The news announcement reported that in a village called Srebenica, located in the former Yugoslavia, groups of Serbian men had rounded up the Muslim residents at gunpoint, separated the men from the women and children, and marched the men off.
Listening to the broadcast on NPR while driving in the car, about 1997, I became alarmed.
"Why separate the men and march them off?" I wondered. "Those men are going to die" I realized.
Somebody's going to come to the rescue, I thought, right? All of Europe knows what's going on if I do.
What about the U.N.?
Don't we have a U.N. to prevent genocide?
Forget the U.N.
I was dead wrong.
No one helped, until the massacre was long over and the men murdered.
Imagine, not being able to save 8,000 men from massacre today, after the experience murdering six million people during the war.
I recalled that in some of the airliner hijackings by the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yassir Arafat and the Abu Nidal group, the terrorists ordered any Jews among the passengers to stand up.
I remembered that when anti-Jewish terrorists commandeered a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, they pushed an elderly man named Klinghoffer, in a wheelchair, over the side to his death.
Years later, when the Srebenica Massacre was uncovered, some 8,000 bodies were dug from mass graves after U.N. and NATO troops supported by American troops, made war on Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader and were able to gain control. Milosevic was prosecuted for crimes against humanity and died in prison. A number of his generals and other leaders were arrested and prosecuted. Some evaded arrest until today.
Why was genocide continuing to occur in Europe's backyard, as the Balkans are sometimes seen, when Europe went through the Holocaust during the Hitler years and World War II.
Don't people ever learn?
Aren't the lessons of yesterday passed down to today?
Apparently not.
Yesterday's lessons are not absorbed by our genes and passed down the way our instincts to fight are. We have to work to pass down the principles governing what we should not do, otherwise we repeat them. The lesson of history, the big one, is that we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, some of us that is.
How prevent the same errors?
One way is to talk about them to see what we should learn. Some of us do, some of us don't. It takes attention, work, discipline, time, effort, and other things out of our day when we'd rather be watching Seinfeld, the show about "nothing."
One friend of mine, Julian W., with whom I attended four years of high school, has devoted his life, after teaching mathematics at the university level, to ministering to the survivors of the death camps of the Holocaust in Germany and Poland. For survivors, he includes the children of the guards who ran the camps. How would you feel if your parents went along with mass murder? Survivors on both sides of the fence require help. Julian helps provide it.
During high school and college, I worked as a lifeguard at beaches on Staten Island, N.Y., fronting on Lower New York Bay.
One of fellow lifeguards at Midland Beach, Ian MacMillan, attended Oneonta State Teachers College (now SUNY/Oneonta) in upstate New York, where my sister, Eileen, also attended. She recently wrote asking whether I recalled Ian, and of course I did, as we worked together all summer in 1961. Ian was a thoughtful athletic type, pleasant, good-humored, and unusually graceful in movement. A college bulletin announcing the accomplishments of its alums had mentioned Ian, so Eileen gave a shout.
I emailed Ian a few weeks ago, via the University of Hawaii, where he has been teaching writing since 1966,, and we renewed our conversation after a long interruption, as in 1961 we were in college, finding our way.
In addition to many published short stories, Ian has written a book called: Village of a Million Spirits, a Novel of the Treblinka Uprising (Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont, 2000), by Ian MacMillan of Hawaii, originally from Staten Island.
Ian very kindly sent me a volume of his short stories, called Ullambana, concerning aspects of life in Hawaii, the part lived by the locals, not the tourists, as well as the Treblinka book.
He said he'd like to know what I thought of the Treblinka novel.
I completed it last evening and then re-read it this morning.
Why re-read a book that you've just read?
This is not an easy book to read, even apart from the daunting subject matter.
Why daunting?
Because I'd grown up starting in World War Two, with 1940 being the year of my birth. When you are born into a World War, you are enveloped in it from the moment you can begin to understand anything, even before you learn to read. I well recall going down into the basement next to the furnace to watch my father flatten tin cans with a hammer and throw them into a cardboard box to donate to the war effort. He built ships, warships, liberty ships, destroyers, and landing craft at the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard located in Mariners Harbor, Staten Island, during the war. He operated a gantry crane along the ways alongside the dry-dock where the keel was laid and the plates welded on to form the hull. My mother would drive to the shipyard to pick him up in the evening and I'd see him up high in the cab of the crane. I was three.
