A DISTANCE FROM THE HOLOCAUST his special focus on the Holocaust is a continuation of an ongoing discussion in Tikkun about how we can think about one of the great outrages of human history. Although in other discussions in the magazine about the Holocaust we have focused more on the experience of survivors, this time we give primary focus to writers who experienced the event from a geo- graphical and historical distance. We imagine that just as ?being there? created painful familiarity with the Holocaust reality, as well as distortion in perception, distance li/eewise creates both clarity and distortion. From our perspective, the Holocaust raises three issues that will continue to be a focus for discussion in the magazine in the coming years: 1. What made it possible for fascism and anti-Semitism to triumph in Europe to the extent that it did? We refuse to address this as an abstract question about "the triumph of evil??-such discussion usually leads to worried talk about human nature that takes everybody off the hook by making it appear that a concrete reality is really an inevitable product of the structure of the universe. It is more useful to assume that the German people, or many of those who ended up supporting fascism in Europe, were not 100 percent evil; and then to ask ourselves what, if anything, might have been done to speak to these people in ways that might have averted the growth of Nazi support. -2. What are the theological implications of the Holo? caust? Although Tikkun has argued for a version of ]udaism that sees God as having given human beings the possibility of moral insight (Torah) and the freedom to malee their own errors and sin their own sins (even at the cost of allowing a Holocaust to ta/ee place), many other theological visions assume a greater involvement of God in history. But if God is involved, what made the Holocaust possible?or what changes in the conception of God are necessitated by it? 3. What are the political implications of the Holocaust for the ]ewish people? On the one hand, Tikkun has argued that the complicity of the nations of the world in the Holocaust gives them a special obligation toward the ]ewish people to insure that Jews have the same protection (based on land and national self-determination) that most other peoples have secured. On the other hand, we have rejected those people who try to use the Holocaust as special warrant to ignore the ethical standards of the ]ewish tradition. Here a special sensitivity is necessary. We do not presume to sit in judgment of those people who survived the crematoria and gas chambers of Europe. But neither do we accept those who think that our su??er- ing as a people provides legitimacy for our causing needless su??ering to other peoples. Visiting the Burnt House Chana Bloch a visit to Eastern Europe last summer, I was asked, ?But what are you planning to visit in the area of Cracow?? I was about to say ?Auschwitz? but caught myself: that would have sounded too accusing. The Polish woman who inquired had been very gracious to my husband and me. Why offend her? ?The museum at Auschwitz,? I said, soft-pedaling. Chana Bloch, a poet, critic, and translator, is chairman of the English Department at Mills College. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to complete a new collection of poems, Falcon, Jackal, Hawk. The word ?museum? came from a pamphlet put out by Orbis, the Polish Tourist Information Center. Under ?Half-Day Excursions from Cracow??along with the Wieliczka salt mine, ?a unique, world-famous monu- ment,? and Tyniec, ?a picturesquely located Benedictine Abbey in Romanesque style?-?Auschwitz is listed as a ?State Museum of Martyrology.? Auschwitz has come to be a synonym for hell, so the word ?museum? sounds evasively euphemistic. ?Martyrology? is worse than that: offensive, even dangerous, because it distorts the truth. A martyr is someone who chooses to suffer or die for his or her faith. 45 The sign at the entrance to Auschwitz makes clear what the tourist pamphlet only hints at: ?The State Museum in Oswiecim-Brzezinka is a monument to the and struggle of the Polish and other nations. The ashes of about four million victims of Hitler?s genocides are buried in the area of the former exter- mination camp." Only one people was singled out by the Nazis for total extermination, but at the museum in Auschwitz you wouldn?t know that. The Jews are only one out of many?and just barely that. The sign at the entrance is in a dozen languages, but Yiddish and Hebrew are not among them. Thrift, thrift. Speakers of Hebrew usually know some other language, and there aren?t enough speakers of Yiddish left to trouble a sign painter. - Auschwitz has become a tourist attraction. In the main building a steamy cafeteria serves schnitzel and boiled potatoes. There?s a youth hostel; a post of?ce; huge marble bathrooms, the most imposing I saw in Poland. There?s a souvenir shop where you can buy little dolls in folk costume, toy pistols, sunglasses, trian~ gular banners with the insignia of the town of Oswiecim. After the war, the city fathers had to sit down and ponder the question: how should a place like Auschwitz present itself to the world? I try to imagine their dis- cussion. At Dachau