AT THE END OF 1978, US President Jimmy Carter established a Commission on the Holocaust. It was charged with the task of proposing an appropriate memorial to the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. There was an element of retroactivity in the president’s decision, a reaching out for the five million dead* whose very identity as Jews was not readily recognized by the United States at a time when they were being subjected to a systematic process of destruction. Now they were to have a monument under official US auspices to recall the days when they died alone.
The drafting of such a recommendation is quite an undertaking and the work was to be carried out by (1) a small staff consisting of a part-time director, full-time deputy director, and full-time assistant; (2) the “President’s Commission” itself—a large body of twenty-four members chosen from the public, plus five from the Senate and five from the House of Representatives; and (3) an advisory board almost as big as the commission. To finance the half year or so of deliberations and planning, a modest budget was allocated to the commission by the Department of the Interior. Commissioners and advisory board members accepted no fees and their official travel outside the United States was to be billed to them personally.
Most members of the commission as well as the board were Jews, a number of them survivors. The most conspicuous profession in the group was the clergy (Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic), albeit one that was drawn mainly from academic life. There was an obvious tilt to the northeast, although several members had come from Georgia. A number of commissioners could be described as prominent in public or cultural life. Few—very few—were young.
I had little inkling or knowledge of the consultations that led to the creation of the commission and the selection of its membership. No doubt I was approached because I had devoted about three decades of research and writing to the Holocaust, but I have long been accustomed to working in solitude. No wonder that in one of the first telephone calls informing me of the commission’s existence I was admonished not to turn down an appointment if I should be requested to serve. I would be needed because the memorial was to be more than mute stone; it was to contain records, books, films, and it was to be a depository of such materials in order that one might progress beyond remembering the imperfectly known to know what was imperfectly remembered.
This was the offer I could not refuse. To my surprise, virtually all of the commissioners espoused the idea of a “living” memorial, a building in which one could meet, learn, and think. More than that, there was to be an endowment to aid researchers with fellowships and grants. Of course, most of the funds for this program would have to be private. We would not only have to recommend a broad framework, but we would also have to think about the means.
During an early meeting, mention was made by the director of a journey abroad, to visit some of the principal sites in Poland and the USSR where the Jews had been killed and to survey hitherto unavailable documentary holdings in the archives of these countries. This mission preoccupied me from that very moment; it filled my mind long after it was over.
I had never been in Poland or the USSR; I had never visited Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Babi Yar. Something—not only lack of money—had kept me from traveling to these places. I had “seen” them, of course, in German documents. It is in those files, thousands and tens of thousands of them, that I had wandered and it is there that I had encountered “planet Auschwitz” and the “concentration camp universe.” Eventually I had become familiar with these phenomena, their terrain, logistics, and operational characteristics. Yet in essence they remained mysterious to me and inexplicable.
“No one who has not been there can imagine what it was like.” How often had I heard this phrase from survivors. Its implications could hardly be overlooked: those who had not lived through the experience would not be able to recreate it, even if they studied the original records or examined the old barbed wires. There is no way one can be in Auschwitz anymore; it is not a concentration camp today, but a museum. Nor can one be in Treblinka; it is a sculpture. One cannot be in Babi Yar either, it is a monument in a park. What then could one recapture in those surroundings? What could we do there now?
The survivors on the commission were to be our guides. The Holocaust mission was in the first instance their journey. At the opening meeting of the commission in Washington, DC, a procedural point had been raised by a Christian member. He said that survivors should always speak first. He was gently overruled by the survivors themselves who preferred to follow a proper US alphabetical order, but here, on the grounds where they had been the outcasts of mankind, orphaned or widowed in a single night, they were to be at the head of the procession.
The undisputed spiritual leader was Elie Wiesel, once an inmate of Auschwitz, now the chairman of the commission, “prophet-like,” mesmerizing, saying at every occasion not merely that which must be said to a host, but also those things that for most of us would have been unutterable, and saying them in the morning, the afternoon, or the night. Fluent in French, English, Hebrew, Yiddish (not to mention Hungarian), the gaunt figure moved among us, sleeping little and eating almost nothing.
We almost did not go. The Soviet Union issued visas to us on the Saturday prior to our scheduled Sunday departure, and it denied entry to the part-time director of the commission as well as to a member of the advisory board. (Both had visited the USSR before and had apparently been in contact with dissidents.) The detailed itinerary was a series of last-minute arrangements that must have been put together with the assistance of extraordinarily diligent officials of the Department of State and embassies abroad. The group was large. Though it included fewer than half of the commissioners and advisory board members (none at all from the legislative branch), there were wives, reporters, and invited guests, some of them financial supporters of remembrance projects. At the many ceremonies at graves and monuments, the cameras would sweep across this crowd numbering between fifty and sixty.