After the war the photos and stories came out about the concentration camps run by the Germans. The Germans were the personification of evil, alongside the Japanese, if you were a kid who grew up here when I did. They didn't call it the Holocaust then. It was just the Germans killing Jews by the millions. In order not to forget, people began to label the catastrophe in which the Nazis enlisted the willing support of states conquered or controlled by Hitler, including France and Italy as well as much of Eastern Europe, especially Poland.
Even in countries where Jewish people had thought that they'd assimilated to the point of indistinguishableness, they were largely mistaken, as their neighbors, and they, had been keeping score of who was Jewish and for how far back since some had been and converted to Christianity.
Under the German way of accounting for such things, blood is what counted, not a paper saying that you'd been baptized. Under the German racial laws, the Nuremberg Codes, if your grandparents, or any of them, were Jews, so were you and you were put in the camps and died. Since my mother, 91, is Jewish, as well as half of my late grandparents, and I, if a non-observing, non-believing, person remains a member in good standing of the tribe, the mistreatment of Jewish people in large ways and small has always made an impression on me.
So when Ian advised that he'd written a novel centered on Treblinka, although I really did not want to immerse myself in that hell, I felt that reading it was something that I needed to do. If Ian went to the effort of writing, I could exert myself to read about a place that I did not care to reflect on yet again.
All during my life, I'd paid attention to what the Germans, the Christians, had done to people who would have included me had not my grandparents on my mother's side decided to immigrate to America in 1902 or 1903. These were Jewish people from outside Warsaw who spoke Yiddish at home. One of their parents, a tailor, had been murdered because of who he was. Other branches of the family were lost to time, distance, and Hitler.
So we knew.
Imagine that you are an experienced writer, someone whose business it is to teach writing to university students. You've written dozens of short stories detailing facets of life in your adopted land, Hawaii. But you feel that there's a bigger challenge. You need to tell a story that challenges your full capacity, all of the resources that you have: time, energy, skill, and experience in the art and craft of writing. You want to tackle the biggest issue of mankind: how to treat other men, and women, and children. You ask what this is. Genocide. Wiping out everyone else who you deem different than you.
Northern Island Protestants.
Irish Catholics.
Indians.
Serbs.
Croatians.
Muslims.
Genocide did not end in 1945.
Ian took on the Holocaust. Ian is not Jewish. He became concerned about the reception his book might receive considering that. However, Ian is a human being. That qualifies him to write about this most human, unfortunately, experience. The Holocaust has been pretty much regarded by many as Jewish property since its naming. Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, Anne Frank, Stephen Spielberg, are names that come to mind.
Yet the Holocaust is not the exclusive property of any one of the many identifiable groups of mothers, fathers, and children who were murdered, from Jews, to Gypsies, to Communists, to Gays.
Man's inhumanity to man is not the exclusive property of any one group. Unless we learn from what exists, regardless of group, we learn nothing. Not only don't we learn, but we have people who actively deny. I don't understand why they deny, but they do. Germany, to its credit, gives classes to high schoolers in avoiding certain habits of mind and phrases which prepare the mind and lead to bad conduct. They visit the camps, those which have been set aside, preserved for memorial and pedagogic purposes. It's what they can do, so they do it. One conviction like the Holocaust on your record is more than enough.
Ian has set about to write a book about the Holocaust in order to prevent it being forgotten, as best I understand.
How would you plan to write a made-up story based on the entire Holocaust? With great difficulty. You'd have to take a small portion and make it stand for the rest. You'd do this because the whole Holocaust is so large that you couldn't do justice to the millions of individual stories in one book.
Ian has taken the story of one camp, Treblinka, out of many death camps, in which the Jewish prisoners organized a rebellion, overpowered some of the guards, and set fire to the camp. Some escaped. Most were re-caught. One got away in Ian's account, to tell the story, bringing the message to the world. Ian has picked up the burden of being the messenger. Ian has delivered the message. For this effort he deserves a medal.
Village of a Million Spirits is not the easiest book to read because in order to tell the story of this rebellion, Ian has to tell the story of what it was like to live in a place where you were starved, beaten, and shot for no reason other than that you were going to die anyway, so shooting you in a moment's aggravation, on a whim, or out of plain cruelty, made no difference to the people with the guns and the inclination to shoot.
The guards made Jewish prisoners help with the unloading, lining up, and separating into two death-lines, men on the one side, women and children the other, of all the newly arriving prisoners as their trains arrived. The prisoners who herded other prisoners stole from them when they were alive, as they arrived with suitcases and gold in their teeth. What you didn't steal while they were alive, you stole after they'd been gassed.
