- 

Nuances of Evil

 

Abraham Brumberg

have always been dubious about so-called ?Holo-

caust Studies??the proliferation of courses, con-

ferences, papers, exhibits, and the like. Another
fad, or perhaps a sop to Jewishness, with the prospect
of an academic degree thrown in for good measure? The
evidence that has come my way suggests that little of
the impact of all this activity goes beyond the much?
ballyhooed idea of ?consciousness raising??that is, an
admirable awareness often coupled with a deplorable
lack of understanding.

I have also been wary of politically expedient uses of
the words ?Holocaust? and ?genocide?: During and af-
ter the 19605, the Soviet Union was frequently accused
of practicing ?cultural genocide? against the Jews, thus
obscenely equating discriminatory policies and the lack
of cultural facilities with mass murder. And I recall Jeane
Kirkpatrick using the term ?Holocaust? to describe the
fate of the Miskito Indians (total number of victims
about seventy) in Sandinista Nicaragua. This is on the
same moral level as the word ?Gestapo? flung at the New
York or Chicago police by the New Left.

This and similar thoughts were on my mind last Jan-
uary, when I attended a London colloquium marking the
fiftieth anniversary of the so-called ?Wannsee Confer-
ence on the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.? Yet
as I listened to the more than twenty papers and the
often brisk discussions they provoked, it became clear
to me that in this case, at least, my reservations were
out of place.

Already the first paper, given by Yehuda Bauer, chal-
lenged conventional wisdom. The Wannsee Conference,
said Bauer, was not where the Final Solution was
reached; moreover, it wasn?t a conference at all.

And he was right. Precisely when Hitler made up his
mind to go ahead with the slaughter is still a matter of
conjecture (despite the claims of so-called revisionist
historians, no action on this matter could have been
initiated without Hitler?s imprimatur). By the summer
of 1941, however?more than six months before the

 

Abra/Jam Brumberg has written extensively on Russian, East
European, andJewz'sb affairs. is a writing scholar at
Georgetown University in lWas/yz'ngton, D. C.

Wannsee meeting?the Final Solution was already in ef-
fect. The SS Einsatzgruppen (loosely, special task forces)
launched their mass executions the day after the inva-
sion of Russia on June 22. Several months later, the first
extermination camp came into being on Polish soil, out-
fitted with mobile vans that used their own exhaust gases
(later ?upgraded? to Zyklon B).

The fifteen Nazi bureaucrats who gathered at the
sumptuous villa on the Warm Lake in Berlin were not
there to debate the merits of Hitler?s project. Their
ninety-minute meeting?amicable, good-humored,
laced with generous doses of cognac, and followed by
a hearty luncheon?was more in the nature of what in
current academic parlance would be called a ?work-
shop.? Certain details still had to be ironed out. In Slo-
vakia and Croatia, Gott sez? Dank, things were going
smoothly, while in, say, France, no difficulties were fore-
seen?wrongly, as it turned out, since the occupation
met with considerable resistance there. A few countries
in northern Europe presented something of a problem
when it came to ?evacuating? their Jews. The language,
as set down by Adolf Eichmann in the protocol, was
tantalizineg vague, even decorous: ?Cleaning [saubern]
the German Lebensmum of Jews in a legal way,? for in-
stance, meant murdering eleven million Jews in a sys-
tematic fashion.

hen there were knotty problems concerning

Misc/slinge (persons of ?mixed blood?): of ?the

first? or ?the second degree,? one-quarter Jews,
one-eighth Jews, persons of ?a particularly objectionable
racial appearance? or lacking in such appearance?the
permutations seemed endless, all of them complicating
the central task at hand, which was how to kill as many
Jews as expeditiously as possible. How should these
groups be treated? The more zealous ideologues were
uncomfortable about any compromises?not a dr0p of
Jewish blood must be allowed to pollute the Aryan race.
Others cautioned a more selective approach. The dis?
cussion, however, went nowhere, because on a matter of

*The conference was sponsored jointly by the Bauer Institute of Brandeis Uni-
versity, the Weiner Library in London, and the Department ofJewish Studies
of the University College, London.

