After-words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice

Prologue: “Did you say: after? Meaning what?”

prologue “Did you say: after? Meaning what?” I know the diªerence between before and after. —Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After “october 1944” is one of the chapters in Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi’s classic Holocaust memoir. As autumn’s light and warmth retreated, Levi knew that the devastation of another Auschwitz winter had arrived. “It means,” he said, “that in the course of these months, from October to April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suªer minute by minute, all day, every day.”1 Winter, Levi went on to suggest, was not the right word for that dreadful season. Nor could words such as hunger and pain do justice to the realities of Auschwitz. Those words, it seemed to him, were “free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suªering in their homes.”2 After making that point, Levi then added one of his most telling sentences : “If the Lagers had lasted longer,” he contended, “a new, harsh language would have been born: and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing near.”3 Although it may not have lasted long enough to produce in full the new, harsh language of which Levi spoke, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors, historians, philosophers, theologians, novelists, and poets groping for words to describe and reflect upon, let alone explain, the xiii immensity of that watershed event in which Jewish life was targeted— root and branch—for utter annihilation. The inadequacy of words, however, is only part of the struggle to express the Holocaust’s realities and implications. Those eªorts stretch language to the point where it is unavoidably silenced, and yet the silence, too, evokes responses. Dialogue—sometimes halting, often fragmented, but dialogue nonetheless—is one result of that give-and-take between speech and silence. Deepening awareness, post-Holocaust dialogue can show how the Holocaust aªects—upsets and reorients are two more verbs that come to mind—our understanding of the most ordinary concepts. This book, for example, has an epigraph, one of those brief quotations that introduces a governing theme or mood. Used in the title of this prologue, it comes from Elie Wiesel, another Auschwitz survivor. His versatile writings sometimes include Holocaust-related dialogues— spare and lean, they often consist of just a few hundred words or less. These dialogues are distinctive not only for their minimalist quality but also because their apparent simplicity, their unidentified settings, unnamed characters, abrupt and open endings raise fundamental questions in moving ways. In Wiesel’s One Generation After, one partner in a dialogue— it could involve two persons or a single person’s self-interrogation—tries to pull the other from a downward-spiraling sadness. “Look around you,” says the upbeat voice. “The trees in bloom. The shop windows. The pretty girls. What the hell, let yourself go. I promise you that after. . . .” After— not allusions to spring’s new life—that’s the word, the problem, that gets the other’s attention. “After?” asks the downcast voice. “Did you say: after? Meaning what?”4 With that question the dialogue ends, but far from being over, it has only begun. After—that word is ordinary because human life is thick with time. Encountering what is present, anticipating what lies ahead, our living is always after, whose meanings denote a subsequent or later time and a seeking or questing for something one does not have. In either case, the question “after? Meaning what?” has its place. What was it that came before so that we could and must say “after?” What is it that our seeking after is trying to get or find? For many people—not only Americans but especially them—after now directs attention back to September 11, 2001, a grisly day when terrorists turned hijacked jetliners into missiles xiv Prologue that leveled the World Trade Center in New York City. At least in the foreseeable future, that complacency-shattering destruction is likely to keep the world at war. Having lost her life to cancer in 1985, Charlotte Delbo knew nothing about the attack on the World Trade Center, but she wrote, “I know the diªerence between before and after.”5 Primo Levi...