The late historian’s bald, factual account of the Holocaust is both moving and overwhelming
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Poland. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish underground, was among the first to reach London and Washington after observing the mass killing of Polish Jews. In an interview for Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah, Karski, still astonished after so many years, gets to his feet as he recalls the reaction of Felix Frankfurter, Franklin Roosevelt’s confidant. “I don’t believe you,” he recalls Frankfurter saying. “I know you are not a liar, but I don’t believe you.”
Similar sentiments will occur to the half-attentive reader throughout almost every page of David Cesarani’s account of the Final Solution. How many Jews were killed? How were they killed? Did the Hitler project really imply the extermination of every single Jew in Europe? And what sort of person could be relied on to kill one human being after another – women and children, the old, the young – day after blood-drenched day?
Cesarani’s justification for another book about the Holocaust is that a generation of new research has failed to find its way into public consciousness. “The nomenclature itself is increasingly self-defeating,” he begins. Terms such as “the Holocaust” or “Shoah”, even “genocide”, in the legitimate course of memorialising Jewish sufferings, have walled off mass killings from the events surrounding them. To that end Cesarani treats the subject in a stripped-down factual idiom, avoiding any pervasive explanation of motives. What we get in this context are facts, and these facts consist largely of killings.
This is a book as hard to read as a set of Human Rights Watch reports. But it’s difficult not to be first moved and then overwhelmed by the mere listing of what happened, and in this respect Cesarani, who died in October, has fulfilled his ambition of reclaiming the killings of Jews for another generation.
For Cesarani, what the German-Jewish writer Victor Klemperer calls “the war on Jews” really begins with the trauma of the first world war. Hitler was a core (and demented) antisemite, but for the most part antisemitism appears here as a default position of the Nazis. They were not always, as has been suggested, exterminationists. The Nazis talked of killing off European Jews, as an act of revenge for what they saw as the betrayal of Germany by Jews in 1919, or because they could be represented as a Judeo-Bolshevik peril. But they also wanted to work Jews to death as slave labour if that seemed appropriate.
This is a book as hard to read as a set of Human Rights Watch reports. But it's difficult not to be moved
Cesarani’s freshest pages come with insights into how the Nazi bureaucracy veered between these two self-contradictory positions, encompassing the need to exploit and the desire to murder. Those tasked with Judenpolitik would empty ghettoes, massacring their inhabitants, only to fill them again when the Wehrmacht required uniforms. They were still shipping Jews to slave labour somewhere in Germany as late as 1945. Killings followed the rhythm of war, and Cesarani is correct in his conclusion that fewer would have died if the war had finished earlier. But I think he underestimates the significance of the 1942 rampage in Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and Estonia, horrifyingly described in Timothy Snyder’s recent Black Earth. Surely there was among Nazis (and their Latvian, Estonian and Ukrainian proxies) a desire ultimately to dispose of Jews. No real calculations lay behind these slaughters, and for Hitler and those around him, none was needed.
Not so long ago, historians wrote about the ingenuity displayed by Nazis. Cesarani is at odds with the notion that there was anything hi-tech or innovative about the killings. The camps took long to build, and the killingapparatus didn’t work. Railway voyages for the victims were badly coordinated.
He also dismisses Hannah Arendt’s theories about the “banality of evil”. Many people were involved in the killings, and not all of them were banal or evil. Arendt treated the councils of elders as collaborationists, judging them almost as harshly as their persecutors. To his great credit, Cesarani doesn’t skimp when it comes to describing how poverty and the shadow of death caused many Jews to exploit one another. But Jewish functionaries were given no choice when it came to deciding to send people to their deaths. If they sometimes tried to save associates of family members we should not be surprised. And of course the idea, prevalent some years ago, that Germans somehow didn’t know what was going on must be given short shrift. They were told what was going to happen, and then encouraged neither entirely to forget nor wholly to remember. Hitler told them that they might be punished by the allies for what they had done to Jews, and it appears from Nazi reports that this was widely believed.
Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish underground, was among the first to reach London and Washington after observing the mass killing of Polish Jews. In an interview for Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah, Karski, still astonished after so many years, gets to his feet as he recalls the reaction of Felix Frankfurter, Franklin Roosevelt’s confidant. “I don’t believe you,” he recalls Frankfurter saying. “I know you are not a liar, but I don’t believe you.”
Similar sentiments will occur to the half-attentive reader throughout almost every page of David Cesarani’s account of the Final Solution. How many Jews were killed? How were they killed? Did the Hitler project really imply the extermination of every single Jew in Europe? And what sort of person could be relied on to kill one human being after another – women and children, the old, the young – day after blood-drenched day?