23

this grave importance the decision was up to the Fiihrer
(?provided the Fuhrer agrees,? as the protocol put it),
and the latter had yet to turn his mind to it. (As a mat-
ter of fact, he never did, which is why several thousand
people escaped the gas chambers: Nothing is done in
Germany without clear-cut bureaucratic instructions.
Ordnung ist Ordnung.)

 

We are still left with the
agonizing question of bow a
demagogue almost succeeded

in mesmerizing one nation
into committing suicide by
loaning it murder anot/oer.

 

The London colloquium, then, served as an admirable
reminder that the value of scholarship must not be con-
fused with its uses. To be sure, preoccupation with fac-
tual details may sometimes seem, well, academic. The
question of precisely when Hitler made up his mind to
launch the Final Solution is a case in point. Was it be-
fore the war or soon after its outbreak? Or was it dur-
ing the early stage of the German assault on Russia, when
Hitler, flushed with victory, felt that the moment for his
most noble endeavor had come? Or did he make this de-
cision when euphoria gave way to a sense that the war
would drag on indefinitely?

The idea of the Final Solution was inherent in the
view of the Jews Hitler had held long before coming
to power. Already in Mein Kamp? written in 1925, he
referred to Jews as ?vermin? fit to be ?wiped out.? ?Only
the elimination of the causes of [Germany?s] collapse,?
he wrote, ?as well as the destruction of its beneficia-
ries the Jews] can create the premise for our out-
ward fight for freedom.? He adumbrated the means
of achieving this end: ?Had twelve or fifteen thousand
of these Hebrew corrupters of the people been held
under poison gas,? he wrote, Germany would not have
lost the war.

At the time these words appeared in print, they were
dismissed by nearly everyone, except Hitler?s disciples,
as the ravings of a lunatic. Years later, the idea that a
whole peeple (?vermin?) could be marked for total ex-
termination was still beyond human comprehension,
even in ghettos already depleted by mass deportations.
But half a century later, when we know what we do about
what was on Hitler?s mind from the very beginning, how
important is it to determine precisely when he proceeded
from thought to action?

24 TIKKUN VOLimportant, if only because placing the deci-
sion chronologically helps to illuminate other major
questions, such as how the decision came about, whether
it was indeed ineluctable, and whether genocide was
crucial to the Nazi worldview in general. That Hitler had
a demented vision of a new German empire, a ?Garden
of Eden? altogether ?cleansed? of Jews, is not to say
that he had a blueprint for bringing this vision about,
or that he did not entertain, at one point or another,
less ?radical? ways of rendering Germany Judenrein. In
the late 19305 he toyed with the idea of a literal evacua-
tion of Jews from Germany?s domain. In 1939-1940,
most historians agree, other ?solutions? were still being
bandied about, and even after extermination was
chosen, its implementation was relegated to some un-
Specified time in the future.

The position that the die was cast late in the sum-
mer of 1941, after Germany invaded Russia?argued in
London by Christopher Browning of Pacific Lutheran
University?seems most compelling. Yet an answer to
this question immediately raises others. Why did the SS
continue its grisly work even as Germany lay in ruins,
and as its bedraggled armies were fleeing from enemies
east and west? The smoking chimneys of the cremato-
ria and the piled-up cadavers were evidence to the lib-
erating Allied troops that ovens and execution squads
had been working around the clock. Thousands of Jews
whom the SS had not managed to kill were forced to ac-
company the retreating troops for eventual execution.
Why? Why did the Nazis persist with the carnage when
the dictate of the moment was obviously sauve qui peut
(whoever can should save him- or herself)?

wo answers have been advanced to explain this

I behavior: The first, which is practical, argues

that it was in the Germans? interest to eliminate

all incriminating evidence along with its witnesses. The

other is Why would the Nazis act any

more rationally when defeat was staring them in the

face than they had in the past? Was the decision to

keep the crematoria working until the enemy was at the

gates any less rational than the decision to kill eleven
million people?

