I cannot begin to contain the words of loss that are detained in a Worlds need for remembering the 6,000,000 Jews who were Slaughtered. These Jewish People, all Men, Women and Their Children, who are The Holocaust, are resident in the most evil atrocity ever inflicted upon humanity. That is why I find great difficulty with my own work, though the truth is there and it is factually correct. While it upholds the integrity, the very veracity of the historical search such a catastrophe demands, there are Never enough words. Make no mistake though, I know there are never enough words that can be written to comprehend this travesty and so, while I can, I will deliver all the words I am able to.
“..We all know how we were ..we were all lost. ..drifting in a world of bitter memories ..trying to hold on to sanity ..not to give in to despair.” Alicia Appleman-Jurman.
I am sure there is a realisation, that within the accusation as to what I might have done, this is aimed specifically at my effort on behalf of at least 6,000,000 Slaughtered Jews. That there is the abandonment of the Jews within each and every such accusation which is once more to the forefront of anything they seek in response. In all honesty, I have to respond that I do not know if I would have saved another Jew from the catastrophe. I do know I would Not have betrayed any Jew for who they are, nor would I have stood on the side-lines and offered the Jewish People no assistance whatsoever.
“..summer ..1943 ..Gestapo squad arrived in Zawichost ..called in ..Jewish leaders ..starszyzna ..announced that in a few days ..Jews would have to leave town. They should be ready to march and await ..arrival of ..escort. This happened at a time when Jews even in remote provinces had no illusions as to what was in store for them. ..whole ..Jewish population of ..town was on ..spot. ..looking at ..road by which ..German police was supposed to arrive. ..author asked his companion. ..Do they know what is in store for them. ..companion ..Surely ..author ..Why do they not disperse ..why do they not escape ..companion ..Where. ..To what place can they escape.” Ferdynand Goetel.
So with that, and believe me, no Jew should be asking any other Jew this question as to what would they have done, should have done or even done differently. There are 6,000,000 absent Jewish voices whose responses are sufficient enough to qualify, and in their silence there is my response. However, each and every Jew has an awareness that no other being in humanity can come close to understanding what was done to their People. That said, the Jewish People have to deal with so many of us who were too silent, and there was so much silence that it screams of the complicity of far too many Nations who would screech otherwise. It is clear from every page testifying to what is The Holocaust, far too many nationals and a glut of the guilty in the atrocity are as yet unaccountable.
Sunday October 11th. 1942. “..Everyone knows ..what happened in Warsaw ..Slonim ..it is already time to count ..cities where ..catastrophies did not occur. ..understand ..better to be sent to Wolkowsk than ..Treblinka.” Ephraim Barash.
For me, there is No Jew who had any choice whatsoever even within those parameters set by the Nazi’s which gave them room to move. Even when their accusers might suggest differently it is clear, whenever a Jew struck back the intensity of the violence fell heaviest upon the most frail and innocent of us all, the Jewish Elderly and Jewish Children. When I remember back to reading Lawrence Langer, who asserts that such was this absence of choice, I am more certain than ever that All Jews faced these choiceless choices. So if we are to use such terms, simply to describe the fate of the Jewish People in The Final Solution of The Jewish Question, then we must suggest this accurately with the truth.
“..Everywhere I go ..I want people to know where I’m from ..my background ..where my family came from because of ..struggle they had to go through. Every week when I play and I see ..Israeli flag ..it brings me a lot of pride and I think it’s because of what my grandparents had to go through. Not just them but everybody during World War II and The Holocaust. That brings me anger but what I’m trying to do is bring ..anger and do something meaningful.” Laetitia Beck.
For what emerged as The Holocaust, adding terms with meaning and significance can only increase a comprehension still yet to be understood in this monumental calamity for civilised humanity. Such is the uniquely unprecedented and unparalleled nature of the catastrophe, and while it is the gravest atrocity ever to face the Jewish People, at the behest of too many within humanity, it is a challenge to what civilised us. In any study of the depths and margins in which such a disaster is defined, it is essential to remind us that not all victims were Jews, though All Jews Were Victims. There is no discernible conflict or conflict in this assertion either, Hitler’s final solution was a question that the Jews of Europe were to answer for with their lives, and without exception.
“..Since ..campaigns of murder were conducted with ..strictest secrecy ..there was considerable temptation to delude one’s conscience into believing that ..deeds committed outside any social control never happened. Who was ..to ask at home ..what was done to ..unknown Jew in ..forest near Minsk or behind ..barbed wire of Auschwitz.” Hans Buckheim.
