Two passages at random: the first from Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim Kaplan, the second from Jean-François Steiner’s study Treblinka:
A rabbi in Lodz was forced to spit on a Torah scroll that was in the Holy Ark. In fear of his life, he complied and desecrated that which is holy to him and to his people. After a short while he had no more saliva, his mouth was dry. To the Nazi’s question, why did he stop spitting, the rabbi replied that his mouth was dry. Then the son of the “superior race” began to spit into the rabbi’s mouth, and the rabbi continued to spit on the Torah.
Despite all the precautions taken by his friends, Professor Mehring was called out of the ranks during roll-call. When the punishment squad, performing its “exercise,” began to thin out, Professor Mehring was seized by an extraordinary will to live and started running like a madman. “Lalka” observed this and, when a quarter of the prisoners had fallen, made the “exercise” go on to see how long the old man, running a few yards behind the others, could hold out.
He yelled—If you catch up with them, your life is saved.
And gave the order to whip on the survivors.
The survivors faltered and slowed down in order to help the Professor; but the blows redoubled, making them stumble, shredding their clothes, covering their faces with blood. Blinded with blood, reeling with pain, they again speeded up. The Professor, who had gained a little ground, saw them pull away from him again and threw his arms forward, as if to grasp the other prisoners, as if to plead with them. He stumbled once, then a second time; his tortured body seemed to fall apart; he tried once more to recover his balance, then, all at once, stiffened and collapsed in the dust. When the Germans drew near, they saw a thread of blood flowing from his mouth. Professor Mehring was dead.
Indeed, rather lucky: not hung by his feet and flogged to death like Langner, the lashes being so timed that he would not die until evening. Not thrown alive into the crematoria fire. Not drowned, as were many, by slow immersion in urine and ordure. Principally, perhaps, without having with his own hands hanged his child in the barrack at night, to preserve him from further torture in the morning.
One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective, is the time relation. At a previous point in rational time, Professor Mehring was sitting in his study, speaking to his children, reading books, passing his hand over a white tablecloth on Friday evening. And flayed alive, “blood splashing slowly from his hair,” Langner was, in some sense, the same human being who had, a year earlier, perhaps less, walked the daylight street, done business, looked forward to a good meal, read an intellectual monthly. But in what sense? Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring or Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox—Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be—that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, “good times” and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of living damnation? If we reject some such module, it becomes exceedingly difficult to grasp the continuity between normal existence and the hour at which hell starts, on the city square when the Germans begin the deportations, or in the office of the Judenrat or wherever, an hour marking men, women, children off from any precedent of life, from any voice “outside,” in that other time of sleep and food and humane speech. On the fake station platform at Treblinka, cheerfully painted and provided with window boxes so as not to alert the new arrivals to the gas ovens half a mile further, the painted clock pointed to three. Always. There is an acute perception in this on the part of Kurt Franz, the commander of the extermination camp.
This notion of different orders of time simultaneous but in no effective analogy or communication may be necessary to the rest of us, who were not there, who lived as if on another planet. That, surely, is the point: to discover the relations between those done to death and those alive then, and the relations of both to us; to locate, as exactly as record and imagination are able, the measure of unknowing, indifference, complicity, commission which relates the contemporary or survivor to the slain. So that, being now instructed as never quite before—and it is here that history is different—of the fact that “everything is possible,” that starting next Monday morning at, say, 11.20 a.m. time can change for oneself and one’s children and drop out of humanity, we may better gauge our own present position, its readiness for or vulnerability to other forms of “total possibility.” To make oneself concretely aware that the “solution” was not “final,” that it spills over into our present lives, is the only but compelling reason for forcing oneself to continue reading these literally unbearable records, for going back or, perhaps, forward into the non-world of the sealed ghetto and extermination camp.
Moreover, despite the large amount of work done by historians, despite the mountains of documentation amassed during the trials, very important questions of “relation” remain obscure or unanswered. There is, first of all, the matter of the unwillingness of European powers and the United States during the late 1930s to make more than token gestures toward the rescue of Jewish children. There is the appalling evidence of the enthusiasm shown in Poland and western Russia by the local population when it came to helping the Germans kill Jews. Of the six hundred who succeeded in escaping from Treblinka to the forests, only forty survived, the majority being killed by Poles. “Go to Treblinka where you Jews belong,” was a not uncommon answer to Jewish women and children seeking refuge among Polish neighbors. In the Ukraine, where many Jews remained in the face of the German advance because Stalinist policy carefully prohibited any warning to them of Nazi intentions, matters were, if conceivable, even worse. Had the people of occupied Europe chosen to help the Jews, to identify themselves even symbolically with the fate of their Jewish fellow-countrymen, the Nazi massacre could not have succeeded. This is shown by the solidarity and courage of Christian communities helping Jews in Norway, Denmark, and parts of Bulgaria.
