Holocaust Memorial Week

I had intended to focus my next post on Himmler (and his close associate, Heydrich) but would like to say some things about this year’s Holocaust Memorial Week. I was able to attend four of the many presentations on offer, all happily connected in some fashion with books I have read and issues I have written about. I perhaps had not looked closely enough at the literature announcing the week’s activities, as I only gradually came to realize its over-arching theme: an examination of “collaboration,” that is to say, an active working with the Nazis’ design to exterminate the Jews of Europe and other targeted groups. When the war ended there were two (to simplify something difficult to easily categorize) that played out across the zones of German domination: first -- retribution, swift and most often fatal against those seen as collaborators, as well as bringing high profile offenders into courts of law for judicial punishment; the other –  burying the past, perhaps motivated by the desire and need to orient energies toward life and the rebuilding of personal and political spaces, and/or a disinclination to examine too closely the shades of responsibility shared from egregious to more subtle degrees by many living at the time.

In areas quickly taken over by the USSR the latter process was facilitated by the Soviet government’s need to bind its new populations to itself in a common narrative: all of the horrors of the war must be laid at the feet of “the fascists.” The people of a newly created Eastern German state, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and so on were written in as simple victims of the Nazi war machine. It was all: let us maintain clarity about the bad and the good, the black and the white. When I visited the USSR in 1973 with Maurice and his students, a constant refrain given to us was about the perfidy of “the fascists” who had attacked Russia, murdering countless millions. All true of course, but only one segment of the story. In Western Europe as well there was a profound disinclination to examine or to even speak of the issues in any depth.

Over the decades, however, this reticence has given way in some places to a more honest and open dialogue. In the west Germany’s alliance with the USA demanded increasingly a public examination and acknowledgement of the horrors perpetrated within its boundaries. For many years now West German students have been taught about their history in searing detail. Turmoil erupted within families as children have had to examine their parents’ narratives of the war against things they were learning. Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1989 efforts have been made in Eastern Europe, markedly in Poland, to broaden official histories to include what happened to the vast pre-war Jewish populations. The four presentations that I was able to attend during Holocaust Memorial Week considered from various perspectives the differences between collaboration as an active espousal of Nazi aims, and, co-operation, working in some fashion with German authorities in order to protect one’s life and well-being and that of others, though not operating in any actively hostile fashion against the populations marked out for destruction. Clearly there are many shades along a spectrum between these two positions. Many survivors have acknowledged that at least a part of their good fortune in remaining alive came at the expense of others who did not. This is a broad topic that I would like to explore further.

At the moment I am reading Saul Friedlander’s 2007 book Nazi Germany and The Jews 1939-45: The Years of Extermination, sequel to his earlier work Nazi Germany and The Jews 1933-39: The Years of Persecution. Early in this work Friedlander warns against the trap of assumed homogeneity of any group. Our brains like neat categories to fit into frames of reference but these can easily lead us toward wrong conclusions. “European Jews,” (one could substitute almost any group – Catholics, American Christians, Muslims, etc) were by no means all cut from the same cloth. In Europe before the outbreak of WWII lived about nine million Jews. This was an enormously diverse group, having for centuries been effected by distinctive national histories, the dynamics of large scale migrations, and for some, the influences of urban life. Throughout the continent and across time people had been diversely rewarded or punished by changes in economic and social possibilities and/or by hostilities. Overall there had been a gradual reduction in religious observance, especially in the west. Then, as now, religious belief and observance spanned from ultra-orthodox, orthodox, liberal, to non-believing, secular Jews. Politically, Jews tended toward liberal ideas, though these could span ranges of democrats, social democrats, Bundists, Stalinites, Trotskyites, or Zionists.

The most observable split among European Jews in this period was between those living in the east and those in the west. Jews in Western Europe were considerably fewer in number than those in the East. They tended to be urban dwellers, educated, many of them professional people, speaking the national language, and identifying as citizens of their particular country. Intermarriage with non-Jews was not uncommon, allowing for some gradual assimilation. Jews living in the large cities of the East were in most respects similar. Most Eastern Jews, however, tended to live in smaller villages or towns, farming or working as artisans. They spoke Yiddish and did not identify in the same fashion with the country of their births. Generally they were poorer, less educated and sophisticated than their Western counterparts, but lived within a vibrant Jewish culture.

Friedlander speaks of the period from the late 19^th century to roughly the end of the second world war as one characterised by “a crisis of liberalism.” With the rise of nationalism minority groups like Jews everywhere became more clearly viewed as “Other,” not just in Germany but generally throughout the continent. Rights gained over previous centuries under the influence of the Enlightenment (generally put in place by monarchs) were in various ways weakened or rescinded, leaving Jews more vulnerable economically, professionally, and with respect to their rights as citizens. During this period there was also a steady migration westward of Jews from the east. The differences between those who had lived for generations in the west and the newcomers were fairly marked and they did not mesh happily with one another. Western Jews found those from the east somewhat “backward” and embarrassing; those from the east were scandalized by the secular lives of the westerners. Moreover the influx of Jews from the east provoked an even higher degree of anti-Semitism than that which had been a “normal” condition of the western milieu. The ideologies of right-wing, nationalist governments meshed easily with the views of the anti-liberal, anti-communist Catholic church, leaving the Jews of Europe without clear allies in any institutional sector whatsoever as the Nazi war machine was set in motion.

More of Friedlander’s perspectives in my next post.