Europe: A History (210 page)
Gentile attitudes were not uniform. Most people, living themselves in the shadow of terror, did nothing; a few assisted in the genocide. Yet many showed compassion. A poet felt anguish at the sight of a children’s playground beside the Ghetto Wall in Warsaw which reminded him of the lonely death of Giordano Bruno:
I thought of the Campo di Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky carousel
one clear Spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.
…
Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo di Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet’s word.
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A thoughtful Catholic intellectual has written of the moral involvement even of those who took no practical part.
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Europe’s response to the Holocaust touched the depths of depravation and the heights of heroism. In the eye of the storm, in occupied Poland, the chances of saving the segregated Jews were never very great. Critics from more fortunate countries do not always realize how a totalitarian regime drives everyone in its power to varying degrees of complicity. Unfree people should not be judged by the criteria of free societies. Even so, there were individuals, the so-called
szmal-cownicy
or ‘greasers’, who did sell fugitive Jews (and members of the Resistance) to the Gestapo. There were others who risked their lives, and those of their families, to hide and protect the fugitives. In 1943 the Polish Resistance set up the
Zegota
organization to help save Jews.
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Perhaps 150,000, or 5 per cent, survived by hiding in barns and cellars, in convents, on false papers, or in the woods.
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[
BATT-101
]
Elsewhere, in less extreme circumstances, Europeans showed everything from noble sacrifice to apathy. In Copenhagen, where King Christian rode out into the streets in sympathy wearing a Star of David armband, most of Denmark’s 300 Jews were able to escape. In Romania, where the army and police killed hundreds of thousands of Jews on their own account, the government none the less jibbed at handing over Romanian Jews to the Nazis. In France, where the Vichy regime operated its own execrable concentration camps, as at Le Vernet, the local
milice
took the lead in collecting Jews. They made a distinction between ‘alien’ Jewish refugees and ‘native’ French Jews, only 8 per cent of whom lost their lives. The French Protestant Churches registered their protest, and the French Resistance took steps to disrupt the deportation trains. In Holland, despite a determined Resistance movement, most Jews were lost. In Hungary, which stayed free of Nazi occupation until 1944, a resourceful Swedish diplomat, Ralph Wallenberg, organized many Jewish escapes. He was due to disappear, for his pains, under Soviet detention. Local Zionist leaders were charged with striking deals at others’ expense. Even in the German-occupied Channel Islands, Jews were handed over. Jews were generally safest in Fascist Italy, in Italian-occupied Yugoslavia, in Fascist Spain or Portugal.
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[
TAIZÉ
]
The lack of demonstrative protest from the Vatican was the subject of much subsequent controversy. Pius XII’s detractors believe that he was indifferent to the Jewish tragedy. His defenders claim that he was torn by fears of reprisals against German Catholics, and by a desire to maintain ‘impartiality’ between the evils of Fascism and Communism.
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He certainly did little for the millions of Catholics killed by the Nazis.
The exact Jewish death-toll will never be known. An estimate’ of 5.85 million was made for the Nuremberg Tribunal. It is unlikely to be very inaccurate. In
round terms, the total was made up of c.3 million Jews from pre-war Poland,
c.i
million from the USSR, and c.i million from other countries. There may be some overlap between the Polish and the Soviet categories, since in 1939 the eastern part of Poland was annexed to the USSR. But no responsible estimates have brought the total below 5 million.
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In quantitative terms, this figure may be compared with estimates of c.8.7 million Soviet and c.3.5 million German military losses, and of civilian losses among Ukrainians, non-Jewish Poles, Byelorussians, and Russians each of which ran into several millions.
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[
BUCZACZ
]
BATT-101
I
N
the early hours of 13 July 1942, the men of the German Reserve Police I Battalion 101 were roused before dawn at the Polish village of Józefów, and driven to the nearby town of Otwock. They were not told what awaited them. On arrival, they were ordered by their SS officers to seize all the able-bodied Jewish males in the town, and to shoot all the Jewish women, children, and elderly. That day, they killed about 1,500 persons, the first instalment of the Battalion’s estimated total of over 83,000 victims.
