January 10, 1944
How did New York Jewish intellectuals write about the Holocaust as it happened? Well, they didn’t. This essay by the magazine’s literary editor Alfred Kazin was a lonely exception. On the whole, The New Republic did a far better job of reporting Hitler’s fiendishness than it did with Stalin’s. It devoted more pages to the impending doom of European Jewry than almost every other American publication. During the thirties, it published a series of grim dispatches from Germany; in 1942, it ran the courageous journalist Varian Fry’s urgent report on the catastrophe, “The Massacre of the Jews.” Kazin, who succeeded Edmund Wilson as literary editor, was always far more comfortable with his Jewish identity than were his other colleagues in the intelligentsia. Perhaps this better attuned him to the slaughter, and made him acutely sensitive to the world’s “silent complicity.”
On May 12 of this year, a man named Shmuel Ziegelboim, who was a Socialist, a Jew and a Pole, was found dead by his own hand in a London flat. His wife and child had been killed by the Nazis in Poland; and no doubt he had had his fill of Polish politics—even (or especially) in London. I had never heard of Shmuel Ziegelboim before I read of his death; and so many Socialists, Jews and Poles have died in these last few years that it is possible—conscience and memory being what they are even for one’s own—that I would never again have thought of him had he not left a letter that was published in a negligible corner of The New York Times.
His letter was addressed in Polish to the President of Poland and to Sikorski, who was then Premier. What he wrote was this:
I take the liberty of addressing to you my last words, and through you to the Polish government and the Polish people, to the governments and peoples of the Allied states—to the conscience of the world.
From the latest information received from Poland, it is evident that the Germans, with the most ruthless cruelty, are now murdering the few remaining Jews in Poland. Behind the ghetto’s walls the last act of a tragedy unprecedented in history is being performed. The responsibility for this crime of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly it is also a burden on the whole of humanity, the people and the governments of the Allied states which thus far have made no effort toward concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime.
By the passive observation of the murder of defenseless millions, and of the maltreatment of children, women and old men, these countries have become the criminals’ accomplices. I must also state that although the Polish government has in a high degree contributed to the enlistment of world opinion, it has yet done so insufficiently. It has not done anything that could correspond to the magnitude of the drama being enacted now in Poland. From some 3,500,000 Polish Jews and about 700,000 other Jews deported to Poland from other countries—according to official statistics provided by the underground Bund organization—there remained in April of this year only about 300,000, and this remaining murder still goes on.
I cannot be silent—I cannot live—while remnants of the Jewish people of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto took weapons in their hands on that last heroic impulse. It was not my destiny to die there together with them, but I belong to them, and in their mass graves. By my death I wish to express my strongest protest against the inactivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of my people.
I know how little human life is worth today; but, as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to breaking down that indifference of those who may now—at the last moment—rescue the few Polish Jews still alive from certain annihilation. My life belongs to the Jewish people of Poland and I therefore give it to them. I wish that this remaining handful of the original several millions of Polish Jews could live to see the liberation of a new world of freedom, and the justice of true socialism. I believe that such a Poland will arise and that such a world will come.
I trust that the President and the Prime Minister will direct my words to all those for whom they are destined, and that the Polish government will immediately take appropriate action in the fields of diplomacy. I bid my farewell herewith to everybody and everything dear to me and loved by me.
—S. ZIEGELBOIM
After the text, the newspaper report added: “That was the letter. It suggests that possibly Shmuel Ziegelboim will have accomplished as much in dying as he did in living.”
I bring the matter up now because I have been thinking about the meaning of that letter ever since I clipped it out of The Times, and because I hope I can now write thoughtfully about it, since I no longer feel any hatred for the newspaper writer who added with such mechanical emotion that possibly “Shmuel Ziegelboim will have accomplished as much . . .” Of course the newspaper writer did not believe that he had accomplished anything; nor did the Polish National Council, which released it to the world; nor do I. Shmuel Ziegelboim died because some men can find their ultimate grace only in the fulfilment of their will—even if their will, in 1943, is toward a death that has so desperate a symbolism. He died because the burden of carrying our contemporary self-disgust became too much even for a man who believed that a new world of freedom would come, “and the justice of true socialism.” And he died because his wife and child were dead, and the millions in the great Jewish worlds of Poland, and the thousands of thousands of his comrades in the Jewish Labor Bund—the disenchanted and dispossessed Jews who lived on air and were called Luftmenschen, but helped to defend Warsaw when the colonels fled.