But what of the outside, what of the powers actually at war with Nazi Germany? Here the evidence is, until now, controversial and full of ugly undertones. Many questions remain almost taboo. There are motives of internal politics, historical prejudice, and personal cruelty which may account for the indifference toward and even participation in the destruction of the Jews by Stalinist Russia. The failure of the R.A.F. and U.S. Air Force to bomb the gas ovens and rail lines leading to the death camps after substantial information about the “final solution” had reached London from Poland and Hungary, and after desperate pleas to that effect had been transmitted by elements in the Polish underground, remains an ugly riddle. The absence of any such raids—even one day of interruption in the gas ovens would have meant the life of ten thousand human beings—cannot be accounted for merely on technical grounds. Low-flying R.A.F. planes blew open the door of a prison in France rescuing vital members of the Resistance from further torture and execution. Just when did the names Belsen, Auschwitz, Treblinka first turn up in allied intelligence files, and what was done about them?
It has been said that the answer is one of psychological paralysis, of the sheer incapacity of the “normal” mind to imagine and hence give active belief to the enormities of the circumstance and the need. Even those—and they may have been few—who came to believe that the news out of eastern Europe was authentic, that millions of human beings were being methodically tortured and gassed in the middle of the twentieth century, did so at some abstract remove, as we might believe a piece of theological doctrine or an historical occurrence far in the past. The belief did not relate. We are post-Auschwitz homo sapiens because the evidence, the photographs of the sea of bones and gold fillings, of children’s shoes and hands leaving a black claw-mark on oven walls, have altered our sense of possible enactments. Hearing whisperings out of hell again we would know how to interpret the code; the skin of our hopes has grown thinner.
This is obviously an important argument, particularly when extended to the problem of German awareness of what was going on and to the even more vexed matter of Jewish unreadiness, disbelief, even in some passive or metaphoric sense, acquiescence in the massacre. The earth at Treblinka contained, in one corner of the camp, seven hundred thousand bodies, “weighing approximately thirty-five thousand tons and filling a volume of ninety thousand cubic metres.” If the Jews could not, until the closing of the oven door or the stench of the fire-pit believe this to be true, if the intelligence of a people prepared for apocalyptic anguish by two thousand years of harrying could not focus on this new and final possibility, how could that of other men? It is one of the daemonic attributes of Nazism (as of sadistic literature) to taint those who accept its imaginings as literally feasible—even when they reject them with loathing—with an element of self-doubt and unbalance. To believe the reports on Auschwitz smuggled out by the underground, to credit the statistical facts before such credence had become irrefutable and generally shared throughout the surviving world, was to yield in some measure to the monstrousness of the German intent. Skepticism (“such things cannot happen now, not at this point in man’s history, not in a society that has produced Goethe”) had its part of humane dignity and self-respect. And tragically so among east European Jews, with their complex involvement in German culture and Western enlightenment.
This is clearly shown both in the fictionalized account of Vilna at the start of Steiner’s Treblinka, and in the opening pages of Kaplan’s diary. Jewish reactions fluctuated wildly between hope that German occupation would bring some rational order to suffering—imprisonment in a ghetto could signify protection from the ever recurrent if random brutalities of gentile neighbors—and the hope that Hitler would soon allow the departure of the Jews from Europe. What wisps of information did leak through about Nazi mass exterminations were, for a long time, treated either as the natural fantasies of the affrighted or as dangerous falsehoods disseminated by provocateurs to demoralize the Jews or incite them to some act of rebellion. The latter would provide the Nazis with an “excuse” to act “more harshly.” Above all, there was the hope that the world outside would come in aid. On January 24, 1940, Kaplan wrote:
A small ray of light has shone forth from between the clouds that are spread across our skies. The information has reached us that the American Quakers will send a rescue mission to Poland. This time the aid will be offered in American fashion, without regard to race or religion, and even the Jews will be able to benefit from the proffered aid. May they be blessed! For us this is the first time that, instead of “except the Jews,” the expression “including the Jews” has reached us, and it rings in our ears with a strange sound. Is it really true?
