Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (42 page)

Miron Lisikiewicz, who rescued Jews, asked: “What is money compared to the life of a human being?” The notion of acting in one’s own economic interests—for money—has little or no place here. Again and again Jews stressed that the people who aided them were, apart from everything else, either losing money or risking their lives to get the additional money they needed to keep extra mouths fed. A Polish sewer worker fed ten Jews who were hiding in the sewers of Lwów; to pay for the food, his wife sold her clothes. Jan Lipke in Riga would get angry if anyone so much as mentioned money. Bronisława Rozmaryn, who was given shelter in Warsaw by Helena Kawka, remembered her rescuer this way: “She risked her own life and that of her two beautiful little children in order to be able to rescue us. She did this entirely without any material motivation, wanting only to save four little Jewish children, who were wandering the streets of Warsaw without any shelter.” Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, believed that “there is not enough money in the world to make up for the constant fear of exposure.” In other words, some other consideration had to be at work aside from fear and greed.

It is true that many Jewish recollections, especially those recorded long after the war, include rather formulaic statements that their rescuers did not receive material compensation. Such language was needed for people to be recognized by Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial of the Holocaust, as “righteous gentiles,” rescuers of Jews. In order to clear the hurdle of “no material considerations,” Jews who wanted their rescuers to be honored sometimes simplified the story and claimed that no money was involved. Of course, it often was. But the people who rescued Jews, as opposed to those who betrayed or killed them, were almost never making money. Valuables or cash might indeed be exchanged, but not in the normal sense of a contract. There was no state to defend such contracts; indeed, the authorities offered rewards for Jews so that they could be murdered.

Money was important, since it is hard to sustain life without it. But a Jew’s future depended on the individual taking the money, a person who was operating in a radically altered political and economic world. Rather than a normal market, in which individuals have property and determine their value among themselves, this was a dark market. All property relations had been destabilized, almost no one could be sure of their economic future, and some people—the Jews—were not individuals with the right to property and its exchange, but a special sort of human contraband. To have Jews at home in the stateless zones of eastern Europe, in occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union, was to risk one’s life; to be willing to hand them over would bring salt or sugar or vodka or money and the end of anxiety and fear. Turning in a Jew meant avoiding the risk of individual and collective punishment.

Within this set of incentives, the economically rational response for a non-Jew approached by a Jew was to promise help, take all of the Jew’s money as quickly as possible, and then turn in the Jew to the police. The economically rational action for someone who knew that someone else was sheltering a Jew was to denounce that person before someone else did to collect the reward and perhaps the property, and to avoid the risk of being denounced oneself as someone who knew about the rescue. It would be comforting to believe that people who brought about the death of Jews were behaving irrationally, but in fact they were often following standard economic rationality. The righteous few were behaving in a way that a norm based upon economic calculations of personal welfare would regard as irrational.

In the darkest of times and places, a few people rescued Jews for what seems like no earthly reason. These tended to be people who in normal times might seem to take ethical and social norms a bit too literally, and whose fidelity to their expressed principles survived the end of the institutions that supported and defended them.

If these rescuers had anything in common beyond that, it was self-knowledge. When you know yourself there is little to say. This is worth brooding upon as we consider how we, who know ourselves so poorly and have so much to say about ourselves, will respond to the challenges to come.

I
n the small photograph that her son keeps in his Warsaw apartment, Wanda J. radiates self-possession, a quality that stood her in good stead during the Second World War and the German occupation of Poland. She lost her husband at war’s end, but saved herself and their two boys. When the Warsaw ghetto was created, she defied German orders and kept her family from resettling there. Denounced as a Jew on the Aryan side of Warsaw, she talked her way out of trouble. She moved her children from place to place, relying upon the help of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. When institutions were obliterated or warped in the aftermath of German invasion, when first the ghetto and then the rest of the city of Warsaw were burned to the ground, what counted, she thought, were the “faultless moral instinct and basic human goodness” of the people who chose to help Jews.

Most of the Jews of Warsaw did go to the ghetto and were murdered at Treblinka. Vasily Grossman, a Soviet Jewish writer working as a journalist in the Red Army who saw and described that place, wrote that “kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being.” Hitler denied that any idea, be it religious, philosophical, or political, justified seeing the other (or loving the other) as oneself. He claimed that conventional forms of ethics were Jewish inventions, and that conventional states would collapse during the racial struggle. Throughout Europe, but to different degrees in different places, German occupation destroyed the institutions that made ideas of reciprocity seem plausible. Where Germans obliterated conventional states, or annihilated Soviet institutions that had just destroyed conventional states, they created the abyss where racism and politics pulled together towards nothingness. In this black hole, Jews were murdered. When Jews were saved, it was often thanks to people who could act on behalf of a state or by institutions that could function like a state. When none of the moral illumination of institutions was present, kindness was all that remained, and the pale light of the individual rescuers shone.

