HOLY LAND: DAY 9: YAD VASHEM The pilgrimage bus drops us off at Yad Vashem in late morning. I realize, not without a certain sadness, that less than half of the pilgrimage group came to see the Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953. Bill Burton would echo my sadness later that evening, before our final dinner: “Going to Yad Vashem should be mandatory for the students in this group,” he muses. “Many people ignore, in fact – he adds with emphasis-wish to ignore this agonic chapter of human history.” “It troubles their inert and insensitive consciences,” I add. He nods . . . I concur . . . it should be mandatory. Yair has come with us . . . We enter the Memorial. I team with Ion Chamorro, we will be together for the following 3 preciously-short hours. We walk into a domed pavilion, dark, with a haunting music leading us . . . the faces, dear God, the faces of those thousand of murdered Jewish children, projected on the dark dome . . . how can anyone go a step further, beyond that?? We move to the main exhibit rooms. This places is enormous. It is intended not only as an exhibit, but as a research center for Holocaust studies. Those faces, those children, appear again . . . I draw near a photo inside the first pavilion. . . I have seen that child before, playing the violin in an anonymous street of the Warsaw ghetto . . . the bewildered faces of Jews, seemingly not understanding why a whole nation, a nation defined by poets, composers and mathematicians, suddenly bursts out with murderous anti-Semitism … The designers of Yad Vashem had a clear sense of purpose. Their photos and narrative boards explain the pre-history of anti-Semitism in Europe. An odd fact emerges: Poland, Austria, Russia, had worst records of anti-Semitism than Germany before the advent of Hitler and his crowd of assassins . . . How did this whole thing happen? I evoke my readings of long ago: Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1962. Her report became a book: “Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil.” I have long been convinced, and Yad Vashem confirms it, as the demonic history of meaningless, raging racial hatred unfolds before our eyes, that the sources of the Holocaust lies here: the Banality of Evil, Eichmann’s repeated protestations at his trial, that he was only following the law, the law of the land, the ultimate consequences of the Nuremberg Laws of September 16, 1935, that effectively stripped Jews in German territories of their citizenship, banished them from the professions, and effectively made them pariahs, “illegals,” in the land their ancestors had inhabited for generations . . . the law that kills . . . But there is more to the Banality of Evil: its fundamental meaning is this: when a nation, any nation, any society, accepts, tolerates, or endorses, those seemingly small and inconsequential acts of racism, ridicule, hatred, that apparently do not have the power to induce social upheavals, those “banal’” evils, across time and space, gather force and volume, and one day they reach critical mass, and something like the Holocaust happens . . . This may difficult to accept – we may hear people recoiling from any implications in such horrors . . . but the evidence, rigorous, historical, archival evidence abounds, screaming across the 69 years since the end of the ear, that, whereas Hitler and the murderous, genocidal minds surrounding him (Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague,” Eichmann, who first spoke of the Final Solution, Goering, who cheated the hangman’s noose with a cyanide pill just one hour before his execution, Himmler, who also escaped public ignominy by resorting to the same ever-ubiquitous cyanide), all of these masterminded the Holocaust, this genocide demanded, required, the help of the ordinary German, the agents of seemingly “banal” anti-Semitism . . . For those who may rush to find shelter behind the preposterous notion that “there is no social sin, just individual sin,” a reading of Donald Goldhagen’s amply documented and finely researched book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: The Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,” might prove a salutary, if difficult-to-swallow pill . . . Ion and I are nearing the end of the exhibits – two more pavilions to go, but we are running out of time, We rush through them, trying to imprint as much as possible in our minds . . . I must come again here . . . arising from the crowd, as a manifesto of banality, a woman screams: “Hurry up, Larry, I still have some shopping to do . . .!” All of the other members of our pilgrimage who came along are long gone . . . Sad, disturbing, depressing . . . I have walked through the mouth of hell, in photos, narrative, film, BUT, BUT : I cannot ignore Elie Wiesel’s lamentation at the beginning of his short work, “Night.” Wiesel, the survivor of stints in the concentration camps of Auschwitz , Buno and Buchenwald, recalled the question his fellow inmates asked, as they watch a young, frail man slowly and excruciatingly strangle to death at Buno: “Where is God in all this.” Perhaps more daunting for Wiesel was trying to come to terms that most of the war criminals escaped justice. He ponders on how “war criminals stroll through the streets of Hamburg and Munich.” At Nuremberg, 13 war criminals were sentenced to death, 11 of them actually were hanged. A handful of others were executed by the Russians and the Free French, but the ordinary soldiers who pulled the triggers that massacred Jews at Babi Yar, or opened the gas valves at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and other camps, escaped . . . The Jesuit Alfred Delp, and the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hung from similar scaffolds, into agonizing slow deaths: Delp was hanged with piano wire at Plotzensee Prison, Berlin, on Feb. 2, 1945, and Bonhoeffer followed later at the Flossenburg camp, April 9, in the waning days of the European War . . . I think of the Rock of Golgotha . . . my hand touched the Rock of the Cross, and I know against knowing, hope against hope, that the cry of the victims, across the centuries, will not be forgotten. The final word, somehow, does not belong to the murderers, not to those who escaped hanging at Nuremberg, where most of them received prison sentences which they later were paroled from . . .to stroll the cities of post-war Germany . . . nor to the politicians whose demonic arrogance and lust for power sentences migrants to death, to the Rocks of Gethsemane, to starvation and despair . . . The final words belongs to the Rock of Golgotha, and to the Empty Tomb . . . the victims of all the Holocausts of history, past and present, the victims of our own tepid, arrogant, Christian communities, who perpetuate the banality of evil, will find redemption . . . The final word belongs to the Rock where a Jewish prophet was crucified, to the Empty Tomb that could not hold inside the over-bursting Love that defines human history and the world . . . E
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:40:17 +0000
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