And on June 11, 1940, the Jews of Warsaw took comfort from the firm belief that “the French are fighting like lions with the last of their strength.” Hope, the radical property of man to regard himself in some kind of mutual relationship to other men, died inch by inch. The memory of hope cries out in one of the last messages received by the outside world during the rising of the Warsaw ghetto: “The world is silent. The world knows (it is inconceivable that it should not) and stays silent. God’s vicar in the Vatican is silent; there is silence in London and Washington; the American Jews are silent. This silence is astonishing and horrifying.” In fact there was noise just outside the ghetto walls, carefully recorded by German newsreel teams: the frequent laughter and applause of Polish spectators watching men leaping into flames and the houses blowing up.
When did belief darken to certitude? According to J.-F. Steiner (but his account is partially dramatic fiction or rearrangement) it was Langner, dying under the lash, who cried out with his last breath that “you will all be slain. They cannot let you out of here after what you have witnessed.” In Kaplan’s testimony the process of recognition is gradual. Each spasm of tenacious vitality—a joke made, a child fed, a German sentry cajoled or outwitted—seemed to Kaplan a guarantee of survival: “A nation which can live in such terrible circumstances as these without losing its mind, without committing suicide—and which can still laugh—is sure of survival. Which will disappear first, Nazism or Judaism? I am willing to bet! Nazism will go first!” Thus on August 15, 1940. By June 1942 the possibility of the “final solution” was becoming plain in Kaplan’s mind. Though “imprisoned within double walls: a wall of brick for our bodies, and a wall of silence for our spirits,” Kaplan could state, on June 25, that Polish Jewry was being totally slaughtered. He even refers to “lethal gas.” But it was not until the deportation order in late July 1942 that the recognition of doom closed in. Rumor flew about that it had been Himmler’s sadistic jest to promulgate the decree on the eve of the Ninth of Av, “a day of retribution, a day fated for mourning through all generations. But all that is irrelevant. In the last analysis there are accidental, momentary manifestations. They did not cause the decree. The real purpose is deeper and more fundamental—the total destruction of the Jewish nation.” That this purpose has survived Nazism in many individuals and certain societies, even societies where there are scarcely any Jews left alive, that it runs close beneath the surface of many aspects of Soviet life, enforces the need to look back. There are elements of anti-Semitism deeper than sociology or economics or even historical superstition. The Jew sticks like a bone in the throat of any other nationalism. “God of Gods!” wrote Kaplan as the end drew near, Shall the sword devour thy sons forever?”
The diary breaks off in the evening hours of August 4, with Jewish police under Nazi supervision scouring block after city block. Taken to the Umschlagplatz (whose features and tablet of remembrance the present régime in Warsaw has all but obliterated), Kaplan and his wife were deported. They are thought to have been murdered in Treblinka in December 1942 or January 1943. Kaplan’s foresight and the help of a Pole outside the ghetto ensured the survival of these small notebooks. Together with Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, this diary constitutes the only complete record of Jewish life in Warsaw from the outbreak of war to the time of deportation. Over and over Kaplan writes that this diary is his reason for survival, that the record of atrocity must reach the outside world. The last sentence reads: “If my life ends—what will become of my diary?” He won his desperate, patient gamble; his voice has overcome the ash and the forgetting.
It is the voice of a rare human being. A teacher of Hebrew, an essayist, a scholar of Jewish history and customs, Chaim Aron Kaplan chose to stay in Warsaw in 1941, though his American and Palestinian contacts might have secured him an exit visa. He wrote in Hebrew, but with that erudite, critical background of classical and European humanism characteristic of the modern Jewish intelligentsia. On October 26, 1939, he set down his credo:
Even though we are now undergoing terrible tribulations and the sun has grown dark for us at noon, we have not lost our hope that the era of light will surely come. Our existence as a people will not be destroyed. Individuals will be destroyed, but the Jewish community will live on. Therefore, every entry is more precious than gold, so long as it is written down as it happens, without exaggerations and distortions.
