crazy about the idea of my son ?shing, but he enjoys it, and I tell myself that he probably won?t catch anything, anyway. In fact he catches a bluegill, bony and too small, but colored?blue and orange and silver?like some trOpical fish. As my husband removes the hook from its mouth to throw it back in the water, our younger son bursts into tears. ?It?s so beautiful,? he keeps saying. Some people (Chekhov immediately comes to mind) seem born with profound empathic imaginations. Others develop a moral sense when they are still children: they learn, without confusion and misinterpretation, what their well-intentioned parents are trying so hard to teach them. Others?the evidence of the Holocausr would suggest?never come to that knowledge, or else some monstrous parallel ?moral? sense grows inside them and emerges at some later age, freakish and grotesque. I learned very early not to do harm, but it took longer till I understood that those who are harmed bleed jusr as I do, that suffering is not glamorous, that death is only death. The lesson of the Holocaust was not that we were fortunate. I could not imagine the victims as me, born at the wrong place and time. In fact what I had to see clearly was that they were not I. The lesson (which orher children, I am sure, learned faster) was that the pain and terror that the Holocaust victims suffered was precisely the same pain and terror we would have suffered in their situation?if we could imagine their situation. ertain paths to knowledge are faintly embarrass- ing. I am acutely aware of the smarminess, the sentimentality of saying I knew nothing about empathy until I had children. I know how softheaded this sounds, this claim to some mysterioso maternal knowledge, although one might ask why. I can think of other experiences that are commonly accepted, without shame or question, as revelatory and illuminating? warfare, illness, even travel. No one would question the premise that a bad auto accident or a trip to China could change your life, but it seems somehow murky and suspect to say that about the experience of seeing a life come out of yours, one you love more than your own. 126 TIKKUN VOLnot mean to generalize or suggest that this is how anyone else might (or might want to) learn to apprehend the world directly. Mother Teresa has no children; many Nazi war criminals did. All I am saying is that this is what happened to me, that after my children were born I noticed a drastic decrease in my threshold for pain (that is, for the pain of others) and a parallel increase in my uneasiness and impatience with how little I actively do to relieve what others are suffering. I worry about what I read in the Americas Watch and Amnesty International newsletters, reports of the brutalized and disappeared, and I worry that I may be guilty of what Dickens called telescopic philan- thropy: caring more about people in distant lands than about the homeless on my own doorstep and the people I come in contact with?supermarket checkers, students, Other drivers on the road?and whom I mistreat through exhaustion and carelessness. I remember very clearly, though it was years ago, reading, in a review of a novel, a description of a German soldier killing a child in front of its mother. How many times this must have happened, how many times I must have read similar descriptions. Yet by then my sons had been born, and I could not stop thinking of it. I kept imagining what it would be like to see your child killeduhow could you go on living? The way I felt when I contemplated this possibility was entirely different from the way I used to imagine being Anne Frank, the way I used to think of the sufferings of Holocaust victims, the way that, as a child, I used to lie awake and think how my parents might someday die. Gone was the voluptuousness, the terror I used for sensation to cause myself pain. In the years that had passed since then, my father had died, and I?d learned that pain was sharper and deeper than the chasm of grief I?d imagined jumping into as a child. Real pain could not be tried out, tried on, explored like a tongue On a sore tooth; real pain sneaked up and seized you and shook you when you least expected it. And gradually I realized that something profound had changed, that suffering no longer seemed to me abstract, romantic, desirable, or voluptuous, but rather ugly, terrifying, deeply moving, and entirely real. Of course the birth of true compassion need not come through the bearing of children, or the experience of loss; it can result?for those who come to empathy late?from any experience that ties one to life, that makes one see it as precious and fragile. Once one has had that strong sense of life, has apprehended it directly, one realizes the magnitude of what it means to destroy it. But once again everything founders on that Dachau Kommandant. He had children, he lost parents, he went off and did his work. This question about the Kommandant could, if you .. .4-4- let it, infect everything, paralyze every action?including, I should say, the act of writing this. Because if love or loss, direct emotional experience, cannot confer empathy