The two answers are not mutually exclusive, and
they illustrate the essential nature of the Holocaust?
namely, the combination of methodical calculus with
untrammeled savagery. Some of the papers presented
in London, notably those by David Bankier of the
Hebrew University and Avraham Barkai of Tel Aviv Uni-
versity, shed more light on how vast numbers of Ger-
mans were inculcated with this savagery. Both dealt with
the nature and magnitude of the Nazi effort to imbue
the population with loathing for the Jews. In the early

- 0

19303 Nazi propaganda said nothing about complete
extermination; but the macabre charges against the
?Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy,? the ubiquitous slogan
?Jude verrecke? (?let the Jew die like a dog?), the resus-
citation of medieval calumnies (though without the ex-
plicit Christian references), the stress on the ostensibly
revolting physical features of Jews, as exemplified in
graffiti and cartoons in Dar Stiirmer and other Nazi or-
gans (a mythical image but a potent one nevertheless in
the towns without Jews or where they were indistin-
guishable, by garb or appearance, from the rest of the
population)?all this conditioned the Germans to ac-
cept the necessity of an all-out war against the enemy of
the German Volk.

1935, most of the Germans approved of the
Nuremberg Laws, and in 1938, the infamous
Kristallnacht evoked but a ripple of protest,
though some burghers were unhappy to see their streets
littered with so much broken glass. The ?depersonaliza-
tion of the Jew,? observed Avraham Barkai, was com-
pleted by the end of the 19305; and from ?deperson-
alization, there was only a step to dehumanization.? By

 

 

 

 

the time Jews were herded into the ghettos of Warsaw,
L?d?z, and other Polish and Russian cities, by the time
they had been turned into ragged half-animals covered
with lice and often forced to ?perform? for German mo-
tion picture cameras, the young soldier in German
occupied Poland or on the Eastern front could see that
the mythical Jew was ?real?L?and then could share this
discovery with his Muti in Regensburg or his Liebling in
Bremen, who in turn spread the word among all their
Volksgenossen, friends, and neighbors.

David Bankier noted that the Nazi propaganda ma-
chine was ?stepped up to an unprecedented degree?
precisely when it looked as if Germany was beginning
to lose the war. (On Goebbels?s orders, between 70 and
80 percent of the radio broadcasts at that time were de-
voted to the Jewish question.) Though this seems like a
species of madness, there was?as usual?reason be-
hind it, however diabolical. By now the bulk of the Ger-
man people was aware of the basic nature of the German
atrocities. They could either condemn them (as a few
did), suppress their knowledge of them (as did many),
or approve them (as did most) by accepting and assim-
ilating the Nazi image of the Jew. Whether through

 

NUANCES OF EVIL 25

 

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suppression or active consent, they thus became in ef-
fect accessories to the Nazi crime.

The Nazis knew it, and so not only in?ated their
rhetoric but insisted that the Jewish menace was grow-
ing stronger as the war continued. If the Allies won the
war, they argued, the Jews would wreak a bloody
vengeance on the German people and (as the real mas-
ters of Russia) would ?bolshevize? all of Europe. To
hatred and loathing, therefore, was added fear of retri-
bution. Total mobilization against the enemy became as
important as the destruction of the Jews. In the words
of one of the leading Nazi propagandists, Robert Ley,
?the struggle will not be abandoned until the last Jew in
Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead.? To
be sure, this rhetoric convinced some Germans that Nazi
policies were reSponsible for the country?s misfortunes.
Most, however, accepted the Nazi arguments. And so
the killings went on.