Only after we had left the United States did I understand the multiple purposes of the mission. We would not only have to absorb much that we would encounter during our hurried visits and meetings; we would also have to impart information to others. Our foreign hosts in Eastern Europe would ask us what we meant when we said the word “Holocaust,” and we would devote more time than we had anticipated to answering that one question above all.
Today [i.e., 1982] Poland is a homogeneous society. Unlike the Polish state of 1939, the present republic has no substantial minorities. The territories inhabited by Ukrainians and Lithuanians were yielded to the USSR, and from the western provinces acquired after the war, the Germans were expelled. The Jewish community, once 3.3 million dispersed in the large cities and smaller towns, now numbers six thousand. Ninety percent of the prewar Jewish population were killed in the Holocaust; most of the remainder survived as soldiers, refugees, or forced laborers outside or inside the destructive arena, and these people have since moved to other countries, mainly to Israel and the United States.
The three million Polish Jews who succumbed to German destruction represent nearly three-fifths of all the Jewish dead. Moreover, Poland (as defined by the boundaries of 1939) is the graveyard not only of those three million, but also of a million more transported there in special trains from several countries of German-dominated Europe.
Before their final destruction, the Jews of Poland were incarcerated in hundreds of ghettos, large and small. Death camps appeared near some of these ghettos. From these ghettos, Jews were moved to the gas chambers where they were killed along with the other Jewish deportees from the northern, western, and southern portions of the continent.
Few traces remain of Jewry in the physical panorama of contemporary Warsaw. As we stood in front of the monument—cast in heroic proportions—of the Warsaw ghetto fighters, I glanced at the ordinary apartment buildings erected by the Polish government on the former ghetto site. They were already showing signs of wear. I knew that the old quarter was no more. For several years, I had been one of the editors of the diary kept by the man who was Chairman of the Jewish Council of the Warsaw Ghetto, Adam Czerniaków.* Again and again, I had consulted a map of the T-shaped walled ghetto, some ten full blocks at its widest and twenty blocks long, which housed well over 400,000 people in three- or four-story buildings. After the deportations and the battle ignited by the armed resistance of the last ghetto inhabitants, the SS razed the Jewish quarter lest Warsaw regain its prewar population size. Now that there are Polish houses where the ghetto stood, it is difficult to visualize its former boundary even at the Umschlagplatz through which the official ghetto exports and imports passed and from which more than 300,000 Jews were taken to Treblinka.
On the first day we visited a Polish monument commemorating the Polish struggle against the Germans. At that ceremony, specially chosen Polish troops stood by and the US ambassador was present as we placed flowers at the foot of the memorial. The Polish People’s Republic does not deny the Holocaust, it does not obscure the fact that Jews died as Jews, but it will remind the world of the Poles who died as Poles, and it will present the two fates in a formula suggesting parity. Repeatedly we heard a statistic indicating that three million Polish Jews and three million non-Jewish Poles had died as a consequence of the German occupation. The Polish toll—casualties in battle, deaths in camps, and fatalities in epidemics—was calculated a long time ago and may well be reexamined by experts, but when Polish Justice Minister Jerzy Bafia referred to this “Golgotha” as a trauma that after thirty-five years was still being felt in every walk of life, I believed him without need for any substantiation.
For Czesław Pilichowski, Director of the Main Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, the double disaster inflicted on Jews and Poles by the same implacable foe was more than a matter of juxtaposition. He cited a poem, “To the Polish Jews,” by Władysław Broniewski, which contains the verse “Our common home has been wrecked and the blood shed makes us brothers, we have been united by execution walls, by Dachau, Auschwitz, by every unmarked grave, every prison bar.” I took down these words and almost memorized them; they rang in my ears longer than any others expressed in these official meetings.