This latter clause he fulfilled to an almost miraculous degree. In midst of hell, Kaplan discriminates between the horror witnessed and that which is only reported. Through extreme precision he came to a deep, diagnostic perception. As early as October 28, 1939, Kaplan had defined the root condition of the relations between Germans and Jews: “In the eyes of the conquerors we are outside the category of human beings. This is the Nazi ideology, and its followers, both common soldiers and officers, are turning it into a living reality.” He knew what not very many, as yet, are prepared to see plainly: that Nazi anti-Semitism is the logical culmination of the millennial Christian vision and teaching of the Jew as killer of God. Commenting on the murderous beatings of Jews by German and Polish gangs at Easter 1940, Kaplan adds: “Christian ‘ethics’ became conspicuous in life. And then—woe to us!” He observed the queer mystery of German culture, the coexistence in the same men of bestiality and eager literacy: “We are dealing with a nation of high culture, with ‘a people of the Book.’… The Germans have simply gone crazy for one thing—books.… Where plunder is based on an ideology, on a world outlook which in essence is spiritual, it cannot be equaled in strength and durability.… The Nazi has both book and sword, and this is his strength and might.” That the book might well be Goethe or Rilke remains a truth so vital yet outrageous that we try to spit it out, that we go on mouthing our hopes in culture as if it were not there to break our teeth. It may do so, if we do not come to understand its meaning with something of Kaplan’s calm and precision of feeling.
That precision extends to Kaplan’s observation of moments of humanity on the part of the Germans. The flush of embarrassment on the face of a German sentry is gratefully recorded; an officer stopping to help a child trampled by a German soldier, and adding, “Go and tell your brethren that their suffering will not last much longer!” is remembered as if he were a mysterious harbinger of grace (January 31, 1940). At all times there is the effort to understand how “this pathological phenomenon called Nazism,” this “disease of the soul” can affect an entire people or class of human beings. In Kaplan the very act of truthful observation becomes an exercise in rational possibility, a counter-statement to the madness and degradation in the street. There is scarcely a touch of hate in this book, only the desire to understand, to test insight against reason. Seeing a German whip an old peddler to death in the open street, Kaplan writes:
It is hard to comprehend the secret of this sadistic phenomenon.… How is it possible to attack a stranger to me, a man of flesh and blood like myself, to wound him and trample upon him, and cover his body with sores, bruises, and welts, without any reason? How is it possible? Yet I swear that I saw all this with my own eyes.
In such labor of understanding lies the only mode of forgiveness. Only those who actually passed through hell, who survived Auschwitz after seeing their parents flogged to death or gassed before their own eyes (like Elie Wiesel), or who found their own kin amid the corpses from which they had to extract gold teeth, a daily encounter at Treblinka, can have the right to forgive. We do not have that right. This is an important point, often misunderstood. What the Nazis did in the camps and torture chambers is wholly unforgivable, it is a brand on the image of man and will last; each of us has been diminished by the enactment of a potential sub-humanity latent in all of us. But if one did not undergo the thing, hate or forgiveness are spiritual games—serious games no doubt—but games none the less. The best now, after so much has been set forth, is, perhaps, to be silent; not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate, to the unspeakable. So argues Elie Wiesel, so argued a number of witnesses at the Eichmann trial. The next best is, I believe, to try and understand, to keep faith with what may well be the utopian commitment to reason and historical analysis of a man like Kaplan.
But as I write this, a minute splinter of the enormity drives home. There is no other man precisely like Chaim Aron Kaplan. This is so of every death; metaphysically an absolute uniqueness passes from the store of human resources. But despite its outward democracy death is not wholly equal. The integrity, the fineness of intelligence, the human rationalism exhibited on every page of this indispensable book—representing a specific tradition of feeling, of linguistic practice—are irretrievably lost. The particular type of human possibility realized in central and east European Judaism is extinct. We know next to nothing about genetic reserves, about the raw material of diverse inheritance on which the human species draws for its labored progress. But numerical renewal is only a part of the story. In murdering Chaim Kaplan and those like him, in making certain that their children would be ash, the Germans deprived human history of one of the versions of its future. Genocide is the ultimate crime because it pre-empts on the future, because it tears up one of the roots from which history grows. There can be no meaningful forgiveness because there can be no repair. And this absence from our present needs, from our evolutionary hopes, of the strains of moral, psychological, cerebral quality extinguished at Belsen and Treblinka constitutes both the persistence of the Nazi action and the slow, sad vengeance of the unremembered dead.