The state stood at the middle of the story of those who wished to kill Jews, and of those who wished to save them. Its mutation within Germany after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and then its destruction in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in 1938 and 1939 transformed Jews from citizens into objects of exploitation. The double assault upon state institutions in the Baltic states and eastern Poland, at first by the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940 and then by Nazi Germany in 1941, created the special field of experimentation where ideas of a Final Solution became the practice of mass murder. The Holocaust as mass shooting extended as far east into Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and Soviet Russia as German power reached. The German policy of total killing then spread back west into territories that the Germans had conquered before the final, fateful conflict with the USSR that began in 1941. The removal of institutions had been, however, irregular throughout western, central, and southern Europe; the Holocaust spread insofar as states were weakened, but no further. Where political structures held, they provided support and means to people who wished to help Jews.

Wanda J.’s judgment about the decisive importance of a sense of humanity seems like a hopeful conclusion, but it is not. Good and evil can be rendered visible, as in memoirs such as hers, but they are not easy to summon or dismiss. Most of us would like to think that we possess the qualities she named: “moral instinct” and “human goodness.” Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized. If we are serious about emulating rescuers, we should build in advance the structures that make it more likely that we would do so. Rescue, in this broad sense, thus requires a firm grasp of the ideas that challenged conventional politics and opened the way to an unprecedented crime.

To characterize Hitler as an antisemite or an anti-Slavic racist underestimates the potential of Nazi ideas. His ideas about Jews and Slavs were not prejudices that happened to be extreme, but rather emanations of a coherent worldview that contained the potential to change the world. His conflation of politics and science allowed him to pose political problems as scientific ones and scientific problems as political ones. He thereby placed himself at the center of the circle, interpreting all data according to a scheme of a perfect world of racial bloodshed corrupted only by the humanizing influence of Jews. By presenting Jews as an ecological flaw responsible for the disharmony of the planet, Hitler channeled and personalized the inevitable tensions of globalization. The only sound ecology was to eliminate a political enemy; the only sound politics was to purify the earth.

Science in fact possesses and enables a certain autonomy, one which a sound politics must recognize rather than seek to subsume. The invisible forces of the world are not conspiring Jews, but physical, chemical, and biological regularities that we are ever more capable of describing. The experience of a European empire, so important to Hitler, did have a biological component, but not the one that he imagined. The unseen advantage that enabled Europeans to conquer the Americas was not their innate racial superiority but the microbes they unwittingly carried in their bodies. The rapid conquest of the New World so admired by Hitler was possible because the germs aided the conquerors. In imagining that Slavs would fight “like Indians” on a receding frontier, Hitler ignored the battle that Indians could not win: against contagious illnesses. Fighting on their home continent, Germans lacked the immunological advantages that Europeans had in North America. In eastern Europe, Germans feared diseases so much that, when they were not busy calling Jews “typhus bacteria,” they spared Jewish doctors so that they could treat Germans infected with typhus. The colonialist had to bear disease in his own bloodstream, not fear it in the blood of others. He won the world not by cleansing it of imagined impurities but by bringing real impurities with him.

When science is disengaged from politics, simple analyses such as these reveal why Hitler’s territorial solution to ecological crisis made no sense. As Hitler himself knew, there was a political alternative in the 1930s: that the German state abandon colonization and support agricultural technology. The scientific approach to dwindling resources, which Hitler insisted was a Jewish lie, held much more promise for Germans (and for everyone else) than an endless race war. Scientists, many of them Germans, were already preparing the way for the improvements in agriculture known as the Green Revolution. Had Hitler not begun a world war that led to his suicide, he would have lived to see the day when Europe’s problem was not food shortage but surpluses. Science provided food so quickly and bountifully that Hitlerian ideas of struggle lost a good deal of their resonance. In 1989, a hundred years after Hitler’s birth, world food prices were about half of what they had been in 1939 when he began the Second World War—despite a huge increase in world population and thus demand.

The abolition of politics and science empowered a
Führer
to define what was good for his race, racialize German institutions, and then oversee the destruction of neighboring states. His worldview also compressed time. By combining what seemed like the pattern of the past (racial empire) with what seemed like an urgent summons from the future (ecological panic), Nazi thinking closed the safety valves of contemplation and foresight. If past and future contained nothing but struggle and scarcity, all attention fell upon the present. A psychic resolve for relief from a sense of crisis overwhelmed the practical resolve to think about the future. Rather than seeing the ecosystem as open to research and rescue, Hitler imagined that a supernatural factor—the Jews—had perverted it. Once defined as an eternal and immutable threat to the human species and the whole natural order, Jews could be targeted for urgent and extraordinary measures.

