Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey

2. Gentiles

2 Gentiles No poetry after Auschwitz — Theodor Adorno To the question “What are you writing?” my answer was: “A writer, children, is someone who writes against the passage of time.” — Günter Grass The Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem is purgatory. One goes there to pay for other people’s sins, but comes out purified all the same. One emerges a Jew. The photographic exhibits soon overwhelm the senses; one grows immune to the tragic residues of suffering because suffering is depicted on such an epic scale and, therefore, diffused. But it was a single photograph that rescued my mind from numbness. It showed a group of Jews, spanning several generations, who had been photographed just before they were to be transported to a concentration camp. Their faces betrayed none of the emotions that could be expected of humans in such a situation. They did not exhibit even the calmness of resignation. They looked at the camera with a calmness approaching calmness itself. It was as if the occasion could not have been more normal. True, 24 Celebrating Europe the condemned all wore a plaintive look, but it was the plaintiveness of tourists posing for a group photograph at the end of a holiday cut short by an inexplicable act of nature. The holiday had brought them to a wonderful place that they liked very much and were loathe to leave, but the holiday would have come to an end in any case. So they were going home. They merely wished they could have stayed a little longer. I could not take it any more and ran out of the museum. It was almost as if I were running towards Europe. “Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent,” George Steiner writes. “It is this fact which must, I think, make the Jew wary inside Western culture, which must lead him to re-examine ideals and historical traditions that, certainly in Europe, had enlisted the best of his hopes and genius. The house of civilization proved no shelter.”1 This is what Europe had done to the Jews. As I came out of the museum, I saw a young visitor — perhaps, like me, a foreigner on his first visit there — sitting on the ground and sobbing uncontrollably. Rachel had wailed for her children: This man was crying for six million children of the Jewish race lost in the Shoah, the calamity of Nazi persecution, expulsion, and destruction that now defined the identity of every Jew eternally.Atear-borne eternity flowed from the eyes of a single man inYad Vashem. Although it was sunny, his body was racked with sobs as if the harshest winter of European history had entered his bones and was gnawing away at them, from deep within the Jewish marrow that made him human. It was 1994. I was among a group of Asian journalists whom the Israeli government had invited to discuss the Gentiles 25 possibilities of Arab-Israeli peace. Politically, it was spring, for the hopes aroused at Oslo were very much in the air, but an evil chill from Auschwitz and Belsen-Bergen, from Buchenwald and Dachau, from Theresienstadt and Treblinka, crept into my soul. The helplessness captured in the photograph embodied what Hannah Arendt calls, incomparably, “the banality of evil” in her book on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. In a work that helped establish the truth that it is criminal to carry out criminal orders, she describes wherein this banality lay. It lay in the fact that Nazism had made barbarism something normal, as if eugenics were little more than a variety of municipal planning, as if the “Final Solution” were just another policy among the thousands that states adopt habitually. The problem with Eichmann was that so many were like him, “and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal”.2 Indeed, Eichmann had a conscience, which functioned like one for about four weeks, “whereupon it began to function the other way around”.3 In less than two years from December 1939, about 50,000 mentally sick Germans were killed with carbon monoxide gas in a grim prelude to the “euthanasia” of Jews. Banality shines best in the euphemisms that adorn it: In both cases, the Nazis described gassing as the humane way of killing people by granting them a mercy death.4 The banality...