Yet I knew that during our century, Jews had endured misery in Polish society. It is hardly an unknown story and in the US Jewish community it has shaped sentiments much less mellow than my own. I could imagine a reaction in the United States to what we were hearing in Warsaw that day. It would be said in our country that Poland is embracing its Jews, now that they are gone, as much as it was rejecting them when they were still alive. In the extreme form of this view, Poland has been the anti-semitic nation par excellence, discriminating against the Jewish population before the war, welcoming German actions against Jewry during the conflict, and all but expelling the remnant thereafter. I myself have always attempted to assess evidence of Polish hostility toward the Jews in the broadest possible context. Long before the Holocaust, there was little tranquility for Jewry in several countries of Europe. After the German invasion of Poland, the ghettoization process instituted by the occupation authorities resulted in a reallocation of Jewish housing and Jewish trading to the Polish sector. The Poles profited, if that is the word, from a Jewish misfortune. The Germans set up their death camps on Polish soil, not, however, to take advantage of any Polish hospitality, but to reduce costs, particularly of transportation. There was no central Polish authority under German rule and it is not Poland that destroyed the Jews—this deed was performed by Nazi Germany.
Still, I could not ignore the circumstance that for the remaining handful of Jews, life in Poland had become difficult and even oppressive. Only a few days after our stay in Eastern Europe, I was to meet a middle-aged Jew in Denmark who had emigrated from Poland nearly a decade ago. I asked him what his profession had been before his emigration. He was a major in the Polish army. Had he retired? No, he had been dismissed abruptly in 1967, one week after the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states. No doubt the reasons for the action against him were linked to foreign policy issues, but I could not help being troubled by his experience and the similar dilemma faced by other Jews in the Soviet Union. The problem is the age-old lesson so ingrained in the mind of the Eastern European Jew that eventually he will suffer, not for a religion he does not practice or a Zionist cause he does not espouse, but for the fact that in the eyes of all those around him he remains unalterably a Jew.
Our hosts placed stress on the Polish agony during the war, and they implied that since those trying days Jews and Poles have had much in common. They also reminded us of the help that ordinary Poles had given to endangered Jews in the course of the German occupation. This chapter in the history of Polish-Jewish relations was emphasized in speeches, books, and exhibits. I had occasion to look at some of the evidence—it was documentary. In German parlance, Poles who had extended shelter or sustenance to Jews were guilty of Judenbeherbergung, a crime for which the penalty was a swift death. The Germans had the habit of posting the names of Polish men and women who lost their lives for such activities.
We had a great many meetings. Addresses were given, points made, themes stressed. At the end of a long day, I would walk alone in Warsaw. Once, before midnight, I saw a Polish family placing flowers on a plaque at the entrance of a park.
We have moved from cemetery to cemetery, said Elie Wiesel later in Jerusalem, and everywhere we went we found a strange beauty. This observation about localities in which masses of people were killed expressed in quintessence a thought I had during our visit to Treblinka.
We had traveled to the site of the death camp in the stifling heat of a Hungarian bus. On the way, a survivor pointed out to us the small Jewish towns that had once existed nearby. We passed old wooden houses, rode over a narrow bridge, and saw old freight cars at a railway siding—a deportation train preserved there by the Polish government. I wish we could have approached the camp by rail, as the deportees of 1942 had done, but we were arriving on a very warm day at the end of July, at a time of year when the first of the Warsaw ghetto transports were being hauled into this killing center. Though the distance is not long, the Jewish victims had been moved much more slowly than we, and they must have jumped out of the cars with forebodings and partly in shock, but also with some sense of physical relief. Did they notice the sky and the trees? It took but two hours for the deportees to be deprived of all their personal belongings and to be walked the incredibly short distance to the chambers where they were gassed.
A small German guard force, augmented by Ukrainian auxiliaries, killed three-quarters of a million Jews in Treblinka on a virtual assembly line. Several hundred Jewish inmates employed in maintenance and facing certain death rebelled in August 1943. Few were the survivors of the break, but those Jews who did not escape from Treblinka did not outlive the camp. In the end, the bodies in the mass graves were exhumed. All the installations were razed, and a Ukrainian farm was established on the site to restore its pastoral appearance. Only a cobblestone path, built by prisoners, was left where Treblinka had existed. After the war, the Polish government laid down concrete ties, arranged as a symbolic railway track, and set up hundreds of jagged stones, each representing a Jewish community, around the stone memorial. For this construction, the entire terrain was used on a scale of 1:1 in the place where it had all happened. A guide pointed out that after every heavy rain, tiny bone fragments are disgorged by the earth and mix with pebbles on the ground. Involuntarily, one or two visitors bent down to pick up what might have been such relics, only to drop them quickly. I was still gazing at the woods and I thought I heard the whine of heavy trucks in the distance. Where is the highway, I asked? Where are the trucks going? There is no highway and there are no trucks, I was told. I was hearing the famous Treblinka wind moving through the trees.