A lack of modesty, of the finely shaping ironies which mark the Warsaw Diary, has been notable in the debates over Treblinka. Born in 1938, of a Jewish father who was deported and killed by the Germans and a Catholic mother, Jean-François Steiner did not experience the actual massacre. It was a trip to Israel and the well-known malaise felt by younger Jews throughout the Eichmann trial—“why did Jews in Europe go like lambs to the slaughter?”—that prompted Steiner to interview the handful of survivors of Treblinka (twenty-two in Israel, five in the United States, one in England) and to write an account of “the revolt in an extermination camp.” Hailed by Madame de Beauvoir as a vindication of Jewish courage and as a pioneer work in the sociological, psychological interpretation of a community in hell, Treblinka has been bitterly attacked by others (David Rousset and Léon Poliakov among them) for its alleged inaccuracies, racism, and for what comfort its general thesis of Jewish passivity may give to Miss Hannah Arendt. The recriminations have been ugly, as they were in the Arendt case. And this, though humiliating and subversive to intelligence, is proper. For it is by no means certain that rational discourse can cope with these questions, lying as they do outside the normative syntax of human communication, in the explicit domain of the bestial; nor is it clear that those who were not themselves fully involved should touch upon these agonies unscathed. Those who were inside—Elie Wiesel in La Nuit, Les Portes de la forêt, Le Chant des morts, Koppel Holzmann in Die Höhlen der Hölle—can find right speech, often allegoric, often a close neighbor to silence, for what they choose to say. We who come after are shrill and discomfort each other with claims of anger or impartial perception. Monsieur Poliakov speaks of the successive “scandals” which attend all books on the murder of the Jews from Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just to Hochhuth’s The Deputy and now Treblinka. Silence during the murder, but scandal over the books.
Steiner has set himself a difficult, somewhat strange task: to reconstruct the life and insurrection in a death camp in the form of a fictionalized documentary, of a piece of closely documented reportage using the imaginary dialogues, character sketches, and dramatized montage of fiction. The fact that almost all the survivors of the rising of August 2, 1943, were later murdered by Polish peasants, by Ukrainian Fascist bands, by right-wing units in the Polish resistance or by the Wehrmacht, has meant that Steiner had to rely on the tortured memories of a few individuals for the bulk of his material. His choice of a dramatized genre, which is profoundly honest in so far as it represents the effort of a non-witness to imagine backward, to enter hell by act of imaginative talent, entails obvious risks. Repeatedly during the Eichmann trial, witnesses blunted the prosecutor’s questions saying “You cannot understand. Who was not there cannot imagine.” And unable to imagine entirely, to translate document into self, into the indelible mark on one’s own skin, Jean-François Steiner resorts, probably unconsciously, to the conventions of violence and suspense current in modern fiction and high journalism.
Consequently Treblinka uses the cinematic chronology and stills of a Time story. It is full of memorable dialogue and dramatic silences. Actual and imagined personages appear in episodes grouped and cut by an obviously skilled eye (a Truman Capote stretched to fury). The mental life of Kurt Franz (“Lalka”) is rendered with Dostoevskyan nuance. Now I have no doubt that all these monstrous and heroic scenes took place: that fathers and sons helped one another commit suicide in the barracks, that naked girls offered themselves to kapos in a last striving for life, that Ukrainian guards and doomed Jews danced and played music together on hot summer evenings in the bizarre death-village built by Franz. I know from other evidence that Steiner’s account of the Treblinka symphony orchestra is true, that the boxing matches and cabaret he describes did indeed take place, that a small number of Jewish men and women, hunted past endurance, came voluntarily to the gates of Treblinka asking for admission and death. In the great majority of cases, Steiner’s narrative and dialogue is firmly grounded in direct and documentary evidence. But because that evidence is mastered by the literary talent of the writer, because a narrative persona full of distinct rage and stylistic force interposes between the insane fact and the profoundly exciting economy, hence order, of the book, a certain unreality obtrudes. Where it is represented with such skill, intricate modulations affect the hideous truth. It becomes more graphic, more terribly defined, but also has more acceptable, conventional lodging in the imagination. We believe; yet do not believe intolerably, for we draw breath at the recognition of a literary device, of a stylistic stroke not finally dissimilar from what we have met in a novel. The aesthetic makes endurable.
But although this is not a book I can unreservedly trust—the pressure it puts on the imagination is not always that which most nearly, most scrupulously relates us to the presence of the dead-many of the charges made against Steiner are unjust.
It is true that insurrection was not as rare as Steiner makes out—witness actions recorded at Bialistok, Grodne, Sobivor, Auschwitz, and, above all, in Warsaw itself. Nevertheless, Treblinka was the only death-camp actually destroyed by a Jewish uprising, and the conditions under which that uprising was planned were indeed fantastic.