In 1962–72, 210 ex-members of Battalion 101 were examined by West German prosecutors, who prepared detailed files on them. They had all been non-Party, middle-aged, largely working-class conscripts from Hamburg, one of the least Nazified cities in Germany. They were the most ordinary of Germans. Almost all expressed revulsion at their wartime duties; and many claimed to be innocent of direct killing. But the great majority took part. ‘It was easier for them to shoot’:
In every modern society, bureaucratisation and specialisation attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. The peer group exerts tremendous pressure on behaviour and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?
1
For obvious reasons, little is known about Jews who were placed in a similar moral position to that of Battalion 101. Very few survived. Yet it was standard practice for the SS to employ Jewish policemen in the ghettos and to recruit Jewish
Sonderkommandos
for the worst tasks in the death-camps. Carel Perechodnik was one such recruit. He was an educated man, who joined the Jewish police force in the Otwock ghetto in the hope of avoiding death and feeding his family. He obeyed Nazi orders, and lived quite well. With the help of non-Jewish friends, he escaped to ‘the Aryan side’, where he lived long enough to write his memoirs. The memoirs are called
Am I a Murderer?
2
For anyone unfamiliar with Eastern Europe, the activities of the communist political police which flooded Poland in 1944–5 are still harder to believe. Popular knowledge in the country has always insisted that the notorious communist Security Office (UB) contained a disproportionate number of Jews (or rather ex-Jews), and that their crimes were heinous. But few hard facts were ever published, and the stories remained unsubstantiated. Recent disclosures, however, have broken the taboo. They are all the more convincing since they were made by a Jewish investigator on evidence supplied by Jewish participants, and in the spirit of Jewish redemption. The study deals with the district of Upper Silesia, and in particular with the town of Gliwice (Gleiwitz). It concludes that in 1945 every single commander and three-quarters of the local agents of the UB were of Jewish origin; that ex-Nazi camps and prisons were refilled with totally innocent civilians, especially Germans; and that torture, starvation, sadistic beatings, and murder were routine. The number of deaths inflicted by the communist regime on the German population is estimated at 60–80,000. In this light, it is difficult to justify the widespread practice whereby the murderers, the victims, and the bystanders of wartime Poland are each neatly identified with specific ethnic groups.
3
For many years after the War, two round figures enjoyed wide circulation: ‘six million’ Holocaust victims overall, and ‘four million’ dead in Auschwitz. The first figure, though somewhat high, is likely to stand. The second figure was impossible. Auschwitz received two people who were later proclaimed Christian saints. The Blessed Edith Stein was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, captured by the Nazis in Holland. Father Maximilian Kolbe was a Catholic priest who gave his life to save a married inmate from death. Fifty years later, pain was still being caused by attempts to find appropriate ways of commemorating the multinational and multi-confessional character of the victims.
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At the time, one of the main problems lay in the fact that the outside world could not be made to grasp the enormity of what was happening. As early as September 1940 a courageous officer of the Polish Underground, Witold Pilecki (1901–48), had succeeded in penetrating Auschwitz I. He spent two years organizing secret resistance cells inside the camp, before escaping.
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Yet the information gathered was not judged credible outside Poland. When the Polish Government in Exile in London published a report on the fate of Poland’s Jews, a leading Jewish member of the Government committed suicide in desperation at the feeble response.
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When a Polish courier visited Washington to give an eye-witness account of the death camps, he was countered by the chilling words of Chief Justice Frankfurter: ‘We don’t say that you’re lying, but…’ American Jews were no more spurred to action than anyone else.
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When the proposal was eventually made to bomb the approaches to Auschwitz, the Allied Powers found reasons to refuse.
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Stalin had killed his millions in the 1930s without significant world reaction. Hitler was able to do the same in the 1940s until outsiders saw the evidence with their own eyes. [
AUSCHWITZ
]
The Holocaust has inspired a vast corpus of literature. Its leading historians are
nearly all Jewish scholars who believe fervently in its uniqueness. They reject ‘the oecumenical nature of evil’
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just as they reject the old question: ‘Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?’
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Even so, much variety of emphasis prevails. Elie Wiesel is credited with turning the term ‘Holocaust’ to its present usage.