Much farther from Warsaw, to the southwest, was Auschwitz, the most lethal place in Nazi Europe. One million Jews died there, as well as several hundred thousand Poles, Russians, Frenchmen—all the nationalities in the orbit of the German army and the German Security Police. Auschwitz was a complex of three camps: the main one, or Auschwitz I, which housed the administration as well as a large number of inmates; the killing center of Birkenau, designated Auschwitz II; and the industrial camp, Monowitz, or Auschwitz III. The entire cluster was photographed repeatedly by allied reconnaissance aircraft in 1944.
Auschwitz I is still intact. Its barracks stand where they were, a reconstructed gas chamber may be viewed, and the crematory is in working order. The death camp of Birkenau is almost bare; the tall smoke stacks of the crematories are gone, but near the railway track one may climb over the ruins of the largest gas chambers ever built.
Adjacent to Auschwitz I is the city of Auschwitz with its large railway yard. Houses now filled with children are ranged along the edge of the former camp. Every day the inhabitants of these buildings may look out of their windows and see the roofs of barracks.
We stepped in, wearing our tags with the emblem of the United States and the legend “President’s Commission on the Holocaust.” The main entrance crowned with iron grill work still proclaims the slogan Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free) and a smaller sign at the side says HALT Ausweise vorzeigen (Halt—show identification). The walkways and buildings were those of a permanent military fort, but that appearance was deceptive. On iron bars still flanking the street on which we were walking, men had been hanged. Individual buildings, which the Germans called blocks, were put to unique concentration camp uses: in one, surgical experiments were performed, in another, prisoners were pushed into a cage and starved to death. Between two of the barracks there was an alley used for shootings. The windows of the building to the left had been filled so that prisoners housed there could not see the executions. To the right, however, no such precautions had been taken, since the only inmates kept there were the condemned, waiting their turn.
Each of the buildings is part of the Auschwitz museum. I went to see the exhibits of old shoes, eyeglasses, prosthetic devices, utensils, and luggage left behind by the Germans because of their unsuitability for shipment to the Reich. I saw a hallway filled with photographs of Polish prisoners, young men and women, who were brought here in 1942 and 1943. Each of them looked healthy since their pictures had been taken on the day of arrival. For each the SS had noted also the date of birth and the date of death. Most had lived only a few months in Auschwitz. I peered at these photographs, one or the other adorned with fresh flowers left by Polish friends or family. I wanted to find some young man who had been as old as I was at that time. The search did not take long. My contemporary, born a few days before me, was dead as a teenager in Auschwitz even before my schooling in New York was interrupted by the war.
In Birkenau, standing on earth, sand, and what may have been ashes, I attached myself to a Polish young lady of noble beauty and refined features who explained the history of the camp. She was obviously a professional historian and I admired her grasp of complex information. She was preparing an album of German SS photographs of Auschwitz and I promised her aerial photographs from our own archives.
Our group was about to be divided, some to visit an old synagogue in nearby Krakow, the others to stay in Auschwitz. Just at that moment I began to feel an unmistakable pain, a cramp brought on by a kidney stone I must have formed. I am prone to this malady when there is too much heat and not enough water to drink. The pain always worsens and then I need morphine for relief. Obviously, I should have left immediately to see a physician in Krakow, but instead I raised my hand to join those who chose to remain in the camp. I returned to the barracks, the old shoes, to the photographs of the dead Poles, to the alley, to the cells. I wanted to stand where the present pontiff [i.e., Pope John Paul II] had knelt in prayer. My pain subsided, my muscles relaxed, and at the end of the day, I knew that I would have no need of drugs.
There was to be one more visit to a cemetery in Poland, a real one in Warsaw. By now, I had run out of time—time to look at documents in the Jewish historical institute, and time to survey the land behind the tombstones where 80,000 Jews, dead of emaciation and disease, had been buried during the ghetto days. I wanted to see only one grave, a regular large slab half hidden in the growing thicket of weeks. It is the resting place of Adam Czerniaków, the chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, who took his life upon the outbreak of deportations after he had failed to save his people.