There is nothing pleasant about this story or its message. Ian is bringing bad news about us as people.
As a prisoner, you traded your takings in return for food to live another day. You traded with the guards, who stole more than you did. The guards gave their Jewish loot to their wives. They traded with their companions. There was money in the Holocaust just as there was money in the Spanish Inquisition, which was also about cleansing a nation of a people, the same people, Jewish people, while at the same time cleaning them out of their belongings. The guards cheered when a new train arrived from Berlin, where there was money, but not from Minsk, where there was little none. Did the inmates cheer because more loot arrived to trade for food for survival? It's hard to say. Starving people don't necessarily abide by civilized, meaning well-fed, rules, as the examples of the Donner party and various lifeboat tragedies attests. Necessity overcomes civility.
In order to deliver the message of Treblinka, of concentration camps anywhere, it is not enough just to say that something happened. To carry the tale to the world of future generations, Ian must to show it, using the techniques of creative nonfiction, including graphic detail which puts you on the ground, in the camp, exactly the place I didn't want to go. He must describe a number of individuals who act and are acted upon. You don't necessarily wish to be rubbing elbows with anyone in the camps, so depraved have the killers and some of the soon-to-be killed become.
Unless you read with great concentration and with little interruption, which I didn't, as I was reading and doing other things in the meantime, it is not difficult to lose the thread of this person's activity or that, especially when the thread of the story winds inside the camp with some prisoners and outside with some of the guards and, of course, the pregnant Magda Nowak, whose baby we worry about. How can an infant be born into such a hell, we wonder.
Will it live?
Or be left to die?
Suffice it to say that few forces are as powerful as the maternal instinct. The possibility of rebirth is a theme that lies like a seed, giving hope for a future better than the past.
The outside interruptions and these thoughts triggered by the novel, caused me to review "A Million Spirits" with marker and pen. Ian writes with considerable subtlety, underplaying the significance people and events that he thinks are important, judging from the Foreword, leaving it for the reader to realize how important it was, for example, that several men organized a resistance. Sometimes a reader needs help to realize how difficult, how heroic, organizing a resistance was under conditions of constant beating, death, surveillance, threat of informants, and abrupt relocation.
When I visited Washington, D.C., a few years ago during a history trip following a son's graduation from college back east, the family wanted to see the Holocaust Museum, so we went in. It looked like old news to me, as I'd grown up reading and seeing the film clips in movie houses about the death camps. I'd read the news. In those pre-TV days, you'd see what they called "newsreels" at the Saturday movies where the kids all went. The black-and-white Movie-tone newsreels with announcers like Lowell Thomas brought you the war, the surrenders, and the death camps. We watched many war movies. The war is where John Wayne, fighting in Hollywood, became famous, when he wasn't fighting Indians.
We saw atrocity films that gave us nightmares. Friends and I would trade nightmares about the Japanese in the Pacific at places like Iwo Jima and Manila. Later, when I moved to California and married, Marie was from Manila, the daughter of American citizens there, and evacuated on American ships in 1946 to California, where they began anew.
Exiting the Holocaust Museum, I wondered how it was that a museum memorializing what the Germans did to the Jews of Germany and all over Europe was built in Washington, D.C.
Shouldn't this be in Berlin? Maybe they have a memorial there, I thought. I haven't been to Berlin. What about France? The French couldn't wait to deport their Jews. Rounded them up and put them in the tennis stadium. An Italian-American friend defensively claims that one good thing about the Italians was that they protected their Jewish co-residents. I can't bear to disabuse him.
Why don't we have a museum in Washington, D.C. to the American Holocaust, the three-hundred years of slavery of millions of people because they were black and it seemed the right and proper thing to do for most God-fearing people, which is one of the problems I have with some people's generally accepted notion of God. Caveat generally accepted notions of God. Make up your own. He (if it's a he) won't allow atrocities. He'll swoop down like Superman and protect the meek, humble, tender and innocent, just as you and I would in our dreams. As long as you're going to dream up a god, why not dream up a good one who arrives, Johnny on the spot, just like the U.S. Cavalry in the old western movies, and saves the pioneers who are running out of ammunition behind circled wagons, surrounded by Indians. In Treblinka there was no U.S. Cavalry and no Jewish or Christian God, in any useful sense.
When your ministers, teachers, political leaders, and the founders of your country, by their active support or silent acquiescence, send you the message that slavery is fine and dandy, plus we're making good money off the traffic and the fruits of slave labor, it will be very difficult to see that there is anything wrong with maltreating other people.