Treblinka is not the first or most authoritative attempt at a sociology of the damned. Kogon’s S.S.-Staat and Bettelheim’s The Informed Heart are much more reliable. But Bettelheim’s observations in particular bear on an earlier, relatively imaginable version of camp life. In Treblinka, with its incessant assembly line of death and technology of mass disposal, with its fake railway station and Teutonic village, with its dogs trained to attack men’s private parts and its official Jewish marriages, life had reached a pitch of extreme insanity. Jean-François Steiner conveys this world, extra-territorial to reason, not, I imagine, in its complete, literal truth. How could he? “I who was there still do not understand,” writes Elie Wiesel. But what he has translated from the silences, necessary forgettings, partial speech of the survivors often rings true. Principally, he makes one grasp something of the deliberate torture of hope and choice by which the Nazis broke the spring of will in men. In a world in which, as in the cruel myth of Plato’s Gorgias, men constantly had before their eyes the calendar of their own deaths, the Nazis introduced a mechanism of minimal hope. “You can go on living if you do this or that to our satisfaction.” But the doing almost invariably involved a choice so hideous, so degrading that it further diminished the humanity of those who made it. The father had to choose to let his child die; the kapo had to flog harder; the informer had to betray; husband had to let wife go unknowing to the ovens lest he himself be immediately selected. To live was to choose to become less human.
Exactly this same process is analyzed by Kaplan. It was the notorious game of yellow or white passes and labor-cards. Which one meant life, which death? Or three cards are issued to a family of four, forcing parents and children to select one of their own number for extermination. Hope mocked can break a human identity more swiftly than hunger. But hunger there was, and continuous physical torment, and the sudden cessation of all human privacy.
Thus the riddle is not why the eastern European Jews failed to offer more resistance, why thrust out of humanity, deprived of all weapons, methodically starved, they did not revolt (in essence, Hannah Arendt’s thesis suffers from a failure of imagining). In fact, this is a radically indecent question, asked as it so often is by those who remained silent during the massacre. The question is how it was possible for Chaim Kaplan to keep his sanity, and how Galewski and his resistance committee were able to rise from amid the stinking mountains of the dead and lead an attack against S.S. machine-guns. The mystery is that even one man should have retained sufficient remembrance of normal life to recognize man in his companions and in his own brutalized image. Only from such recognition can rebellion and that supreme deed of identity which is to give one’s life for the survival of others—as the entire Treblinka committee did—arise.
Certain Jewish mystics have said that Belsen and Treblinka embody a momentary eclipse or madness of God; others have spoken of God’s especial, and therefore unfathomable, nearness to His chosen in the gas oven and at the whipping block. These are metaphors of reason when reason suffers despair or a hope more grievous than despair. What the documents tell us is that in the dark of God’s absence, certain men, buried alive, buried by that silence of Christianity and Western civilization which makes all who were indifferent accomplice to the Nazis, rose and destroyed their parcel of hell. For all its unpleasant stylistic virtuosity, for all its contrivances and, perhaps, inaccuracies, Treblinka gives us some understanding of how this came about. The charge that J.-F. Steiner has somehow humiliated the Jews by showing them through the eyes of German and Ukrainian torturers, and that his account of the initial paralysis of Jews at Treblinka contributes to a racist myth of Jewish passivity, seems to me unfounded. It overlooks his primary intent which is to imagine for himself and for us the unimaginable, to speak where only silence or the Kadish for the unnumbered dead have a natural place.
But enough of the debate. These books and the documents that have survived are not for “review.” Not unless “review” signifies, as perhaps it should in these instances, a “seeing-again,” over and over. As in some Borges fable, the only completely decent “review” of the Warsaw Diary or of Elie Wiesel’s Night would be to re-copy the book, line by line, pausing at the names of the dead and the names of the children as the orthodox scribe pauses, when re-copying the Bible, at the hallowed name of God. Until we know many of the words by heart (knowledge deeper than mind) and can repeat a few at the break of morning to remind ourselves that we live after, that the end of the day may bring inhuman trial or a remembrance stranger than death.
In the Warsaw ghetto a child wrote in its diary: “I am hungry, I am cold; when I grow up I want to be a German, and then I shall no longer be hungry, and no longer cold.” And now I want to write that sentence again: “I am hungry, I am cold; when I grow up I want to be a German, and then I shall no longer be hungry, and no longer cold.” And say it many times over, in prayer for the child, in prayer for myself. Because when that sentence was written I was fed, beyond my need, and slept warm, and was silent.