I was startled when Elie Wiesel, the chairman of our commission, called a meeting of the group in the open environment of a dining room of our Warsaw hotel to discuss the advisability of proceeding to the Soviet Union in the light of the refusal of visas to the director of the commission and to a member of the advisory board. So far as I was concerned, that issue had been settled before we left our homes in the United States—we would go. Much to Wiesel’s dismay, several of us spoke up to reiterate the earlier decision. Exhausted by a full day, we reassured him in a sluggish manner that at some appropriate time in the future we would express our outrage to protest the Soviet action. Only one member of our group, Bayard Rustin, understood immediately that Wiesel was attempting to elicit our outrage on the spot in order that he might use it for yet another attempt to obtain the visas. I was too concerned with the possibility that he might actually abandon our original plans to be of help to him. For me, the visit to the Soviet Union was essential, if only because we had been admitted as members of an official Holocaust commission. Already my head was filled with burning curiosity. How would we be received? What would be said to us?
The director of the commission, Irving Greenberg, was not in Europe. Perhaps he had expected an immediate statement of solidarity from the membership. The advisory board member whose visa was also denied, had come with us as far as Warsaw. He had, in fact, been instrumental in arranging the entire journey. It was his miserable travel bureau we all had to use. Now he conceded defeat: he wanted us to continue without him. He only asked that we would say one prayer for him at Babi Yar and another in the Moscow synagogue. His voice breaking, he sat down, but then rose again to apologize for having displayed his feelings so openly. Now he wanted to give us a reason for leaving him behind. He had been a member of a partisan unit in Eastern Europe during the war. There was an iron rule in the unit that a wounded man would be shot by his comrades lest their mission be jeopardized. I liked Miles Lerman. This former partisan and current oil distributor personifies the character traits I have come to associate with survivors. They are men and women with fast reactions, high intelligence, great endurance, and an extraordinary capacity for regenerating their lives from the impact of shattering experiences. When I saw Lerman again in Copenhagen, barely a week after our meeting in the Warsaw hotel, he was talking to all of us, full of inquiries and plans.
I was not prepared for the Soviet Union. As a political scientist, I should not have been surprised by anything, not the standard of living as exemplified by the merchandise in a department store, nor the restrictions so evident in the mere absence of foreign non-communist newspapers in the lobbies of our hotels. I knew of the Soviet belief that distant goals require constant sacrifices: for capital formation and industrialization, many consumer goods are not produced; for the stability of the regime, intellectual and physical mobility is curtailed; and for the sake of unity in the Soviet Union, the separate memories of constituent nationalities, including the Holocaust that befell the Soviet Jews, must be submerged. What I had not quite expected was backwardness in so much art, architecture, and historiography, that stale conforming manner in which Soviet designers and writers are casting the aesthetic qualities of life. Hence I was taken aback also by the counterpart of this stylistic retardation in the formula-ridden answers of bureaucrats to central questions about World War II and the Holocaust that had transpired in its course. The approach of Soviet officialdom to the meaning of history is fixed and rigid; the encounter of these men with us could be no different.
In Poland, we had not only been warmly received; we were given assurances that the Polish archives would be open to US researchers interested in the German occupation. Poland holds a large quantity of German documents, particularly records portraying the destructive scene at a local level. Much that occurred in the final hours of Polish Jewry and of other Jews deported to Poland is reflected in these files. The USSR also possesses documents of German occupation authorities, not to speak of contemporaneous Soviet correspondence dealing directly with the German onslaught and its effects on the civilian population. I was interested in these materials, though I realized that access to them would be a major problem. Not only would a segmentation of occupation history into Jewish and other subject matter be unwelcome in principle, but such sorting requires an examination of all the German records in detail. We know enough about these documents to expect any report, whether by German SS offices, civilian overseers, military government, railroad directorates, or economic agencies, to contain information about a variety of events—the production of wooden carts and the shooting of Jews might be described on a single page. Moreover, the researcher might be particularly interested in comparisons and contexts; he might wish to investigate the German “racial ladder” and the placement of various groups in this scheme, or the role of native auxiliaries in German service, or the psychological repercussions of shootings on White Russian or Ukrainian communities. It would be inherently impossible for Soviet authorities to permit foreigners the pursuit of information about any aspect of the Jewish catastrophe without allowing them some insight into the entire fabric of Soviet society at a time when it was undergoing its greatest stress.