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Lucy Dawidowicz argued for the premeditated nature of the Nazis’ genocidal programme.
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Raul Hilberg saw the Holocaust as the culmination of two millennia of Christian antisemitism.
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Yehudah Bauer constructed a stark landscape of Nazi ‘murderers’, Jewish ‘victims’, and Gentile ‘bystanders’.
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Martin Gilbert compiled a heart-rending compendium of individual experiences.
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TAIZÉ
O
NE
day in August 1940, soon after the fall of France, a 25-year-old theology student from Switzerland wandered into the little Burgundian town of Cluny. He was writing a thesis on pre-Benedictine monasticism. He was less interested in the ruins of the monastery than in the vague possibility of founding a monastic community himself. He was the son of a Protestant pastor from the district of Neuchâtel, until recently a confused agnostic. He saw a sign ‘House for Sale in Taizé’, cycled the 10 km up the valley, and bought the house in the half-empty village. He was Roger-Louis Schutz-Marsauche.
1
Wartime Taizé lay close to the demarcation line between the German-occupied and the Vichy zones. The self-appointed monk lived there intermittently and alone. For two years he devoted himself to sheltering Jewish refugees until the Gestapo carried his guests away. In September 1944, after the Liberation, he returned again, and took to sheltering German prisoners of war. The villagers reacted violently, and one of the prisoners, an ailing Catholic priest, was killed. At the war’s end Roger was joined by his sister, Genevieve, and together they provided a home for twenty rural orphans. Seven more ‘brothers’ arrived. As non-Catholics, they had to apply for special permission to use the deserted parish church. When permission was granted in 1948, it bore the signature of the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Roncalli.
The Community of Taizé defies classification. It has no formal rule, and belongs to no denomination. It is inspired by the Beatitudes in their purest form—Joy, Simplicity, Mercy, by the service of youth, by the mission of reconciliation, and by a powerful idea, which is the subject of Brother Roger’s book,
The Dynamic of the Provisional
(1965). It is instantly recognizable from the unique ‘Taizé Sound’—the sound of energetic young voices singing the simplest of words and melodies in rhythmic, incanta-tory, four-part harmony.
Once the Church of Reconciliation was built on the nearby hill in 1962, it became the focus of a world-wide movement, of two-way traffic devoted to the perpetual ‘Council of Youth’, and the ‘pilgrimage of trust on earth’. Eighty white-robed brothers manned a spiritual generator which reached out to all continents. Missions set out for Asia, Africa, Latin America, New York. Wherever there were human divisions, the spirit of Taizé sought to heal them. Initially shunned both by the World Council of Churches and by the Vatican, it won them both over. In Europe it found the support of the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople and of the then Archbishop of Cracow. In the 1980s it breached the Iron Curtain, when its European meetings moved on from St Peter’s and St Paul’s to East Berlin and to Warsaw.
Contemporary European Christianity has produced a number of inspirational figures who have transcended all existing barriers. One was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (b. 1910, Skopje), an Albanian nun better known as Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
2
Another was a Dutchman, Father Werenfried van Straaten, founder of ‘Aid to the Church in Need’.
3
A third such person, of simple heart and unsimple name, is without doubt Brother Roger. ‘One passes through Taizé’, said John Paul II, ‘as one passes a spring of water.’
Dissentient voices betray little uniformity. Non-Zionist witnesses, such as Marek Edelman, the last living leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Rising, have been pilloried for opposing the dominant Zionist viewpoint.
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One scholar maintained that the Holocaust arose from unforeseen circumstances in 1941.
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Another tried to show that the Jewish tragedy should be judged within the wider context of the Nazi Terror in general.
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A group of dubious publicists centred on the
Journal of Historical Review
has sought to maintain either that the ‘gas chamber stories’ were a hoax, or that the statistics were vastly inflated. The liveliest debate which they provoke concerns their own right to be tolerated.
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Other critics complain that ‘the Holocaust industry’ has exploited Jewish suffering for political ends.
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The film-maker Claude Lanzmann won less than universal acceptance for his evocative film
Shoah
(1984), which many people mistook for documentary history.
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For passions still rage. The last word has still to be spoken.
