The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

I would like to make three rather extended observations about the essay by Timothy Garton Ash, “The Life of Death” [NYR, December 19, 1985], dealing with the film of Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, and his and Lanzmann’s opinions about the carrying out of the Holocaust and their suggestions as to its “nature.”

I am myself a survivor of the Holocaust: I was born in Warsaw (the subject of a large part of the essay) and was in the Warsaw Ghetto almost till the end; then after various adventures that included a period of time “on the Aryan side,” as it was called then (that is, being hidden by a Polish Catholic family and helped by other Poles). I finished in Bergen-Belsen where I spent nearly two years. I think that being a child of nine to twelve years old during the crucial part of those experiences (1942–1945) helped me to understand them afterward better than could those who were fully grown up; and of course children under such experiences grow up and mature beyond their formal age, without however losing a part of the openness to strange things which is one of the advantages of youth. In numerous talks in Israel with many survivors of similar experiences, of more or less the same age, I have found a confirmation of my opinions.

In the first place I think that Garton Ash and, even more, Lanzmann before him do not want to understand the behavior of those who either tried to lead a “normal” life, disregarding, so to say, the mass murder that went on around them, or of those who actually helped in some secondary capacity to carry out the work of extermination, because both of them limit themselves, completely and absolutely, to the consideration of the Poles and disregard completely, or, one can say in the case of Lanzmann, willfully, the fact that many Jews had exactly the same attitudes. Let us take the Warsaw Ghetto. Before the beginning of the actual extermination in the summer 1942, when of course the extermination of Jews in the other cities was known to many including the children (especially after the news came of the extermination of the Ghetto of Lublin) the life went on exactly as usual, exactly as in Polish Warsaw during the extermination of the Warsaw Jews.

More than this: when after the great majority of Warsaw Jews were exterminated in summer 1942, and in the following late autumn and winter there was a comparative lull in “the actions,” that is, in the rounding up of Jews to be exterminated, life in the pitifully small residue of the Ghetto that remained also returned to some level of “normality” with some entertainment and card-playing or other kinds of parties. The explanation is simply that the great majority of human beings cannot do otherwise; but this is a human explanation, common, as I believe, to all humanity and not something peculiar to Poles as Lanzmann tries to make it, by omitting a crucial part of the evidence. The same I could observe under even more harrowing conditions in Bergen-Belsen. For some months the platforms bearing hundreds of naked, emaciated dead bodies passed daily at a certain hour in the morning before our “special” little camp. When the horror (which was a horror even to people so hardened to shocks as we all were) began, it did shock all of us to the extent of disrupting our “normal” lives, for it is an essential part of the real and the true experience of the victims of the Holocaust (and no doubt of other similar experiences) that, except for very short periods of time, “in the face of death” so to say a sort of “normality” is being established under almost all circumstances. But after a few days the same people who on the first day could not eat, in spite of the continuous horrible hunger, ate what they could find to eat, and the subject was mentioned less and less in the common talk of our camp.

The same thing happened when for a shorter time (I think for about a month) another camp with people who were literally being beaten to death with clubs was situated in the shortest possible distance from our own compound where we could all see and hear the people being tortured to death with deliberate beatings and starvation. (Much of the beating was administered when the victims waited for their small pittance of soup, much less than others got.) I am not implying that most people who witnessed such horrors, whether Jews or Poles, do not continue to suffer and to feel some sympathy for the victims, only that they must after a rather short time return to some sort of normal experience in which the sufferings of the victims do not obsess and occupy their whole lives. Maybe this is what Plato implied when he said that human beings cannot bear too much reality, but in any case this is a part of our common human experience, in no way peculiar either to Jews or Poles, as a little observation or reflection on human beings placed in similar situations could show. For example how have people behaved in the past when others, maybe their neighbors and/or friends, burned alive in the town square? Or were stoned to death “before the gate”?