and morality, what can we expect historical knowledge to do? Pol Pot was well educated; he probably knew all about the Holocaust. And apparently that didn?t stop him from staging one of his own. The second half of the stories in A Scrap of Time con- cern memory and its importance. In one story, set years after the war, a Jewish couple visits the Polish farmhouse in which they hid in a tiny bunker throughout the war. Out of gratitude they have ?nanced the remodeling of the farmhouse, which, they now see, includes a roomy hiding place 50?35 the Polish couple proudly tells them?the Jewish couple will be more comfortable should they need to be hidden again. In another story, a young Jewish woman, a survivor, leaves her American ?anc? who, wanting to love and save her, urges her to change her name and forget her painful memories. The irony is that while we were working on the translation, my cotranslator kept looking in modern German dictionaries for the meanings-of words in Nazi of?cialese?terms for speci?c army ranks, types of roundups, and ?actions.? And what she kept ?nding was that the words no longer existed; no de?nitions were listed for ordnungdz'enst or . aufseberz?n. The notion that memory and testimony are a moral and spiritual obligation goes beyond the question of what we expect them to accomplish. One burdensome by-product of a sense of evil is that some things seem wrong. Among them are sins of omission. It is wrong not to say: the Holocaust happened, and it was not glamorous or romantic. And it seems inexcusable to act as if no one will be changed by hearing these words, as if no one will be saved, as if evil cannot be struggled against. To say that evil is part of human nature, that the Dachau Kommandant went to work?why bother then to discuss it, better just to let it drop?is not only incorrect, but cowardly and dangerous. Whenever I hear anyone using metaphors of the barnyard to describe human behavior, I steel myself for something suspect to come. But once again I ask the dead to forgive me, because I want to be very clear. What I mean by the necessity of action in the face of some possibly ineradicable strain of evil is this: if you put a flock of chickens in the barnyard, sooner or later the rest of the chickens will start pecking the weakest one. This is the mystery of cruelty and evil. But to know this is no reason not to try to stop it, not to try to save the chicken from being peeked. I could nOt live in this world without saying: look, that chicken is being pecked. Stop, stop pecking that chicken. Because when you no longer say it, no longer feel the responsibility to say that it has happened and is happen- ing, the words you use to say these things mysteriously disappear, and soon no one is saying them. It is impor- tant not to let the words vanish, to remember, to keep repeating: the Holocaust happened. It was not glamor- ous or romantic. It was not abstract. Six million men, women, and children died horribly, and the very im- possibility of imagining so much needless, cruel death is precisely the reason why we mu5t keep pushing our- selves to imagine. El NELLY Continued from p. 54) he next day, the people who were ?t left the ghetto and marched under armed German guard toward the camp. Jewish militiamen helped or- ganize the columns. They tried to calm frantic mothers by promising them that no harm would befall their chil- dren left behind in the ghetto. As a reward for their ef?cient help, the militiamen were entitled to the use of horses and carts in order to transport their possessions from the ghetto to the camp. They were even permitted to stop over in the city and make their ?nal arrangements before the liquidation. On the way, Kuba picked up Nelly?s children, wrapped like bundles, and hid them in the bottom of the cart, thus transferring them into the camp. Now they were there with Nelly, on the upper bunk, between the window and the door of the barrack?three small creatures alone among the adult population of the camp, which consisted of thousands of bereaved parents: the only males among the hundreds of women in the barrack. We, the women without special privileges, left each morning at dawn after the roll call to work for the Germans, in their factories. Those who were responsible to the Germans for the productivity and ef?ciency of the work, ruled their slaves mercilessly. From time to time the Germans would storm the factories and take away people for outdoor work. The most common out- door work in the camp was the digging up and desecra~ tion of graves (the camp was situated on the site of an ancient Jewish cemetery). The Germans delighted in forcing their prisoners to dig up the graves, remove the remains of the dead, pile them up, and bum them A heavy, overpowering stench enveloped the whole camp- Trained dogs urged on the enfeebled workers; Often, incited by their masters, the dogs would bite the living flesh of their victims. Those who could nOt continue would be removed, together with the remains from the graves, and burned. Weeks and months passed, and the heavens grew dark TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 127