An open letter from Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, took up a full page yesterday in The New York Times. The heading was “It’s Time to Dial Back the Rhetoric in Poland.” I have no expertise in the matter, but I couldn’t help recalling Tuvye Tenenbom‘s take on the situation of Polish Jews and the video he made during a period when Lauder claims things were looking up for them. Tenenbom recorded what he called “rampant” anti-Semitic graffiti everywhere in the city of Lodz. Have a look, then read Lauder’s letter below.
It’s interesting to put this theme in the context of how the Nazis coerced people in occupied countries to participate in the Holocaust. There’s a remarkable book, “Wir haben es gesehen” by Gerhard Schoenberner, that is a large collection of eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and how it was done. It is a great loss that the book is out of print and was never translated into English.
The Wehrmacht knew that mass murder gave them a horrific image, so they developed many techniques for coercing people in occupied countries to participate in the Holocaust as their proxies. This has tempered, at least to some extent, my view of the culpability of countries in Eastern Europe, and also countries like France and Holland.
It’s all relative and highly complex, of course. Strangely, Italy, though shameful and deeply culpable, was one of the better countries at resisting the mass murder, mostly because it was allied with Germany and didn’t share Hitler’s lunacy about Jewish people. Or at least relatively, if one can even refer to mass murder in relative terms.
This history, and the horrific descriptions in “Wir haben es gesehen,” leave me wondering in Trump’s America, how people would react if an overwhelming and cold blooded military force came into communities and used experienced and brutal techniques to blackmail people into collaborating in the mass murder of a group of people. How much persuasion would it take? How much would it take to persuade people who are simply trying to survive along with their families, and how much would it take for people already oriented toward participation? I keep thinking of those torch-lit parades we saw not long ago. . . .
(I’m on tour, and generally exhausted when I have free time, so I probably won’t be able to follow any discussion of this terrible history.)
William, you have posted a set of important questions.
And thank you for the mention of “Wir haben es gesehen,” (“We Saw It”).