The observation of Garton Ash that the Nazi oppression in Poland was greater than in other countries and the argument of the Poles who debated Lanzmann in Oxford that Polish Warsaw was in a state of terror is no doubt correct (as I saw myself) but is only of secondary importance in comparison with the fact that Jews, Poles, and everybody else so far as we can know when we wish to know, behave in about the same way in this respect, and that such behavior is a part of something that we may call “human nature,” common to most of us. The last Passover Seder celebration (of 1943) which I celebrated with my parents was held amid the noises of shooting of the Jewish Revolt and its suppression in another part of the Ghetto, not so far away. It was a poor and hurried celebration but most accessories of the occasion were there and all the ceremonies were carried out, including the prescribed singing. The one before that (in 1942) was a joyful occasion of much splendor, not only among us but with very many thousands of other Jewish families of the Warsaw Ghetto. Yet the extermination of Jews had already begun months ago and was much advanced.

No doubt, had a survivor from one of the many small towns of conquered USSR, where most of the Jews had been already exterminated, arrived at a typical Passover celebration of spring 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto, or at one of the numerous public balls, concerts, etc., he would have said, if he was as stupid as the survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto whom Lanzmann picked, that while Jews were killed in his area, in the Warsaw Ghetto “life went on as naturally and normally as before.” There are even prevalent theories that this “life as usual” phenomenon in the ghettos was a justified part of the passive Jewish resistance. I am not sure about that, but I am sure both rationally and passionately that human beings or most of them, whatever their nationality or religion, have to behave in this way in order to remain human beings.

Lanzmann simply heard what he wanted to hear, that Poles are such and such and that Jews are chosen people whose behavior should not be investigated. He did not want to hear the real truth, that both of them, and of course all other peoples too, are human beings who behave more or less in the same way in similar circumstances.

Similar considerations apply to the question of those who participated in the extermination of the Jews (or in other mass murders committed by the Nazis) or expressed sympathy for the extermination; except that seeking normality, of whatever kind, is a reaction of a great majority, of nearly everybody in fact, in all human societies; while collaborating in fearful crimes even under the condition of impunity and reward (in the form of steady work and relative protection from state terror) is indulged, in all societies (so far as we can see) only by a minority. Again the crucial social fact, which could enlighten us about the human reality of carrying out mass murders, is shirked both by Lanzmann and Ash. Of course there were Polish policemen who rounded up Jews and Poles, who blackmailed Jews whom they recognized as such. My own mother was stopped on a Warsaw street by such a one (she bought herself with a diamond ring) while I followed a distance behind with a Polish friend. We were both well trained enough to continue past her, while she haggled for her life, and to stop and wait only behind a corner so that the blood price would not increase.

But who of the Jewish survivors does not know (and certainly Garton Ash should know) that there were also Jewish blackmailers, some of them even quite famous by name, outside the Ghetto, who were neither better nor worse than the Polish ones, and also Jewish policemen in the Ghetto whose duty in the first weeks of the extermination of summer 1942 was to deliver, each of them a specified number, Jewish victims to “be sent” to extermination. Now, I hold that both kinds of murderers or accessories to murder are fully equal and that the abhorrence in which one should hold them does not depend on nationality, but my memories (and memories of all the survivors who are honestly “talking among themselves”) tell me that at the time we Jews hated the Jewish policemen, or the Jewish spies for the Nazis in the Ghetto, much more than we hated anybody else. Maybe two actual “stories” which I witnessed myself, but which I believe to be very typical, will illustrate this attitude. During the first weeks of the great extermination in the summer of 1942, the Jews who worked in the big factories supplying the German Army were not molested, while other Jews were being rounded up. They were supposed to be in the factories till five o’clock in the afternoon, when they were allowed to go out, and at that time the catching of other Jews was supposed to stop. One such afternoon at quarter past five I was looking out a window of “Tebens,” one of those privileged factories, and saw a Jewish policeman dragging a boy (naturally the Jewish policemen, having no guns, preferred the weaker victims). The boy was shouting at the top of his voice that now the Jewish policeman had no right to catch him and resisting as well as he could, when suddenly the Nazi vice-commander of the factory, a vicious brute by the name of Bach, came out of the gate, hit the policeman with the horsewhip which he always carried, and shouted to him: “Cursed Jew! An order is an order!”