I mean, if God is behind it, who are we to say otherwise?
This is one of the problems with the idea of God, any God, whether you call him Yahweh, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Allah, any member of the Hindu pantheon, etc. None of them are capable of overcoming a man, or a million men, with blood in their eye, at least not all of the time or for very long.
I don't argue in favor of getting rid of the notion of any idea of God, or any god, so long as we realize that those who purport to speak for him, her, or it, are no better than you, or even me. They're as full of it as you and I would be if we claimed that God spoke to us and here's what he/she or it told us in confidence and therefore we ought to wipe out those other folks over there who don't share our belief.
This is why the only strong belief I really have is that the world needs a really good shrink, preferably one not infected with the god-virus.
After all, they'(those slaves we were talking about before I digressed yet again), are black, aren't they?
How do you expect us to treat blacks?
Like us?
Not very likely; not in this lifetime.
That's the way it was in America and not the way it was in Germany, as best I can tell, only worse. Slave owners in America had an economic interest in keeping alive their valuable property. German people were only interested in killing Jewish people and taking their gelt (gold, in both Yiddish and German). There's a difference.
Hitler, I'm told, took his inspiration for his ethnic elimination (murder) policies from America's racial policies and the views of some of our top scientists in favor of "eugenics," that is, killing people who are sick, old, or different.
And then there is our Holocaust II, Jim Crow, the forced putting down of an entire race for another hundred years following the Civil War that ended slavery. There were two kinds of force used to put people down: legal force using cops, fire-hoses and German shepherd dogs, restrictive deed covenants (no blacks and Jews allowed clauses in property deeds, outlawed in 1948 in Shelley v. Kramer) and social forces, such as gentlemen's agreements, restricted country and other clubs, and quotas on Jews entering Ivy League schools. Segregation de jure and de facto, in legal parlance.
The memorial to our own twin Holocausts is seen in our Constitutional Law. Determined people have been chipping away at Jim Crow for years. The worst of it is gone, the result of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 promising freedom of public accommodations voting. Are these dead letters? Hardly. Sen. Hillary Clinton was criticized by Sen. Barrack Obama recently in their presidential nominating campaigns when she said that Dr. Martin Luther King was great for leading the civil rights movement as he did, but that his effort would have come to naught without Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson having pushed JFK's civil rights legislative program through a reluctant Congress. LBJ predicted that his Democratic Party would lose the South for two generations for espousing a program that went so against its grain. This prediction has materialized as the South has voted primarily Republican since then, for over forty years.
As wonderful as you may think our promise of equal protection of law is, and it is very good, it still has significant lapses. The Executive Order, #9066, by which Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the rounding up and putting into concentration camps of Americans of Japanese Ancestry on the West Coast in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor (but not AJAs in Hawaii, nor German-American, nor most Italian-Americans with whose ancestral country under Mussolini we were also at war) was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
What justification was given for rounding up American citizens on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin? Well, there was a war on and the military thought that these might be security risks, so this important governmental purpose was deemed to outweigh your individual right not to be jailed by your government although you'd given no sign of doing anything wrong.
Panic, in other words.
We fall victim to it all the time. September 11, 2001 is just the most recent large example, for us. Our political leaders secure their support by striking fear of the boogie-man into so many of us, to the point that we will invade another country that hasn't made war on us provided only that we are frightened enough to hit back first, which is the definition of a pre-emptive strike.
How well did my friend Ian do in calling attention to the Holocaust through the medium of a novel some fifty-five years following the liberation of the camps by American soldiers under General Dwight D. Eisenhower?
Has he succeeded in blowing the whistle loud and clear that this must happen never again?
Does Ian tell a convincing story that moves you?
Do you realize the magnitude of the construct of attitude, government and economy as you read his dramatized account, fictionalized yet based on true events?
I didn't mark up the book as I read it through slowly for the first time. I found myself going astray from time to time because the novelist, in telling his tale, takes pains to draw things out, and I sometimes lost track of which character we were inhabiting at the moment. So I went back with yellow marker and high-lit each of the principal characters, and inserted page-number cross references so that individuals referenced in the foreword, for example, three who led the rebellion but did not survive, could be tracked when they made their appearance or were otherwise referred to by others in the text.
In his artful crafting of the story, it was not always initially apparent that a particular event had the significance that it seems to have had in reality. For example, at one point the effective local ruler of the camp on a day-to-day basis is one Franz aka "The Doll," for his uncommon good looks, in contrast to his monstrous activity. In order to make his captive work force support the death program effectively, he offers them a deal, which they accept, that the guards will treat them better.