The vast majority of Germans not only knew about
the mass murder, but regarded it as necessary?indeed,
as an essential part of the German struggle. At most,
they found someof the methods ?excessive.? A paper
by Omer Bartov of Harvard University helped to dispel
the that the average Wehrmacht soldier was not
involved in the slaughter. True, some officers tried to

26 VOL. 7, No. 3

maintain their distance from the SS, but the vast
majority of officers and men, when ordered to do so?
as indeed they often were?worked side by side with the
SS in exterminating the ?Jewish vermin.? In fact, said
Bartov, the Final Solution would not have been possible
without the active participation of the regular army.

ne of the questions that continues to haunt
0 us to this day is the putative ?uniqueness? of

German behavior. Would?or could?other
nations be drawn into similar enterprises, at once
coldly systematic and reeking of unrestrained bestiality?
Though the question can probably (and fortunately)
never be answered to our full satisfaction, something
can be learned from comparing the behavior of specific
national groups during the Holocaust. Here, too, the
London colloquium was enlightening. A paper by Dina
Porat of Tel Aviv University provided appalling and
detailed evidence on the participation of Lithuanians
in the extermination of virtually the entire Jewish
community in that country, some two hundred twenty
thousand strong. The murders took place not in distant
camps, but right on Lithuanian soil, in and around the
ghettos of Vilnius, Kaunas, and scores of other towns
and villages. Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Estonians, and
Latvians were also drafted into special SS Einsatz-
gruppen, but none of them performed their tasks with
the wanton brutality of the Lithuanians?indeed the
Lithuanians? conduct in the field was considered ex-
treme by their German mentors. In no country did the
local population join in the slaughter with so much ea-
gerness and in such large numbers.

Porat skirted the issue of how a population whose re-
lations with Jews had always been fairly amicable was
provoked into such barbarismw-a question that (like
so many others) still challenges comprehension. Some
of the factors she refers to, such as religious bigotry
(the Lithuanians are overwhelmingly Catholic) or the
relatively high proportion of Jews in the local Commu-
nist party and Soviet apparatus in 1940-41, do not
come close to explaining the intensity of the Lithuani-
ans? murderous passion. The second reason Porat men?
tioned is in fact a species of apologia used by Lithuanians
to exculpate the killers. (See Efraim Zuroff?s ?White-
washing the Holocaust,? Tz?kkun, January/February
1992.) But the facts she mustered are staggering.

Croatia during the war, as discussed by Jonathan
Steinberg of Trinity College, Cambridge, presents a
more complex picture. Like the Lithuanians, the Croats
are overwhelmingly Catholic, and like the Lithuanians,
many of them participated enthusiastically in the mur-
der and deportation of most of the thirty thousand Jews

(Continued on p. 82)

.5

fears of parents whose children have been involved in
violent incidents in the schools has educated the public
about the often tragic limitations of liberal approaches
to family policy?and helped clear the way to a com-
passionate, morally consistent response.

The Left urgently needs to address the pain of poor
and working parents, and we can begin to do this only
by recognizing that the issues are not merely economic,
although they often stem from economic privations.
Liberal child-welfare experts ignore this pain at their
peril since the Right will continue to fill the resulting
vacuum by claiming this issue as its own. We cannot
allow the language of empowerment to be co-opted by
the Right, which uses it to justify a hands-off approach
to state involvement in employment, education, and
welfare in order to ?liberate the forces of individual ini-
tiative? in the inner city. Properly defined, empower-
ment of parents means helping them confront racism,
condescension, and inequality.

The complexity and immediacy of the issue requires
us to respond quickly and decisively. Many of the clients
in the child-protective system do need help. The ques-
tion is, what kind of help? Rather than focusing on child
removal as a remedy, that help could take the form of
funding ?family preservation? programs that assist fam-
ilies before their children are removed and maintain the
parent-child bond during foster care with frequent vis?
its. ?Family preservation? should be broadly defined to
include support for poor and working parents in the
form of publicly funded day care and health insurance.
In addition to providing services, government should
support community organizations and mutual-assistance
societies such as those formed by many ethnic groups
that share day care, provide seed money for new en-
deavors, and run parenting groups and advocacy efforts.

Rec0gnizing the pain of parental struggle does not
mean that all parents are good. It does require recog-
nizing that real support for families must be linked with
efforts to change the world of work and reorganize the
economy. The social significance of child neglect extends
beyond its current impact. Its human implication is
also profound because it shapes the lens through which
future generations will filter their memories, and, in
turn, their hopes and dreams. A compassionate response
to children must include an equally compassionate re-
sponse to their parents. Cl

NUANCES OF EVIL
(Continued from p. 26)

who lived on Croatian territory. Furthermore, as in the

case of the Lithuanians, the cruelty diSplayed by the
Croats was often considered excessive even by the SS.