I think I know how great and indirect a wish for immortality can go into suicide. I shall believe that men want to die only when I hear of men living (or writing) in complete anonymity. I know something of the ultimate and forgivable egotism of any human spirit, and that the one thing we can never afford to lose is the promise of our identity. Shmuel Ziegelboim wrote at the end with the instinctive rhetorical optimism of those who feel that they are dying without too much division in themselves, and for something greater than their own ambitions. But I have wanted to believe, and now do believe, that Shmuel Ziegelboim died because he was finally unable to withstand the real despair of our time—which arises not out of the burning and the killing and the endless political betrayals, but out of a humiliation which some of us can still feel before so terrible a break in human solidarity. I think he died, as so many greater men have already died morally, because he was unable to believe in a future built on so unrecognized and unreported a human isolation and barbarism as we know today. Shmuel Ziegelboim came from a ghetto-driven, self-driven, but spiritually generous culture; and I honestly believe that he was thinking not only of his own people at the end, but of the hollowness of a world in which such a massacre could have so little meaning. In any event I should like to think that I am more “fortunate”—that is, relatively untouched and able to think about what freedom is. And that is why I bring the matter up now, as a token of what Shmuel Ziegelboim died for, and in an effort to say some very elementary things which liberals especially have not always cared to face.
I do not speak here of the massacre of the Jews, for there is nothing to say about it that has not already been said. I can add nothing, nor would I wish to add anything, to the private imprecations and the public appeals. I do not say that they are useless, for I do not dare to believe that anything here will be useless. It is merely that something has already been done—and not by the Nazis—which can never be undone, except as we seek to understand it and to grow human again (or expectant, or merely wise) through it. For the tragedy is in our minds, in the basic quality of our personal culture; and that is why it will be the tragedy of the peace. The tragedy lies in the quality of our belief—not in the lack of it, but in the unconsciousness or dishonesty of it; and above all in the merely political thinking, the desperate and unreal optimism, with which we try to cover up the void in ourselves. Yet I speak pragmatically: I am thinking of concrete situations. For Hitler will leave anti-Semitism as his last political trick, as it was his first; and the people who have been most indifferent to the historic meaning of the massacre of the Jews will be just those who will wonder why all the pacts and all the armies and all the formal justice will have done so little to give them their pre-Fascist “security” again. If liberal optimism is false now, it will seem cruel later, when in even a post-Hitler Europe men will see again (many of them know it now, but for other, for purely political, reasons) that fascism remains, even though fascists, too, can die.
The treatment of the Jews, historically, has always been a touchstone of the degree of imagination, of Christian confidence, really, which formally Christian countries have been able to feel in themselves. Historically, no massacre was ever unexpected, no act of cruelty ever so great that it violated the professions of a civilization—every civilization being what it was even when the cathedrals rose highest. But surely there was never so much self-deception about our essential goodness or our dream of “social security,” so little philosophic (or moral) searching of the lies our hopes build on our lack of community, as there is today. The real materialism of our time has nothing to do with our intellectual naturalism, which is indispensable to those who do not believe in magic; or to our complete technological reliance upon ourselves, which is that it is. The real materialism, the real heresy, is the blindness of those who, declining to believe that there is a prime cause in the heavens, believe bitterly that society is always the prime cause of what we are. It is the materialism that comes with passing the buck so persistently to everyone but yourself that you never know whom to blame, even when you are Koestler’s Rubashov in Lubyanka. It is the materialism of those who believe, as radicals, that you can begin by lying and making your victim lie (especially in public; a public life has a public apotheosis)—and that then you can build a brave new world based on the ultimate good sense of cooperativeness and the higher self-interest. It is the materialism of those who believe, as reactionaries, that you can build a tolerable society by appealing to an inner contempt among men for their “romantic”—and quite indestructible—hopes. It is the materialism of those who believe, as liberals, that you so fascinate men in a legality of good intentions, or even philanthropy, that you will
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove . . .
But it is above all the materialism of all those—not liberals, not radicals, certainly not reactionaries—who want only to live and let live, to have the good life back—and who think that you can dump three million helpless Jews into your furnace, and sigh in the genuine impotence of your undeniable regret, and then build Europe back again.
That is the central point—not a “moral” point which any true unbeliever need be afraid of for its own sake, but the coarsely shrewd point based on the knowledge that life is also a process of memory, and that where so great a murder has been allowed, no one is safe. I do not believe in ghosts; if I did, I could be falsely heroic and satisfyingly sentimental, and say that the blood of the Jews over Europe is like that Christ’s blood which Marlowe’s Faustus saw streaming in the firmament. For I know that the indifference—the historic contemporary indifference, with everything it suggests about our governments as well as ourselves: I do not forget the rulers in describing the ruled—is far more terrible than physical terror and far more “tangible” than conscience. And what I am saying is not that the peoples will be remorseful (did we do it?), but that they will be betrayed by the human practices encouraged by the massacre of the Jews. Something has been set forth in Europe that is subtle, and suspended, and destructive; and it will break the power-pacts, and the high declarations, and even the armies, since armies are only men. That something is all our silent complicity in the massacre of the Jews (and surely not of them alone; it is merely that their deaths were so peculiarly hopeless). For it means that men are not ashamed of what they have been in this time, and are therefore not prepared for the further outbreaks of fascism which are so deep in all of us. It means that we still do not realize why
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every cry of every Man,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
Blake knew it, as we can still know it: the manacles are always forged by the mind. Can the mind still break them free? Can it?