a sign welcomes visitors to ?the lZOO-year-old artists? center with its castle and sur- rounding park offering a splendid View over the country.? It?s a problem, of course. If you lived in Dachau or Auschwitz, what sign would you hang out? My husband, Ariel, was born in Germany. Since 1829 his family had owned a department store in the central square of Mosbach, a small town near Heidelberg. He was born in 1933, just after the boycott started. Some thugs painted ?Kauft nicht (Don?t buy from Jews) on the store windows; Herr P?ster, a neighbor, helped scrape off the paint. Customers came after hours to the back door and continued buying; Frau Schafer stood behind her lace curtains and wrote down their names. Ariel?s parents left Mosbach for Palestine in 1937. They settled in Nahariya, north of Haifa, and became chicken farmers. Like many German Jews, they went on speaking German, the language of culture; in the evening, tired from a long day?s work, they fell asleep in Hebrew class. If you asked them what is beautiful, they would answer: the snow-covered trees of the Schwarzwald. They lived like strangers in their new lives. But the cousins they left behind died in the camps. Ariel told me stories about the good Germans who had helped his family. I had been brought up to believe that there were none. It took, me a long time to under- 46 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 stand the complexity of his family?s attitude toward Germany: a pained disbelief shot through with love and yearning. Hate is simpler. ?But what about Erwin?? he would say, naming a German Christian employee who had convinced his parents to leave. ?What about Annele? Erna?" Goering is reported to have said, ?Don?t come and tell me, ?Herr Cohen or Herr Levy is such a nice man.? The whole race is rotten.? Ariel was brought up by his parents not to say nasty things like that about the Germans. Everywhere we traveled in Eastern Europe, the ghosts of the past accosted as. They fastened upon as with a prophetic intensity, spoke their piece, and often vanished without even saying their names. Yet his parents, like many European Jews, half-believed what the Nazis had to say about them: ?All they know is buying and selling?; and ?If aJew has an Iron Cross, he must have gotten it by cheating.? As it happened, Ariel?s father had been awarded an Iron Cross for valor in World War I, and his uncle Karl fell at Verdun, ?ghting ?for the Fatherland." That apparently wasn?t enough to assuage their self-doubt. One day in 1954, when Ariel came home from his Israeli officer?s course in uniform, his parents contemplated him with something more complicated than parental pride. ?Now that would have been a slap in Hitler?s face!? his father said. Here, at last: an answer to history! We talk about ?the six million,? meaning the Jews killed by the Nazis. Almost ?fty million people?not only Jews?died in the war. How many millions more had their permanently deformed? Where I come from, we were luckier. Not one member of my immediate family died in the Holocaust?only relatives of relatives, friends of friends. I was born in New York in 1940. In the middle of the war I stood on the sidewalk, dressed in a white crocheted nurse?s out?t with gloves to match, and smiled for the camera. What I knew of war was a radio speaking from its shelf and a bedtime ritual: ?Pray for Uncle Isaac; he?s a soldier.? Then relief, and celebration. The Veteran?s Day parades down the Grand Concourse in the Bronx were brisk and cheerful: soldiers in uniform with red poppies in their buttonholes. We had won the war. If the end of the story wasn?t all marching bands, the sorrows hovered at a distance. The little men with gold teeth who married my mother?s cousins went to live in another city. They were refugees, a word always spoken in italics. From what had they taken refuge? ?Not in front of the child- ren.? I ?rst heard stories of the war at the summer camp where, on Tisha b?Av, a fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple, a new litany was read in the auditorium ?Ausc/9wz'tz, Maz'clanek, high-minded campers gave up ice cream for the day. Many visitors to Auschwitz bear a burden of personal suffering. I came without such a history. But why visit Auschwitz? Why travel so many thou- sands of miles to honor the?dead, when I haven?t been to my own father?s grave in years? What did I want, borrowed?pain? There?s enough pain back home, thank you, even in a life lived under the banner of safety. Nor was it ?survivor?s guilt" that moved me. When I think of the dead, I feel horror, not reverence?they were victims, they weren?t saints?and guilt has no part in it. Hardly knowing what I wanted, I was drawn to this place by an urge amounting to a compulsion: I had to see it for myself. As a mother, a teacher, a poet. As a comfortable middle-class American who has learned about evil mostly from books. As a Jew who wants to live a Jewish life, having no clear sense of what that entails. Go stand there; you may ?nd out a thing or two, said a voice I recognized. Go violate your precious z'n- nocence. You need to know. hree rows of brick barracks still stand at Ausch- witz, each building a monument to a different division of suffering. The general exhibits deal with Extermination, Material Evidence of Crimes, Every- day Life of the Prisoner, Living and Sanitary Conditions, the Death Block. Among. the ?National Exhibitions,? set out like pavilions at a European fair?Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the rest? one building is devoted to the ?Suffering and Struggle of the Jews.? Of course, there are bits of the Jews scattered among those Other buildings. Piles of human hair. Braids tied with faded ribbon. Gray cloth, a little coarse, made of this hair. Hairbrushes, toothbrushes, shaving brushes. Crutches. Cooking pots. Piles of suit- cases with addresses stenciled in white ink. Shoes, boots, wooden clogs. One huge room is full of shoes. On either side of a center aisle, the shoes of the dead are piled up behind thick glass almost to the ceiling. A dump, a junk heap. You can?t see the bottom of the pile. The shoes look very worm?were the newer ones shipped off to Germany? I discovered with a little jolt that they had no Shoelaces. No, they wouldn?t have. The shoes were caked with the mud of Auschwitz, the same mud that was on our shoes. What is one to do with those shoes? At the State Jewish Theater in Warsaw, Ariel and I had seen an improvisation in pantomime about European history: the characrers started out in togas and ended in mini- skirts. In one tableau, there were the shoes, center stage, a great pyramid of them, and a violin scraping away in the wings. Such a big pile, and no place to put it. In the next scene, the whole cast gathered to sweep the shoes offstage, and the music changed to ?Rock Around the Clock.? That image of sweeping the shoes out of sight came back to me at Auschwitz?surprisingly, even in the Jewish pavilion. One of the main themes in this building is Polish ?Jewish cooperation during the war. There are lists of names, photos of Poles who died helping Jews, evidence of extensive cooperation between Polish and Jewish partisans. I know about those brave Poles; at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, many trees have been planted in their honor. The name of every Pole who helped should be recorded at Auschwitz too. There especially. But I am disturbed by the way a minor subplot was made to seem like the whole story. And the questions started coming fast, faster than I could sort them out: Can the whole story be told here? Who put together the exhibit in this building? Perhaps Jews who chose to remain in Poland and had to conclude a separate peace? Did they keep silent out of fear? Or out of delicacy, as we did with our hosts in Warsaw? In Warsaw we stayed for a few days with a Polish family, friends of a colleague in Berkeley. the younger daughter, an archaeologist born in 1948, showed us around the city, taking us from palace to reconstructed palace. An archaeologist makes a good guide to a past so dead. In the tower of the Royal Palace, in the central square, there is a stopped clock where a bomb hit on September 17, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Warsaw. The clock says 11:15. What does it mean to live in the shadow of that stopped clock? At house, we sat in the kitchen and talked about the war. brought out cheese, herring, and bread, and she prepared an omelette with sausage and fresh tomatoes. Her father, Jan, chief engineer in the reconstruction of Warsaw, poured little glasses of vodka. Her mother, Halina, told us how she had been separated from her older daughter for a few months during the Polish uprising in 1944. She wanted us to know this. With to translate, we compared sufferings. It was a lopsided affair: I was just a stand-in, after all, in my little crocheted nurse?s out?t. That dialogue in the kitchen had an almost audible subtext. Our faces said: We are Jews; look how pleasant and cbarmz'ng we are; bow could anyone not love us? Their faces answered: (Continued on p. 123) VISITING THE BURNT HOUSE 47 The model for intellectual critics of the press should be Santa Cruz?s Michelle Anderson, the beauty pageant contestant who played by .the rules long enough to make it to the ?nals of her California competition, then unfurled a banner protesting beauty pageants as de- grading to women. If such mole-like subversion can be accomplished without its double agents going down in ?ames, pressology will triumph, and mainstream journalism will change sooner, and for the better, rather than later. In the end, freedom of the press belongs to those who work in it. Cl VISITING THE BURNT HOUSE (Continued ?om p. 47) Of course we understand. Don?t you see? It?s not true what they say about us. Moved by the generosity of and her parents, by the pleasure of our new friendship, I didn?t ask the questions I might have asked. It would have been easier to raise those questions with people I knew much better?or not at all. few kilometers down the road from Auschwitz A is Birkenau~Brzezinka in Polish?where larger crematoria were built after the small one at Auschwitz was found insuf?cient. This is the place where the railroad tracks ended, where selections were made at the ramp, where millions of Jews from all over Europe went directly to their deaths. We expected the route to Birkenau to be well-marked, but we couldn?t ?nd a single road sign, though we