82 VOL. 7, No. 3

But the differences are salient. To begin with, the
Croatian Fascist Ustasha movement, which set up an
independent state in April 1941 and collaborated with
the Germans, represented only part of the Croatian
people, many of whom joined Tito?s Partisans. Second,
while the Jews were slated for extermination, the real
enemies of the Ustashi were the Orthodox Serbs-?
?Turks,? as one Ustasha leader put it, ?the plunderers
and refuse of the Balkans.? It was against the two mil-
lion Serbs that the Ustashi turned, determined to kill
one third of them, deport another third, and forcibly
convert the rest to Catholicism.

What of the role of the Catholic Church? In every
case (including Poland and Slovakia) it was enormous,
though not of a piece?some Catholic clergy and laity
actively resisted the Nazis, while others collaborated
wholeheartedly. In Lithuania, there is no record (as far
as I know) of local priests actually taking a hand in the
massacres. In Poland, the largely Catholic population
certainly did not take part in the extermination process,
though most Poles, raised by Christian doctrines to de?
spise and suspect the Jew, were either indifferent or
pleased that the Germans were ?solving? the problem
for them. No priests, however, openly condoned or lent
support to mass murder, and some lay Catholic intel-
lectuals and members of the clergy were deeply involved
in rescue activities. But in Slovakia, the head of the pup-
pet government set up in March 1939 was a Catholic
priest,Jozef Tiso, who headed the Hlinka People?s party,
a right-wing Catholic group. Under its aegis, all but five
out of ninety thousand Jews were murdered, most of
them by deportations to death camps. Some of the de-
portations, however, were put off as a result of inter-
vention of the Church.

In Croatia, the role of the Church was uniformly vile.
Many priests actively participated in the butchery, and
the Church, through Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac and
the Vatican, remained silent about the atrocities. The Us-
tashi, after all, were their people, good, God-fearing
Catholics, while the Serbs were heathens and the Parti-
sans were atheists and Communists. The Ustasha gov-
ernment, furthermore, banned abortion, contraception,
pornography, and similar abominations; it was clear to
the Church whose side it should be on.

It is a pity that Steinberg?s work on Croatia has not
received the kind of publicity it deserves. At a time when
the Croat government is generally portrayed?with the
blessings of the Catholic Church?~as the innocent vic-
tim of Serb chauvinists, that slice of history deserves to
be remembered?especially since President Tudjman
has seen fit to rehabilitate the Ustasha as ?an expression
of the historical strivings of the Croat people,? and boasts
that neither his wife nor mother is ?Serbian or Jewish.?

The French are another matter. The Vichy govern-
ment?s role in the Final Solution has been the subject of
a great deal of controversy. In Poland, the alleged com-
plicity of the French authorities has often been cited to
show that other occupied peoples had a much worse
record than the Poles, and that criticism of the latter,
therefore, is based simply on anti-Polish malice. In ad-
dition, the idea that French anti-Semitism is viciously suz'
generth is given credence by many American Jews.

John P. Fox of London gave a meticulously docu-
mented and closely argued paper on Vichy France that
helped to dispel some of these stereotypes. Out of the
300,000 Jews in France in 1939, 76,000 were murdered
either in extermination camps or by execution. Ap-
proximately 74 percent of the total, then, escaped ex?
termination?an extraordinary proportion as compared
with other countries. What accounts for it?

he answers are both revealing and paradoxical.

