Special JTA Analysis Elie Wiesel — the Jewish Guilt Syndrome by Jack Siegel, JTA Executive Vice-pre

In a recent speech given in New York City, Elie Wiesel charged the American Jewish leadership with silence and failure in 1942-43 to come to the aid of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps and forced ghettos. “They did nothing.” he said, “why didn’t they go mad?” Apart from the rather bizarre suggestion, what good would that have done for the Jews in concentration camps and ghettos? Besides which, and perhaps Wiesel does not know this, the American Jewish community was quite well organized and militant in the anti-Nazi struggle.

“How many marched on Washington?” he asked. By 1943, some of that Jewish leadership and many of their sons were in uniform and were marching, not on Washington, but on Berlin. And that was no mere demonstration; their lives were being put on the line.

“How many (Jewish leaders) tore their clothes in mourning?” Wiesel asked. This is a rather strange request, forty years later, but again, how would that have helped Jews in concentration camps and ghettos? “How many weddings took place without music?” This sounds like the end line of one of Wiesel’s twice-told dark and demonological tales. Even in Auschwitz there was music. Music is the sound of hope in the heart of man. But again, weddings without music would not have helped the Jews in Auschwitz and the ghettos.

“What,” asked Wiesel, “made one people (presumably the Germans) turn overnight into murderers, another part into victims, all others accomplices?” This was not an overnight process but the answer quite simply and horribly is terror. Hitler’s major contribution to contemporary civilization was the banality of violence. He made a science of what its application to human beings can do.

WESTERN POWERS APPEASED HITLER

This writer, who was assigned by the US Military Intelligence Service to an American internment camp for Nazi political prisoners after the war, had occasion to see to what depths and dehumanization the Nazi terror had reduced people. In these camps, devoted to interrogation, but without terror or violence, there was no song. There was only the cry of betrayal and false claims of innocence.

Wiesel also asked why the French did not march into the Rhineland in 1936. Now for the first time in his talk before the Holocaust Memorial Day Observance, Wiesel deals with a reality. Why, in fact, did the French not march into the Rhineland? Asking a question in history, Wiesel is bound by its conventions. He cannot escape, nor can his listeners, into myth and legend. The answer is Appeasement.

It is now commonly accepted that the Western powers appeased Hitler, gave him concessions and nations and allowed him to build his army on the promise that he would march that army into the East. A minor and corollary casualty would be the genocide of six million Jews; but this the leaders of the Western “democracies” were prepared to accept in order to insure the success of the larger goal. By 1943, Hitler was not to be deterred. What greater deterrent could there have been than the Allied bombers blasting the German people and countryside, reducing the latter to rubble? Hitler by then was enslaving other people as well and his personal destiny was linked to the outcome of his war.

But we are no longer innocent. That ceremony has been played out and it is time we assessed the Holocaust in terms of its historical context. There were more than 25 million people killed as a result of the Hitler era and war. Six million were Jews. We must not forget these Jews or the lessons arising like a Phoenix out of their ashes.

REALISTIC VIEW OF HOLOCAUST IMPERATIVE

But to do justice to our history, and history in general, in order to understand it, we and the young people moving into the pages of that history must place the cause of the Holocaust squarely where it belongs. It does not belong in the dark pages of Wiesel’s books. Nor in his private sufferings, for no matter how we may sympathize with that experience, it boggles our minds as well.

But the guilt for the Holocaust, on which Wiesel has worked so well over recent years. is not with a Jewish leadership. It is not the fault of survivors. It is universal and has its roots in a reality which continues on today. Wiesel may be a talented writer and consider it his ministry to be a consciousness-raiser, but his burning soul is not necessarily the torch to lead us, and our youth, through the guilt-ridden, shadowed alleyways to the right road of redemption and Jewish realization.

The Warsaw Ghetto fighters did not lament, nor did they invoke mythic demons. They sang, yes they sang, “Do not say this is the end.” They fought and cried out, “Do not forget us!” They died….

To everything there is a season. Now it is incumbent on the Jewish community and its leadership to give a forum and a currency to a realistic view of how the Holocaust happened. This way, it seems to this writer, we will never forget the Holocaust. This way, we will make it part of our heritage without disassociating it from the rest of the world in which we must live. And this way, we can make certain that it will never happen again.