holocaust

It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I…

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld’s chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

I read this poem, evoking the emotions of a woman crammed into a freight car on her way to the death camps during the Holocaust, right before I read Elie Wiesel's most recent edition of his book Night, describing his own experiences in the Holocaust. His book is, needless to say, chilling. But the additions in the latest edition make it even more so. If you read earlier editions, you might want to read the intro to the new one because he mentions things edited out of the original.

In Night Wiesel describes in considerable detail the experience of the freight car taking him to the Auschwitz. Everything about the experience was dehumanizing, mile by mile stripping away the humanity of the Jews not only in the eyes of the German guards, but even in the eyes of the Jews themselves. In many ways Dan Pagis’ poem is rehumanizing those who went through the experience, by framing it in terms of a Biblical incident that supposedly frames human origins. When I read the description of the freight cars in Night I kept returning to this poem, contrasting these two portrayals of the same experience in my mind. Both are born of the same experience but in many ways they are mirror images: the dehumanizing, “humans as freight” experience, and the experience that encompasses all of humanity, thus rehumanlizing those who experienced those freight cars. They are not contradictory versions, but are two sides of the exact same experience: the narrow one of what the experience meant right at the time to those directly involved, and the expansion of that highly personal experience to put it into the context of human nature and human history in general. What we do to each other now replays the family tragedy of the Biblical myth.

Sobibor was almost the forgotten Nazi Death Camp. It was almost forgotten because the SS themselves tried to eradicate all traces of the camp. The camp had become an embarrassment after nearly half the Jews at the camp rebelled and escaped.

That rebellion happened today in 1943.

Sobibor was one of the actual "Death Camps" where extermination was the primary goal. Most concentration camps focused on working the prisoners to death. The "Death Camps" focused on killing them as fast as they could. There were six death camps, all located in Poland: Aucshwitz II, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. More than 250,000 people were murdered at Sobibor alone. Both Treblinka and Sobibor were destroyed thanks to Jewish uprisings.

At 4 PM, Oct. 14th, 1943, rebels led by Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky started killing SS soldiers at Sobibor. The first to die was the camp's deputy commander, killed as he visited the tailor's shop to try on a new uniform. Here is an account of that first blow as told by a survivor:

October 14, 1943 was a warm, sunny day and nothing disrupted the routine. Only a very small group knew that this was to be the fateful day. The Nazis in the camp went about their business as usual. At precisely 4:00 P.M., the stage was set. Everything now depended on the nerves of the attackers, their faith in themselves and luck.

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

At a time when I was simultaneously becoming more agnostic/atheist and more Jewish (perhaps in the tradition of Isaac Deutcher who recognized a place within Judaism for non-believing Jews), I quite naturally posed the age old question of just what it means to be a Jew. Parts of my quest to answer this question for myself have become diaries on various blogs. Genetic, cultural, tribal, religious, nationalistic and historical definitions of Judaism all combine into a mish mash that must be confusing to non-Jews but that I have come to see as a very key aspect to Jewish identity. I have come to see this identity crisis as a core part of Judaism that goes back as far as we can trace.

That’s how I think. Immerse in the complexity and maybe even add to that complexity with some paradoxes: atheists can be perfectly good Jews, identity crisis can be a defining feature of identity, etc.

My wife thinks differently than I. And her response to the question of Jewish identity was characteristically terse and to the point:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

I think one reason why this occurred to my wife is thanks to a visit we made to Eastern Europe. In both Latvia and Russia we found that people immediately spotted us as Jews. We never got that feeling in America or Israel. In both America and Israel we were seen as Americans, period. Should we wish to indicate our Jewishness we could, but no one spotted us from a distance and categorized us as Jews. In Latvia and Russia, the recognition was immediate. Sometimes it was matter of fact. On a night train from Latvia to Moscow, a route with few tourists, the woman who checked our tickets look at my wife’s name and first asked if we were Polish. We said no. Her next guess was Israeli. As far as I know nothing about us suggests Israeli, but that was her second guess. Only on her third guess did she pick American. But that was trivial. She was friendly and kind through the entire ride.

I experienced an odd sensation today as I was on the subway today. Today was Columbus Day but I had to go in to work for part of the day anyway. The book I am currently reading is King Leopold's Ghost, a pretty horrifying history of the Congo under colonialism.

Reading about colonial genocide in Africa on Columbus Day. Had a kind of irony to it.

I have been ambivalent, in the litteral meaning of the word, towards Columbus Day for years now. I celebrate America and Columbus' "discovery" of the "New World" because the result of his discovery and the ultimate founding of America is that my family, myself included, is alive and thriving today. Without America, my family would have been exterminated in the genocide of Nazi Germany if not before that in the genocide of the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and later Stalin's genocide in the Soviet Union.

But I am reminded every Columbus day of the genocides on which the founding of America was based. My family had a refuge from genocide because of a previous genocide committed against the natives of America. How's THAT for ambivalence?

King Leopold II set out to turn the entire Congo basin into his own personal colony. It wasn't a colony of Belgium until later. It was a colony held by a single man. According to some estimates, ten million people were killed so that one man could make the modern equivalent of $1 billion. Those people were killed to keep costs down in production first of ivory, then of rubber. Eventually, outrage from Britain, the US, France and Germany led to the transfer of the Congo from Leopold to Belgium...without much change in the genocidal practices.