For one thing, most of the deportees were sent

to the camps in 1942, and after Germany an-
nexed the unoccupied zone in November of that year,
the transports declined precipitously. This was both be-
cause stateless Jews were deported whereas French Jews
weren?t, and because by the end of 1942 the Vichy gov-
ernment no longer believed that Jews were being
shipped to work in German factories as the Nazis in-
sisted. Laval and P?tain were staunch anti?Semites,
and the plan to expel the many foreign Jews who had
fled to France in the 19305 had long been on the agenda
of the right-wing political parties. But their ?own? Jews
were a different story, as was wholesale murder. More?
over, the German insistence that Vichy give up French
Jews was a direct and intolerable challenge to French
sovereignty. Laval and P?tain resented this fiercely, and
in fact did their best to sabotage the continued German
deportation efforts.

Many ordinary French citizens supported Laval
and P?tain?s resistance: Thousands of Jews were hid?
den and saved by local families, whose efforts were not
motivated by any notions of sovereignty but were
prompted by human?often Specifically Christian?
considerations. Protestant descendants of the Hugue-
nots were particularly heroic in rescuing Jews, both
French and non-French. Fox?s evidence does not exon-
erate the Vichy authorities from the charge of ruthless
persecution, but it does discredit the accusation of com-
plicity in the Nazi program of mass extermination, and
generally adds nuance to our understanding of an occu-
pation government that was far more complex than
is usually perceived.

What conclusions, however tentative, can be reached
from these disparate accounts? On the basis of his

research, Fox is firmly convinced that the French could
never dream up nor willingly participate in a Nazi-like
Final Solution. The Lithuanians proved themselves
equal to the Germans in savagery, but it is doubtful
whether they would have been capable of creating the
kind of systematic and bureaucratic death machine that
the Germans had assembled. The Ustashi behaved like
beasts, yet again their aim was not the same as that of
the Nazis. The Catholic Church did not cover itself with
glory, but its behavior cannot be reduced to one com-
mon denominator.

fthere is one general conclusion to be drawn from

these papers, it is that they do not lend themselves

to general conclusions?in other words, to sim-
plistic generalizations. The instinct to kill, or the lust for
blood, or indeed the capacity to commit evil may con-
ceivably reside in all peoples at all times. But whether
or not these proclivities come to the fore, and if so how,
in what form, and to what end, surely depends on any
number of factors, ranging from cultural norms and his-
torical traditions to religious dictates or constraints,
from Specific circumstances to particular temptations.
Whatever the temptations or circumstances, would
the English (or for that matter any other) people embark
on the mass extermination of a whole nation? Is the in-
humanity that is born out of fear or the urge for self-
preservation the Jewish policemen in the ghettos
who brought their own mothers and fathers to the de-
portation trains) any less despicable than that induced
by sheer hatred or religious beliefs? What accounted for
the differences between the efforts to save Jews in Den-
mark and in Poland, between the actions of the Roma-
nian and of the Bulgarian authorities? Each question
yields some answers, and each set of answers, in turn,
leads to more questions?which leaves one wondering
whether full understanding is really within our reach.

In his opening remarks at the conference, Yehuda
Bauer struggled with the question of whether we can
really understand the Holocaust, especially the role of
?the perpetrator.? The answer, he says, is that we can,
inasmuch as we are all capable (whether we admit it
or not) of placing ourselves ?in his shoes.? We all have
the potential of evil within us, and we can understand a
man like, say, Heydrich ?because he is a human not un-
like ourselves.?

I take Bauer?s point, but I have my doubts. The
Wannsee colloquium (like that film masterpiece Shoals)
suggests that there is indeed much that can be learned
and understood: the mechanisms of death, the role of
?Operation Barbarossa?f (the German-Soviet war) in the
Holocaust, the reasons (however ignoble) for the lack of
an adequate Allied effort to halt the Final Solution, the

IKKUN VOL. 7, N0. 3 83





role of peeple like Himmler and Heydrich, the behav-
ior of witnesses (like the Poles) or accomplices (Lithua-
nians, Croats, French), and much more. In the end,
however, we are still left to grapple with the agonizing
and overpowering question of how a demagogue almost
succeeded in mesmerizing one nation into committing
suicide by having it murder another. This question, I
fear, will haunt us to the end of time. El

FICTION
(Continued from p. 28)

urgent voices. What were they saying? Why were we,
and Pepi, being treated so rudely?