One of the notions that you might take away from a story such as this is the idea that victims can be co-opted, when their survival is at stake, into cooperating to victimize others. There is no necessary community among victims when it is every person for himself in order to survive.
We saw this in the Korean War when 22 American soldiers including some officers who had fallen captive to the North Koreans were "brainwashed" into refusing to be repatriated after the fighting ceased. They'd been turned by their captors.
During a notorious bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, the robbers held the bank employees hostage inside the bank as it was surrounded by police. By the time it was all over in a few days, some of the hostages had fallen in love with their captors, some even marrying.
Patti Hearst, kidnapped and held hostage for months by the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army, was later photographed apparently helping to rob a bank in which a teller was shot and killed, not by her. Convicted of some participation with this outlaw group, she was later pardoned by the president. The theory, as best I can surmise, is that we should not hold legally accountable those who, through no fault of their own, have fallen captive to those who force them to commit crimes. As always, you have to try to put yourself in the shoes of the person you seek to condemn, not always an easy thing to do.
Individuals who become totally dependent on others for life, sustenance and continued unpunished existence, have a tendency to relate to their captors the way an infant does to its mother. It means survival.
These are difficult realizations, but Ian's book lays the foundation and shows them happening.
Despite the challenges of keeping track of shifting points of view as we go from character-to-character, which can be sorted out as one goes along, or later, using marker and making notes, once you finally get the story and how it hangs together, you find that hiding in all of the detail is not only a tale worth telling but one that makes one reader, at least, think, "So that's what it was like? Hmmm." I think this part is accurate in the sense it is true to life despite fictionalization of the characters. They react to their surroundings in ways that are real, according to many public accounts and frequently pay with their lives.
What I think that Ian has done, in addition to whatever else he's done, is to open the door further to written accounts of this one holocaust, among the many we've seen since and continue to see.
He's held up the Holocaust as an example worth writing about creatively. This may, and should, encourage others to identify individual stories and follow them.
One of the difficulties in trying to make sense of the murders of so many thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, millions, in fact, is that the sheer number overwhelms the mind. By creating individuals from among the many, Ian puts faces and deeds on some who will have to stand for the rest. This is difficult because so much seems to have been erased by to process of selection and extermination itself. The creative person is left often with traces. In a book review in the Sunday NY Times last week, Elie Wiesel, a camp survivor who has written the story of his existence, point out that his story begins where Anne Frank's left off.
This leads me to a legal question.
You and I live in America. We believe that the laws should be followed, right?
You are a good and a moral person. You would not intentionally do something wrong that is of any moment, I believe. Correct?
Suppose it were made against the law to hide Jews such as Anne Frank's family and you found out that the Frank family were in hiding in your building.
Would you turn them in?
Would you turn in an American of Japanese Ancestry on the West Coast who was hiding out in violation of the Executive Order 9066 by the democratically elected FDR, the one upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States?
Do we believe that there are laws that are higher than our democratically adopted Constitution?
Laws of God?
Laws of Nature? See something called Natural Law. Many of our founders believed that Natural Law supported, even superseded, the Constitution.
Our Constitution was not handed to us by God or Moses, or even Jesus way back when. It was ratified in 1791, a little better than 200 years ago, sort of like yesterday in the grand scheme of things.
We crafted it ourself. We changed it every term of the Supreme Court and sometimes through the amendment process. Remember? We outlawed slavery and alcohol. We took back the amendment outlawing alcohol. Our Constitution is a changey thing.
How do we know what is right?
Is something right simply because our Founding Fathers said it was so? They crafted a constitution that supported slavery. It took a Civil War to undo that. We're still working on Jim Crow.
One of the ways we know what is right is by putting ourselves in the place of the victim. Imagine that you are a member of Anne Frank's family, hiding. From that standpoint, do you believe that the neighbors should turn your family in to the Gestapo simply because someone has passed a law? What if the law itself is unjust? Must you obey it?
Suppose that you were there in Treblinka along with Janusz Seidlicki, the sixteen-year-old protagonist who brings the tale for Ian to tell, how would you have behaved under the gun?
I congratulate Ian MacMillan for wringing this extended creative account out of his imagination based on the facts available to all of us. This true story, based on true facts, presented by using fictionalized characters in order to cut it down to manageable size, could not have been crafted by anyone other than a master of the craft of writing. Ian sees the big picture and has done something useful about it to show the example to encourage others not to let it happen again. This is monumental, and Ian deserves full credit. Good job, indeed.