Tactically, there was yet another problem, one which affects all attempts to effect exchanges of knowledge with the Soviet Union. The United States is an open society, our libraries and archives are accessible to all visitors without any stipulation of reciprocity. What Soviet or East German researchers want to know is given to them without restrictions; for what we attempt to find out, we have no more to give. In Kiev, on our first night, walking with Bayard Rustin, I voiced the thought that one argument—the only argument—might be the point that it would be in the interest of the USSR to open its shelves to us, that in the United States there was little appreciation of the Soviet agony or the Soviet contribution in World War II, that findings made by US researchers in the Soviet Union would carry more weight in our country than the selection and presentation of topics by Soviet historians and journalists. Rustin was without question the most astute and experienced member of our mission, and what he said to me that evening in Kiev was somewhat as follows: “I hope you do not mind, my friend, my telling you that you are naive.”
Kiev has the appearance of a new city. Before the war, its population was nine hundred thousand; now the number is 2.15 million. From 19 September 1941 to 6 November 1943, Kiev was in German hands. As soon as the city had been captured, a unit of the SS and Police, Einsatzkommando 4a, ordered the Jewish inhabitants by means of wall posters to assemble for “resettlement.” They were taken to a ravine at the city boundary where the Kommando, a small company-size unit augmented by detachments of German Order Police, massacred them in a three-day shooting operation. The count was 33,771 Jewish dead. When, in the spring of 1942, the commander of Kommando 4a, Paul Blobel, received a visitor from Berlin (Albert Hartl), he pointed to the mass grave, explaining that the Jews were buried there. Now, more than three and a half decades later, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Kiev City Soviet of Peoples’ Deputies welcomed the Holocaust commission to the city, and Soviet guides showed the recently built memorial to the visitors from the United States.
I do not know what route the bus was following from our hotel, but the ride seemed very short and when we arrived at the ravine called Babi Yar I immediately asked how far we were from the center of the city. Barely two miles was the answer. I could not help wondering then how many people, including the victims themselves, must have heard the rifle shots and machine gun fire. Babi Yar is a moon shaped depression in the earth, covered with grass and surrounded by trees. Raised on a ridge that is jutting into the center of the dish is a Janus-like monument. Facing the street are heroic figures, while on the far side one may see the tormented faces and contorted bodies of Soviet citizens, including women and children. I talked to the designer of the memorial who explained that the Germans had shot captured partisans here and helpless civilians there; the sculptor had kept that geography in mind when he shaped the monument. I knew that, unlike Blobel, the Soviet planners of the memorial made no mention of Jews. Our commission had brought a wreath of flowers with streamers commemorating Babi Yar as a Jewish tragedy and laid it down at the foot of the pedestal on which stood the partisans of stone. The cantor sang, and I disengaged myself from the coil of people around him, stepped back twenty feet and looked up at the crown of the monument. Two Soviet photographers rushed towards me and took pictures of me at close range.
We were leaving Kiev for Moscow on a Friday afternoon and I did not think that we would have meetings until Monday. No sooner, however, had we arrived when several of us were asked to go to the headquarters of the Moscow Writers Union, a building which in furnishings and atmosphere reminded me of a typical student center at an American university. It was old and nondescript; on several of its floors people were sitting, reading, eating. Our delegation was headed by Wiesel and included the theologian Robert McAfee Brown, as well as Time magazine book review editor Stefan Kanfer, not in his capacity as a correspondent covering our mission, but as a novelist pressed into service at the spur of the moment to match the formidable array of literary talent assembled on the Soviet side. To our surprise, the Soviet chairman introduced the members of his group by citing their military records. Two had evidently received high decorations and another had risen from private to major. “When you introduce us,” I whispered to Wiesel, “you may say that I was a soldier.” “An officer perhaps?” Wiesel asked quickly. “No, just a soldier.” Kanfer did not stir. He is a veteran of the Korean conflict. Wrong war.
The Soviet delegation consisted of eight people; half of them were Jews. Were so many Jews assembled as a courtesy to us? The idea was unsettling. As if to read my mind, one of the Soviet writers referred to himself as a member of a minority—he was a Russian. Later, the Soviet chairman showed us two large tablets listing the names of Moscow writers killed in action. Half were Jewish names, he explained.
We were eating a full meal, the best I was to be served in the Soviet Union, and we were assured that we could have every course without concern—the food was completely kosher. While we were dining, each of us spoke, not as one would in an official meeting with formal agenda, but to say something personal. One of the Soviet writers (the one who had risen from private to major) was Anatoly Rybakov. This is what he told us.