Study and research will not access what we know in all that we have yet to comprehend of The Holocaust, how human beings were so abjectly mistreated, other human beings did this. That the Jewish People had been given no choice in how they were expected to live was legislated for, was a systematic calculation and was then enacted without concern. The Jewish route toward death was accorded to 6,000,000 of them in the many sites set aside for their destruction and even in the Death Camps that death was a confusion of uncertain betrayals and false truths. The shower room was still a death sentence, a mockery of human compassion imposed upon them by a cruelty beyond human comprehension.
Friday, 7th. April 1944. “..millions of Jews ..captured ..who knows where they are. ..We have come ..from place where your brothers are. ..Two thousand years have we brought into this world children ..doomed to suffer.” Moshe Flinker.
This fact still remains that human beings did this to other human beings and simply because these were Jewish human beings. What was not set aside by the hatred became the tool for the destruction that consumed all of these Jewish People without a single thought of consideration. In this truth there is no version and The Holocaust remains more precisely a factual veracity that maintains the standard for the scientific search in history it must demand. The sought after distortion of any element of that fact will deviate the line of essential obedience to the truth that our trajectory demands.
“..Let me explain that even though I had been in Auschwitz I did not know about ..gas chambers. Can you imagine that. We thought ..when we were there ..that our parents and ..children were taken to camps which were much better. We assumed that they couldn’t live through ..camp we were in. It was not until a large contingent from Auschwitz came to Belsen that I had to give up that idea that they were safe. I met 2 women in their 30’s who spoke Hungarian and they asked if it was true that ..Hungarian transports were so severely selected people to ..camps and ..others to be gassed. I said ..What are you saying. ..And they looked at me as if I were foolish ..but they didn’t want to destroy my hope and so didn’t try to explain. I ran back to ..tent and collapsed. I think I cried for weeks. I finally realized that everybody was killed.” Maria Frank-Abrams.
The decisions the Jews made in the midst of this conflagration, while they might appear crucial in terms of how they were affected by them, there was a jackboot which stood permanently astride them. Here, Police, Waffen SS, Wehrmacht, SS, SD, and not all were Germans, were armed with whip, gun, rifle and aboard a gas chamber which consumed more than we will ever know. So the crucial decision is a pertinent one and one which remains outside the body of the Jewish People for whom the choice had been designed to be taken away from them. I have often pointed to the Jewish Parent who would refuse to leave their Children and so deliver those last moments of Love and Devotion to them.
“..During 20 months of this trial ..court had to relive ..suffering and tortures ..people were subjected to ..forever coupled with ..name of Auschwitz. There will be some among us who ..will not be able to look into ..happy ..trusting eyes of a child without seeing ..hollow ..questioning uncomprehending ..fear filled eyes of ..children who went their last way there in Auschwitz.” Judge Hans Hofmeyer.
Of these multitude of Jewish Children, each Child who had been their everything from inception, could Not be allowed to go into eternity without the compassion they deserved. I had spoken to so many Survivor’s whose loss of a Parent was such, they would have held them up all the way toward oblivion just to be with them their. For both Parent and Child, to feel those last moments as a unified one must have been a strength beyond our limited imaginings. For far too many Jewish Children, all 1,500,000 of them, and then for far too many Jewish Parents and Adult Jews, some 4,500,000 of them, all choice was taken away from these 6,000,000 Jewish People and that can never resonate with a sound as:
And What Would You Have Done
” ..Did you make sure to scrape the ashes of friends and relatives from the furnace?
And did you haul the cart in the snow
To the heap of ashes of those cremated before them?
Were the words “You’ll certainly live as long as the furnaces send smoke aloft, because you’re needed,” directed at you?
And when you were covered with those ashes, did your mouths report what had happened in the language of the barracks?
That extra soup, is it the price of the labor of your spade
And the double ration-the price of the sweat that you gave forth?
And was it to you that the words “Only some time later, at an unknown time,
After the coal, the miner of the coal also comes” were directed?
Not you, not me! We were not put to that ordeal!
You may scrape furnaces every night
And push the cart to its side in your dreams.
But to have the slightest inkling of what happened in that man’s heart, you cannot.
Rather, from time to time you may turn your eyes heavenward, as if reflecting,
And what would you have done.” Gunther Anders.