Fortunately the PEN committee appreciates detail, as well as the big picture, for Ian won the PEN award for his Treblinka book in 2000.
***
Follow-up thoughts to a thought-provoking book are coming in:
Treblinka is in Silesia, a much contested territory controlled either by Poland or Prussia (for Germany) over the centuries. Today it is Polish, following the defeat of Germany in WWII. For further reading about Silesia, Germany, Poland, the war, the holocaust, and the fraught relations between Germans and Jews, and Germany and the world, see Five Germanys I Have Known, by Fritz Stern (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). Stern was born in Silesia, fled the Nazis and came to America in 1938 (or 1939), became a historian at Columbia University in New York, and a frequent academic ambassador to the renewed, re-civilized, one hopes, Germany after the war.
The character, Magda Nowak, is a seventeen-year-old Polish girl who first has a love affair with Michal Balicki, from her village, and then has a more consequential relationship with Anatoly Yovenko, who, as his last name would suggest, is a Ukrainian working as a guard employed by the Germans inside the camp. Poland and Ukraine are also much contested areas, with the border changing as the regimes change. The general rule seems to be that whichever ethnic group you don't claim is, if not your enemy, then not your friend, someone you disdain and mock behind their back, if not to their face.
Magda becomes pregnant and over the months of the story her pregnancy comes nearer to term. Her problem is that her father treats her as a subhuman, refusing to help her meet the needs of her impending delivery. Why?
Because the father is Anatoly, the Ukrainian. In fact, the father prostituted the daughter to obtain gold for sex. Anatoly had gold as he oversaw the searching of Jews exiting the death trains carrying what little they could, such as jewelry, money, gold, and stamps. Magda would receive items of value from Anatoly and in turn hand over the takings to her father as she lived in his house.
What's right with this, I believe, is that the author is making the point that the local people participated in and profited from the long-term series of atrocities of this camp, and by extension, all of the other camps.
What's wrong with this, I believe, is that Mr. Nowak is also made into a Jew-hunter as well as pimp and profiteer from the loot stolen from Jews before they were murdered and burned to destroy the evidence of genocide.
The suggestion appears to be, or that I read into the work, is that in order to be a hater of Jews in Poland, and by extension a hater in other countries controlled by the Third Reich such as France and Italy, one must be the sort of person who would prostitute his daughter. If only the persecutors were so limited to that population alone.
The problem with the Holocaust, one of them, is that the perpetrators were the allegedly "good" people of Poland, Germany, France, Ukraine, Italy, Austria, Romania, etc. They didn't pimp their daughters. Far from it. Washington and Jefferson were our allegedly good people who worked, whipped, and sold slaves. After the Revolution, when his slaves fled to support the British who promised them their freedom, Washington negotiated in New York with the defeated General Howe for the return of his property, the departed slaves. The British general, to the credit of himself and the British, refused.
How is it that some things we can see and others we cannot?
The answer is that we have to be taught to see by those who see.
Ian is a great teacher. The reason is because he has been inspired to tell the tale in a way we can get our minds around. Those interested in time to come will be able to read in one volume enough about what the Holocaust was like to realize that they never want to see another one. Depravity has inspired creativity, in the artist and, we hope, the political leader. Ian has passed the message along the decades for those who will look. This is no small service.
The perpetrators of what, years after the war began to be called the Holocaust, were the ones that, if you were a tourist before the war, you would have been happy to see, as opposed to the Jewish people, if you weren't Jewish, who you would want to ignore. In the beginning, there was no Holocaust, just murder, which was bad enough. After the war, when everybody with eyes, ears, and a brain could fathom the situation of ethnic cleansing through the device of mass deportation and murder, THEN the world was able to see what had occurred. Plaintive cries from relatives and tribal members in the meantime had been downplayed when not ignored, at the highest levels of government. This is the problem that recurs in the case of other rejected groups of people, such as in Bosnia, yesterday, and Africa, today.
The perpetrators were the so-called normal people. Jewish mothers, fathers and children were the pariahs, hence the victims.
Katherine Porter wrote a novel called "Ship of Fools," later made into an excellent motion picture, in which a German ship approaches Cuba fully booked with Jewish people fleeing Germany before the roof fell in. Cuba refused to give refuge. The ship headed for Miami and came within sight of the lights of the shore of Miami Beach.
