For Yom HaShoah (Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day) this year I have decided to share some passages from the memoirs of Holocaust survivors that I find particularly profound and inspiring. The unique perspectives and reflections of those who have personally witnessed the greatest atrocity inflicted by one set of humans upon another can often highlight or reinforce moral and religious lessons for the rest of us.
The first extract is taken from Man’s Search For Meaning, the Holocaust memoirs of Viktor E. Frankl:
“Even among the guards there were some who took pity on us. I shall only mention the commander of the camp from which I was liberated. It was found after the liberation…that this man had paid no small sum of money from his own pocket in order to purchase medicines for his prisoners from the nearest market town…It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing.
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of the camp’s influences and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible…
From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two – the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere and penetrate into all groups of society.”
Frankl’s insistence that we view the monstrous perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary humans who abused their Divine gift of free will is underscored by another passage, this time from Out Of The Depths, the memoirs of the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Rabbi Lau is recording his own passionate response to one of the witnesses from the Eichmann trial:
“If Auschwitz were indeed another planet, it would be easier to accept the Holocaust. But in truth, the disaster of Auschwitz is that it happened on the very same planet where we had lived before, where we live now, and where we will continue to live. Those who carried out the cruel murders of the innocent where ordinary people, who returned home from their murderous acts to water the flowers in their manicured gardens. They tended the flowers lovingly and carefully so they would blossom, just after they had torn infants to pieces and shattered the skulls of men and women. Just after shoving thousands of people into the gas chambers to their deaths, they came home to play with dolls together with their little girls, and listen to classical music, eyes closed, engrossed in the uplifting spirituality of Bach and Beethoven…Those were people just like you and me, and that’s the whole problem. When you transfer all those horrors to another planet, you minimise the issue. You are saying that something like the Holocaust can never happen to us again. In my humble opinion, you are wrong…”
There is an unsettling tendency in some quarters to depict heroes and religious leaders as ever-righteous superhumans who are never subject to temptation – and certainly always distant from sin. As we discuss in Judaism Reclaimed, such an approach not only robs their followers of potentially potent role models who can inspire others to battle and overcome challenges, it also undermines the fundamental principle of absolute free by implying that these leaders were naturally pre-ordained for greatness. Even more damaging and destructive, it emerges from Rabbi Lau’s continuation, is the implication that evil is committed by a team of inhuman monsters, inherently differentiated from the rest of mankind. Not only does this notion challenge Judaism’s core teaching of human free will and autonomy, it also prevents us from taking seriously the deadly potential of genocidal threats, relying on the false premise that “the world would never let that happen”.
First posted on Facebook 20 April 2020, here.