He had grown up with Jewish parents but wholly assimilated into Russian culture. He did not attend religious services and he knew no Yiddish or Hebrew. His eighteen novels had no Jewish content. One day, however, he wanted to write a short story in which the two protagonists, a man and a woman, were Jews. He wanted his story to be about love, not merely the romantic love of young people who had just met, but also the mature love of a husband and wife after they had lived with each other for many years. He decided that his young man should have migrated to Russia from Switzerland in 1910, that he should have met a young woman, married her, and stayed on through World War I and the Revolution. To show them growing older, he had to continue the story to 1941 and the German assault. He had spent three years in research to construct a locality in which his couple might have lived. By then his story was becoming a novel.* He had to place them into a ghetto and inevitably he had to construct the ultimate scene of a German shooting operation. It troubled him greatly that the Jews went to their deaths with apparent docility, but he was convinced that they had no recourse and that they died with dignity. After the publication of his novel he had received hundreds of letters assuring him that he had been right in this portrayal.
Wiesel spoke of his concern about Babi Yar. Having been there only that morning, still agitated by the experience, he had to point out that it was painful to see the monument without an inscription identifying the victims as Jews.
There are monuments and there are monuments, the Russian chairman replied. When, for example, his friend, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, wrote a poem “Babi Yar” explicitly dwelling on the Jewish fate, that verse was a monument. Who could tell which of the two monuments, the one of rock or the other on paper, would last longer?
The Saturday morning was devoted to an appearance by the commission and its guests at the Moscow synagogue. I declined to join the group. Religious observances make me uncomfortable and the political overtones of that particular visit disturbed me. We had come to the Soviet Union as a commission of the president and our mandate was the Holocaust. For me there was no other purpose, but I realized that many of my colleagues did not share my single-mindedness. Our very presence in Moscow on a weekend was no accident; the Saturday in the synagogue had been planned to show support for Soviet Jewry. Later I was to learn that Elie Wiesel had asked for a private moment after a meeting with Procurator General Roman Rudenko to present a list of four incarcerated dissidents to the Soviet official. Wiesel is a deeply sensitive man and he could not bring himself to remember the dead by forgetting the living. I myself was thinking about unknown, Russified, and atheistic people whose lives in the Soviet Union are increasingly filled with questions and quandaries.
In Red Square, of all places, I was to have an unexpected encounter with one nameless individual. It was evening and four of us, still wearing our tags, were standing there. He came up to us and in halting but intelligible English said that he knew about our arrival from broadcasts on the Voice of America. His age was about twenty-nine and he was born in a small town far from Moscow of a Jewish father, long dead, and a Russian mother, still living. Some time ago he had moved to the Soviet capital with his Russian wife. By profession he was an engineer and he was working in his field, but lately he was contemplating emigration. “Why?” I asked. “Because I want freedom.” Did he have access to military secrets in his job? Yes, he said, and that is why he was seeking employment in a position not requiring knowledge of such information. Once he had made the change he would stay for a period of three years. Two of my companions immediately handed him their cards, but he would not give us his name. Who was he? Why did he approach us? Was I becoming paranoid for asking what his purpose may have been?
Before the commission had left the United States, I had insisted on an opportunity to meet with a representative of the Soviet archival administration. I had familiarized myself as well as I could with the organization and holdings of the Soviet archives by reading the standard work on that subject by the American Sovietologist Patricia Grimsted. In her substantial volume, there is no mention of captured German documents. I would have to inquire about their location and availability in the course of our discussions in Moscow.
The chief of the Soviet team of archivists was the deputy director of the Main Archival Administration, F.[jedor] M.[ichailowitsch] Vaganov. I pressed the attack for the US group, supported at every turn by my friends who were eager to widen any opening and exploit any breach. The Main Archival Administration, said Vaganov, had no German documents. It had no documents at all dated after 1940. Furthermore, there was no “fond” or collection identified as German documents as such. Where were they then? I asked. Did the Defense Ministry retain possession of them? Documents dated after 1940, said Vaganov, were being kept by whatever ministry was the appropriate custodian in accordance with their subject matter. In that case, I asked, when would documents dated 1941 or 1942 be transferred by ministries currently keeping them to the Main Archival Administration? There was a key, said Vaganov, according to which transfers were being made; the schedules varied on the basis of different criteria. The Main Archival Administration did not know when documents would be handed over by the Ministry of Defense. Was he saying, I asked, that he had no German documents? The Soviet Archival Administration, said Vaganov, may have documents needed for investigation of war crimes. One or another document may be found in the files of an Archive in Byelorussia or Ukraine. We should consult the volumes of the Soviet history of World War II for sources. We should avail ourselves of the existing system of cooperation between the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and US academic bodies if we wished to utilize a Soviet Archive.