Cesarani’s justification for another book about the Holocaust is that a generation of new research has failed to find its way into public consciousness. “The nomenclature itself is increasingly self-defeating,” he begins. Terms such as “the Holocaust” or “Shoah”, even “genocide”, in the legitimate course of memorialising Jewish sufferings, have walled off mass killings from the events surrounding them. To that end Cesarani treats the subject in a stripped-down factual idiom, avoiding any pervasive explanation of motives. What we get in this context are facts, and these facts consist largely of killings.
This is a book as hard to read as a set of Human Rights Watch reports. But it’s difficult not to be first moved and then overwhelmed by the mere listing of what happened, and in this respect Cesarani, who died in October, has fulfilled his ambition of reclaiming the killings of Jews for another generation.
For Cesarani, what the German-Jewish writer Victor Klemperer calls “the war on Jews” really begins with the trauma of the first world war. Hitler was a core (and demented) antisemite, but for the most part antisemitism appears here as a default position of the Nazis. They were not always, as has been suggested, exterminationists. The Nazis talked of killing off European Jews, as an act of revenge for what they saw as the betrayal of Germany by Jews in 1919, or because they could be represented as a Judeo-Bolshevik peril. But they also wanted to work Jews to death as slave labour if that seemed appropriate.
This is a book as hard to read as a set of Human Rights Watch reports. But it's difficult not to be moved
Cesarani’s freshest pages come with insights into how the Nazi bureaucracy veered between these two self-contradictory positions, encompassing the need to exploit and the desire to murder. Those tasked with Judenpolitik would empty ghettoes, massacring their inhabitants, only to fill them again when the Wehrmacht required uniforms. They were still shipping Jews to slave labour somewhere in Germany as late as 1945. Killings followed the rhythm of war, and Cesarani is correct in his conclusion that fewer would have died if the war had finished earlier. But I think he underestimates the significance of the 1942 rampage in Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and Estonia, horrifyingly described in Timothy Snyder’s recent Black Earth. Surely there was among Nazis (and their Latvian, Estonian and Ukrainian proxies) a desire ultimately to dispose of Jews. No real calculations lay behind these slaughters, and for Hitler and those around him, none was needed.
Not so long ago, historians wrote about the ingenuity displayed by Nazis. Cesarani is at odds with the notion that there was anything hi-tech or innovative about the killings. The camps took long to build, and the killingapparatus didn’t work. Railway voyages for the victims were badly coordinated.
He also dismisses Hannah Arendt’s theories about the “banality of evil”. Many people were involved in the killings, and not all of them were banal or evil. Arendt treated the councils of elders as collaborationists, judging them almost as harshly as their persecutors. To his great credit, Cesarani doesn’t skimp when it comes to describing how poverty and the shadow of death caused many Jews to exploit one another. But Jewish functionaries were given no choice when it came to deciding to send people to their deaths. If they sometimes tried to save associates of family members we should not be surprised. And of course the idea, prevalent some years ago, that Germans somehow didn’t know what was going on must be given short shrift. They were told what was going to happen, and then encouraged neither entirely to forget nor wholly to remember. Hitler told them that they might be punished by the allies for what they had done to Jews, and it appears from Nazi reports that this was widely believed.
There’s more than enough ground for outrage in these pages, and readers can take their pick. I was most pained by the apathetic response outside Germany to the killings. After Kristallnacht in 1938, when the shops, synagogues and homes of German Jews were looted, NGOs of the time were eloquent and, in the short term, effective in arranging a boycott. It was hard to get information out of Poland in 1940, but people who wanted to find out what was going on could easily do so.
But the behaviour of the Foreign Office and the US State Department still seems scandalous. Was so much indifference a consequence of antisemitism among bureaucrats? It would appear that elite Washington and London didn’t really think that Jews were important enough to merit any radical alteration of war plans. It was enough for the House of Commons to stand in silence, and for Roosevelt to receive deputations of American Jews. Later, of course, tears could be shed. We can all of us argue whether anything has really changed.
I’d been reading Cesarani’s account of the failed efforts of inmates to break out of Treblinka when I went to see the Hungarian film Son of Saul. For those still unaware of this masterpiece, directed by László Nemes and released in the UK in April, it’s a filmed account of the life of a Hungarian Jew whose job is to clean up the detritus of murdered Jews and run errands for bestial German and Ukrainian supervisors. It’s set within 24 hours at Auschwitz, and the film rarely leaves the face of its protagonist as he heaps corpses or shovels them into furnaces. But the film has an odd, wholly redemptive quality. Something will happen to us, it states boldly, if we look at things long enough. The most appalling aspects of reality can be reclaimed, even transfigured if we pay due attention to them. It would be an exaggeration to say that killings are life-enhancing, but they can be useful.
In a very different way, this radical perception is what drives Cesarani’s painstaking narrative. I don’t think he’s wholly successful, but this isn’t really a criticism because, without the empathetic inspiration of art, it may be impossible truly to understand what happened.
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