The United States, under Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, refused to allow the Jewish passengers, fleeing for their lives, admission to the U.S. as refugees. The ship sailed for Bremen or Hamburg. The passengers died in the Holocaust. The United States, and the people thereof, in the judgment of the president, did not welcome Jews who, in their apparent estimation, would be difficult to absorb into the population, much as we debar starving Haitians from landing as economic refugees when they wash up on Miami's shores today while we welcome political refugees from Fidel Castro's communist Cuba.
The Cubans have a strong political lobby. The Japanese-Americans were extremely isolated politically at the time of Pearl Harbor. The Jews of Germany in particular and Europe in general were extremely isolated politically and socially. Hence their downfall. Are the Mexican immigrants to the U.S. politically isolated or politically integrated into the mainstream community? Why are we unable to enact a proper immigration bill?
If Ian is arguing that only the bad, low-class, low-life people discriminated against Jews, as exemplified by Magda Nowak's father, I think he's missed a chance to make a more legitimate point that would not tend to excuse all those other anti-Semites who weren't interested in prostituting their own daughters, of whom, I suspect there were relatively few. The cause of the Holocaust was not that only bad people hated Jews but that good people hated Jews. James Carroll, in Constantine's Sword, shows how this came about. He blames Catholic Church doctrine which blamed Jews for crucifying Jesus some considerable time earlier. The message was carried down through the ages via repetition every Sunday in church and in church schools. Minds were prepared long in advance to embrace a Jewish Holocaust in which Jewish parents and their children were the fuel.
However, Ian doesn't always pile unnecessarily on the anti-Semites by having them pimp their daughters. One of the German officers with a leading role in this fictionalized drama, Josef Schneck, the sadist who cuts off the tied-up Anatoly's little finger with gardening shears to force him to reveal the location of part of a valuable stamp collection hidden under a stump, stolen from a man arriving on one of the trains before he is murdered because he is Jewish. Schneck states that he was a medical student before the war who finds that he has come to prefer shooting people to trying to heal their wounds. Presumably he came from a decent background before helping to run an extermination camp.
In his foreword, Ian argues that there were real heroes, camp inmates who planned the overthrow of their German masters, "the engineer Galewski, Zhelo Bloch, Rudolph Masarek" who are presented "obliquely and at a distance." Bloch appears on pages 115 and 116, long after I was no longer able to retain in mind that the author saw him as a hero worthy of that recognition. This required considerable effort at cross-referencing, not the ordinary job of a reader. The other characters, who report on Galewski, as well as on Bloch who appears briefly on pages 212, 221, and 231, and Masarek, on pagees 167, 224, are barely visible as important leaders of a revolution within the camp. The focus is off them and placed instead on Janusz and Magda. I ask myself why the author constructed his message in this way.
This, I think, is part of the problem of biting off more than a mind can chew. There are too many Holocaust stories to tell, six million, and each individual one suffers from the attention given to the others. I'm still not certain of the contribution to the story of Magda's attempt to get home where her mother has secured the service of a midwife to help deliver her baby. Magda's odyssey recurs ever few chapters as a series of interludes to take you out of the camps into the surrounding community so that you can appraise the local attitudes, which are all bad with one major exception at the end, in the Pripet Marshes.
These marshes, incidentally, are the source of the migrations of the Slavic people of Russian stock, which migrated tribally a thousand years earlier into today's Balkan territory north of Greece and Macedonia, the now former-Yugoslavia.
Along the way, they split into two sectarian based cultures, Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic, Serb and Croation, with attendant difficulty. This point of origin accounts for why Russia backed Serbia during World War One, claimed influence during World War Two (but were thwarted in large measure by Marshall Tito), and posed obstacles to NATO forces during the post-Milosevich peace-keeping occupation. Russia regards the Balkans as within its sphere of influence. Always has, probably always will.
Ian provides a brief glimplse into the plight of the Gypsies, but doesn't dwell on this group, with which I have some familiarity, as the result of some of my legal work. In representing a member of the group for more than a decade, I had the duty, and rare opportunity, not only to study Roma culture from the standpoint of the literature, but to have an informant who could comment knowledgeably about the family workings which made her life so difficult when it came to her wish to accommodate to the dominant culture.
When it came to Hitler, suffice it to say that he practiced on the Roma (the Gypsy word for themselves) before he perfected his technique to use on the Jewish people. The Gypsies went first. They were distinctive, unassimilated, hated and had no place to hide. Like the Jews, the Gypsies by and large wanted little part of the larger culture. They wanted to be free to move within the larger culture to repair pots and pans, perform day work, entertain for a fee, tell fortunes, etc., but did not wish to lose their identity through assimilation.