drove around for nearly an hour asking directions. Finally an old farmer piling clover into the trunk of his car guided us to the red brick guard tower that marks the entrance. The camp is enormous. Unlike Auschwitz, it has been abandoned. Nothing is left of the people, the bundles, the fear, the smoke. Nothing but empty barracks of brick and wood. And miles of grass. At Point Reyes near San Francisco, not long ago, I visited the epicenter of the 1906 earthquake and walked along the fault line: here?s where the earth shifted; here?s where the ground opened. Birkenau is such a place. Grass is healing, says my husband, quoting a German expression he learned from his father: ?Lass grass daru'ber wacbsen.? I quote back Carl Sandburg, a poem I learned in grade school: am the grass; I cover all.? (The grass covers his uncle Karl at Verdun, one of the European battle?elds that Sandburg names.) I remember being disturbed by Sandburg?s poem when I was a child. I hadn?t yet realized adults could forget something that mattered; I used to think they remembered everything. A child?s initiation into the adult world is a series of such awakenings. When I told my young son, as mothers do, never to take candy from a stranger, he replied, with genuine puzzlement: didn?t know grown-ups be bad.? The grass comes and covers what grown-ups would rather not remember. Is that what ?healing? means? More than forty years have passed since the Holocaust. Some people would like to ?le it away under ?Atrocities, Twentieth-Century,? where it seems less terrible. But for most people I know, the feelings aroused are still raw. I wonder how long the sensation of pain will last. Jews have a long memory, but even forJews the destruc- tion of the Temple has stopped hurting. We visit the Burnt House in Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, with a kind of historical curiosity. Imagine: you can actually see pieces of charred wood and pottery! The bones of a woman?s hand! In two thousand years, Jews may look back and talk about Auschwitz as we talk today about the destruction of the Temple. But how shall we talk about it now? We are still gathering the potsherds. In the State Jewish Museum in Prague, housed in a number of buildings that were once synagogues, you can see cere- monial objects, textiles, manuscripts, early printed books, Bohemian glass?the remnants of a thousand years of Jewish life in Bohemia and Moravia, con?scated by the Nazis. A millennium reduced to a handful of objects in glass cases. When you look at these relics, when you admire their colors or proportions, you forget for a moment that they are objects shorn of context. The context is beyond recovering; we can only guess at it from scattered evidence. At Budapest?s Jewish Museum, our Hungarian Jewish guide pointed to a photo of a fourth-century Jewish tomb with a knobby menorah and the inscription, ?God is One,? explaining with some pride: ?There were Jews living here in the Roman period; the Magyar invasion didn?t take place until the tenth century.? The pathos of that claim: We were bere ?rst. And look at this photo: aJewish delega- tion to the wedding of King Matthias in 1476, the Jews dressed like gentiles, like nobles, sword on hip. We could look like them when we wanted to. Jewish army of?cers in World War I, photographed in the ?eld on Rosh Hashana in their uniforms and striped prayer shawls: We were loyal citizens. A rabbi blessing King Charles IV in 1918: We were important; our blessing mattered. Jewish athletes, a student choir, an ice cream vendor: We led normal lives; we were like everyone else. Those voices reverberate in the half-empty museum with their boast, their apology. Yet with so much lost, one is grateful that something TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 123 . raw-u In still exists to say: We lived bare 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: 1933-39, ?The establishment of the Fascist dictatorship, and the battle of the German anti?Fascists under the leadership of the Communist party?; 1939- 45, "World 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 Budapest, a woman of about sixty-?ve found us looking through the fence at the Memorial Garden. ?They 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 floated 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, cats. 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 Dohany and Wesselenyi with her glittering eye: we must hear her out. Our need to hear was as strong as her need to tell. 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 '1 1? ?mtEverywhere we traveled in Eastern Europe, the ghosrs of the past accosted us. Full of fury, they fasrened 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 distinguish it from the false one. What does it mean to tell the truth about the past? 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 long 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. \Y/hat 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, not more about the Nazis. And the Jews whose lives were destroyed 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.? 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 Kornrnandant's grand- daughter how it is possible that a man who is kind to