The test that was supposed to confirm Hitler’s idea of nature, the campaign that was to rescue Germans from the intolerably claustrophobic present, was the colonial war against the Soviet Union. The 1941 invasion of the USSR threw millions of Germans into a war of extermination on lands inhabited by millions of Jews. This was the war that Hitler wanted; the actions of 1938, 1939, and 1940 were preparation and improvisation, generating experience in the destruction of states. The course of the war on the eastern front created two fundamental political opportunities. At first, the zoological portrayal of Slavs justified the elimination of their polities, creating the zones where the Holocaust could become possible. Then, with time, Germany’s uncertain fortune revealed the deep political logic of Hitler’s thinking. The war was presented as both colonial (against the Slavs) and decolonial (against the Jews). As the colonial war for
Lebensraum
faltered against the resistance of the Red Army, Nazis emphasized instead the struggle to save the planet from Jewish domination. Since Jews were held responsible for the ideas that had supposedly suppressed the stronger races, only their extermination could ensure victory. The SS men who had begun as state destroyers, murdering members of groups thought to be the bastions of enemy polities, now became the mass murderers of Jews. Wherever German power undid Soviet power, significant numbers of local people joined in the killing. In occupied Poland in 1942, most Jews were deported from their ghettos and murdered by gassing, as at Treblinka. The Jews of the rest of Europe would survive Hitler’s murderous logic only insofar as they and their neighbors remained attached to the conventional state institutions. In the dark zones of statelessness, survivors such as Wanda J. needed good fortune and virtuous assistance.

The idea of rescue seems close to us; the ideology of murder seems distant. Ecological panic, state destruction, colonial racism, and global antisemitism might seem exotic. Most people in Europe and North America live in functional states, taking for granted the basic elements of sovereignty that preserved the lives of Jews and others during the war: foreign policy, citizenship, and bureaucracy. After two generations, the Green Revolution has removed the fear of hunger from the emotions of electorates and the vocabulary of politicians. The open expression of antisemitic ideas is a taboo in much of the West, if perhaps a receding one. Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same.

Just as Hitler’s worldview conflated science and politics, his program confused biology with desire. The concept of
Lebensraum
unified need with want, murder with convenience. It implied a plan to restore the planet by mass murder and a promise of a better life for German families. Since 1945, one of the two senses of
Lebensraum
has spread across most of the world: a living room, the dream of household comfort in consumer society. The other sense of
Lebensraum
is habitat, the realm that must be controlled for physical survival, inhabited perhaps temporarily by people characterized as not quite fully human. In uniting these two passions in one word, Hitler conflated lifestyle with life. For the vision of a well-stocked cupboard people should endorse the bloody struggle for other people’s land. Once standard of living is confused with living, a rich society can make war upon those who are poorer in the name of survival. Tens of millions of people died in Hitler’s war not so that Germans could live, but so that Germans could pursue the American dream in a globalized world.

At precisely this point Hitler’s theory allowed him to join globalization with domestic politics. Hitler was right to believe that, in an age of global communication, notions of prosperity had become relative and fluid. After his pursuit of
Lebensraum
failed with the final German defeat in 1945,
the Green Revolution satisfied demand in Europe and much of the world, providing not just the food needed for bare physical survival, but a sense of security and an anticipation of plenitude. Yet no scientific solution is eternal; the political choice to support science buys time, but does not guarantee that future choices will be good ones. Another moment of choice, a bit like the one Germans faced in the 1930s, could be on the way.

The Green Revolution, perhaps the one development that most distinguishes our world from Hitler’s, might be reaching its limits. This is not so much because there are too many people on earth, but because more of the people on earth demand ever larger and more secure supplies of food. World grain production per capita peaked in the 1980s. In 2003, China, the world’s most populous country, became a net importer of grain. In the twenty-first century, world grain stocks have never exceeded more than a few months’ supply. During the hot summer and droughts of 2008, fires in fields led major food suppliers to cease exports altogether, and food riots broke out in Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. In 2010, the prices of agricultural commodities spiked again, leading to protests, revolution, ethnic cleansing, and revolution in the Middle East.

Though the world is not likely to run out of food as such, richer societies may again become concerned about future supplies. Their elites could find themselves once again facing choices about how to define the relationship between politics and science. As Hitler demonstrated, merging the two opens the way to ideology that can seem to both explain and resolve the sense of panic. In a scenario of mass killing that resembled the Holocaust, leaders of a developed country might follow or induce panic about future shortages and act preemptively, specifying a human group as the source of an ecological problem, destroying other states by design or by accident. There need not be any compelling reason for concern about life and death, as the Nazi example shows, only a momentary conviction that dramatic action is needed to preserve a way of life.