Interestingly, while Jewish tradition relies on the written word as the primary means of preserving and passing along the culture, through weekly readings of the Torah in synagogue, Gypsy culture takes the opposite tack: they have little or no reliance on the written word or graphic arts. Dance, music, song, story, yes, this they have, but not statues, etchings, oil paintings, etc. Why?
When you move around a lot in family groups on foot or in a cart or caravan, you don't have room for this.
Ian MacMillan, as you can see, has written a thought-provoking book. Since that was his intent, it appears that he has well-succeeded.
***
Last evening on the public broadcasting station was a feature narrated by Elliot Gould. He used to be married to Barbra Streisand. It was about the Jewish people who lived in the area of Poland and Ukraine, where my maternal family lived for centuries if they ran true to form, in villages called shtetls. Pronounced "shtate-ls," as in "state" with an H after the initial S. A little state, perhaps. These people were farmers, tradesmen, craftsmen, scholars, traders, you name it. The women baked and made a chicken feed a dozen people, extending it in soup and all sorts of creative dishes. The women passed along the religion while the men spent time debating talmud. As the narrator observed, they made the economy move forward. How does a farmer get his cabbages to market? He sells them to a businessman with a wagon. The man with the wagon carries them to market and sells them to the customer, freeing up the farmer to plant and weed the next crop. This is what the middleman does. If the farmer needs a loan to tide him over until the next harvest is in, from whom does he borrow? The man with the wheelbarrow, who is Jewish. And who does he repay for the loan? The Jewish money lender. You can see where this is going to lead, so I'll spare you. The result is the Lower East Side of New York around 1910. The result is Hollywood. "What do you know about making movies," the old gag goes, you're not a furrier." I could go on, but won't.
Walking to the bus from Curtis High School, Staten Island, N.Y., one day, I overheard some gentile girls talking. "Those Jews," one said, "why do they have to be different? Why can't they be like everyone else?"
Her frustration surrounded her like a miasma, visible to anyone in earshot. The poor girl. Didn't she realize that being different was the whole point of being Jewish? Jews make themselves different in dietary rules, prayer rules, marital rules (who you can marry and who you should not), language rules, religious garment rules, bathing rules, language rules (Yiddish, not Polish, German, Russian, or English), facial hair rules, headwear rules, everything except shoes. Shoes you need to walk on and we don't like sore feet.
If Jewish people wanted to fit in like the girl exiting the high school, it would be the easiest thing in the world. Shave, lose the yarmulka, order the ham and cheese, drop the "oy veys" and you can see where this winds up. With someone like me. Half this and half that and not very much of very much.
In some asian country the name of which I've forgotten, the people there claim that a mixed race or ethnic person is not half and half but double cultured. I wish I'd heard that when I was a kid, it might have spared me a little confusion.
"Well what am I, Jewish or Christian?" I'd ask. My father was Irish-Catholic. He married the Jewish girl from the hardware store that sole motorcycles, Harley-Davidson's in fact. He gave me rides when I was a kid. The family story is that Mom got thrown in on the deal. That is a true Jewish story. Mom got thrown in to make the sale. We love that story.
"You're American," Mom would say. She was not thrilled when I said one day that I wanted a religion like the other kids. Which one do you want? My cousins were Jewish. The one down the street had his bar mitzvah. That seemed like just the thing. I don't know who was more surprised, Mom, or Dad. Their theory was to let the kids decide what they wanted to be when they grew up. To keep peace in the family. Theirs was a mixed marriage. On StatNisland, everything was a mixed marriage. An Irish Catholic girl who married an Italian Catholic boy was a mixed marriage, not that this could ever happen, of course.
For a long time I thought my religion was American.
Then I thought it was Jewish.
Now I'm back to thinking I'm American, which is where I started.
What goes around, comes around.
L'Chaim!
Then I reported to one of my fellow lifeguards on a sermon I'd once heard in the temple, the synagogue, on Yom Kippur, when the rabbi made an analogy, to the effect that God kept a ledger in which he kept track of your good deeds and bad, sort of like Santa Clause, I guess, to see how you would fare on the Day of Atonement.
"You don't really believe that shit, do you?" my chair partner said.
That cured me of religious bullshit to this very day.
I learned a lot at the beaches I worked for six summers, Great Kills, Midland, and South Beach.
I don't know what I'd've done without them.
I don't know what Ian would've done either.
Read the book.
It'll make you examine your basic beliefs.