Even before our queries to the archivists were over, a larger group of our commission had begun a meeting with Soviet historians. We joined our colleagues to talk with members of the World War II Section of the Institute of the History of the USSR in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The Soviet chairman was V. A. Kumanyov, but the most active discussant at the Russian end of the table was the military historian of World War II Alexander Samsonov. It is Samsonov who challenged our mission and everything we stood for. In pursuing a study of the Jewish disaster, he said, with World War II as a background, we were reversing reality and standing history on its head. As a Marxist he had to conclude that the Fascist assault on the USSR was an attempt to conquer the world. In the wake of this aggression, Jews were killed, Russians were killed, Ukrainians were killed. The Fascist plan was to wipe out entire peoples, including all of the Slavic nations. He himself was a Byelorussian and more than thirty years ago he had seen with his own eyes the devastation visited upon the area that was his home.
Several of us replied to this argument. We said that the Jews had been the victims of German actions from 1933 to 1945. The ghettos were established on Polish soil in 1940 and when German armies suddenly struck at the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Jews were facing mass death. We were not unmindful of the fact that in German plans the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe were destined for rapid enslavement and ultimate extinction. Yet as Soviet forces turned the tide of war in the titanic battle of Stalingrad, the invader’s vision of the obliteration of the Slavs was dissipated in the retreat. The Jews, however, were being killed until the end; their annihilation became reality, and European Jewry, as we once knew it, is no more.
Kumanyov now joined the debate. There were differences of opinion, he said, particularly about Nazi policy vis-à-vis the Jews in the total constellation of German planning. To Kumanyov the destruction of the Jews was just an experiment that led to the annihilation of others. Thus he agreed in part with Samsonov, in part with us, but he had to add that if we were to look at the Holocaust in an isolated manner, we would weaken our common struggle against Fascism.
We left the Soviet Union that afternoon. The first of our two last stops was in Copenhagen, where we paid tribute to the Danish people for their singular rescue effort of October 1943 that resulted in the clandestine transport in small boats of almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark to safety in Sweden. Our journey ended with a depleted group in Jerusalem where our Israeli friends were worried that the Holocaust Commission would not succeed in isolating itself from the urgings of nationalities with martyrological claims of their own. At Yad Vashem, Israel’s Remembrance Authority, a display had been prepared of original documents. One was the last notebook of Adam Czerniaków (the chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council) opened to the last entry. My colleague, S. J. Staron, and I had worked with typewritten transcriptions and a facsimile edition of the diary; only now did I notice that at the moment of Czerniaków’s suicide, shortly after his final entry, the notebook was just about full.
On 27 September 1979, the commission assembled in the Rose Garden of the White House for a presentation of its report to the president. Elie Wiesel spoke in front of the microphone, as President Carter stood at his side, erect and motionless, looking off into the distance. Was he listening to the words? Was he thinking about one of the many crises with which he had to deal?
Wiesel, still thinking of Babi Yar, remarked that this massacre had occurred just thirty-eight years before. The world had looked on then and in the following years, as the Holocaust swept across the European Jewish communities. The president responded, commending us for our work and the journey that in itself was an act of memorialization. Then he recalled the omissions of the time when the world had looked the other way.
It was in the middle of the afternoon, and for the president, not yet the middle of his working day. He is like a prisoner, I thought, always under guard, pressured by every summons. That day he had given us an hour. Could it be that he had already devoted more time and thought to the Holocaust than his predecessor during the war, Franklin Roosevelt, had managed while the Jews were dying?
It is natural, I said to myself as I was walking in the streets of Washington, DC, that night, for me to feel slightly depressed. Not because of those who would deny the Holocaust, or those who would dilute it, or the others who would forget it—I understand them all. If I did not feel all that well, I was merely experiencing the reaction I always had after some concluding ceremony. What I had to do now was to plan my research. There were documents I had to read, particularly the records in the Polish archives, and I would have to travel again soon. Next year, in Auschwitz.
Originally published in St. Johns Review 34, no. 1 (1982–83): 105–12.
* The estimated number of six-million murdered Jews is more common. Hilberg himself calculated “the Jewish death toll … slightly above five million” (see chapter 1).
* I.e., The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz (New York: Stein and Day, 1979).
* Anatoly Rybakov, Heavy Sand (New York: Penguin, 1982).