My husband said, hesitantly, DoctorP?what is
wrong? You do it for others, don?t yOUP?Wlay not for us?

Preparing to leave the room, as if he could not bear
our presence another moment, the doctor said, Im-
possible. Just take it?him?out of here. Of course we
don?t do such things.

My husband repeated, You do it for others, doctorjoined in, pleading, my fingers stretched as if
to touch this intolerant young man?s arm, though of
course I did not dare touch him, Oh, Doctor, yes,
please-420193: not for us?

Our words hung in the air. The doctor did not reply,
but strode out of the room, and shut the door firmly be-
hind him. Was anyone in such a position of authority
ever so rude to those who have come begging for help?

Was there some errorP?some terrible misunder-
standing? We looked at Pepi, in dread of what we might
see. But it was only Pepi?our Pepi.

Lying there on the metal table, beneath the unwink-
ing ?ourescent lights, watching us, hearing every word.

The doctor?s assistant handed us Pepi?s blanket as if it
were contaminated, and said, with an air of righteous
disgust, You may leave by this door at the rear.

And so?don?t judge us did it
ourselves.

For, after all, society failed us. We had no choice.

About fifty yards behind the pet hOSpital was a deep
drainage ditch filled with brackish, ill-smelling water,
in which there ?oated, like shards of dream, threads of
detergent scum. Trembling, sick at heart, tears brimming
in our eyes, my husband and I carried Pepi to the ditch,
to put the poor thing out of his misery.

For we had resolved not to bring Pepi back home with
us. No, we simply couldn?t go through all that again!

Not in our very worst dreams could we have anti-
cipated such an ending to Pepi?s life in our family.
So heartbreaking a task, yes, and so arduous and

84 TIKKUN VOL. 7, No. 3

physically demanding a task?forcing poor Pepi into
that cold, foul water, and pushing his head under! And
how fiercely he fought us!?he, who had seemed so
our beloved Pepi, transformed into a
stranger?an enemy! We would think, afterward, that
Pepi had never so willfully disobeyed us, and he?d never
demonstrated such strength: as if, in the years he?d lived
in our household, be bad been unknown to us in his deep-
est, most secret self.

Pepi, no! we cried.

Pepi, obey!

The hideous struggle must have required ten minutes.
I am still trying to forget. Never had I, who?d loved him
so, dreamt that I might one day be Pepi?s executioner??-
never had I dreamt I might be anyone?s executioner. My
clothes were splotched with filthy water, my good kid-
skin gloves punctured and torn from Pepi?s teeth! Nor
did my husband, the gentlest and most civilized of men,
ever imagine he might find himself provoked to rage,
grunting, cursing, ugly veins standing out in his fore-
head, as he held this thrashing, squirming, desperate
creature beneath the surface of ditch water in a subur-
ban field, at dawn! For we soon forgot what we were do-
ing, in the human desperation of doing it.

And you, you damned hypocrites, what will you do
with yours? 

RETHINKING FEMINISM
(Continued from p. 36)

the former, how do we protect the lesbian living in a
homophobic community or the Black, Vietnamese, or
Haitian woman living in a racist community? Until we
have some clearer sense of how we are to form the
egalitarian and non-exploitive communities envisioned
by Fox-Genovese, we must provide individual women
of all races, classes, and sexual and ideological orienta-
tions with protection against oppressive community
standards through extracommunal networks of advo-
cacy and action.

If we consider the issue of reproductive rights, for in-
stance, a multifront strategy is essential both to defining
an agenda that will meet the needs of the broadest spec-
trum of women and to defeating those conservatives who
have successfully redefined the issue as simply pro-life
or pro-choice. Fox-Genovese notes that as re-
productive rights have come under increasing attack
some feminists have come to claim access to birth con-
trol and abortion on the narrowest possible grounds of
privacy and individualism. Yet to assume that the debate
is fundamentally about the rights of women versus the
rights of fetuses and fathers is to miss the opportunity
to rethink the entire issue in more radical terms. As the