New Holocaust History: Important Addition to our Libraries.
Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
Saul Friedlander
Harper Collins, 663 pp.
reviewed by Allan Gould
Can we ever get enough of the Holocaust? Has it been quite literally done to death in film, literature and scholarship? I have warned in other book reviews that our great faith cannot survive on mounds of bodies: it must be our extraordinary ethics and the Sabbath and rituals which must be stressed in our lives and to our children, and not victimhood.
Yet the second large volume by the excellent Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination is surely must reading, if only for its powerful and meaningful introduction, and the way it depends so much on diaries--most of their authors sadly murdered--which give us a real sense of the singular horror of that time. This 663-page volume (Harper Collins), which is followed by 128 pages of notes, is rarely poetic or even horrific--there are no photographs--but deeply moving in its often new theories of why, as well as how, this outrageous genocide took place.
I had real trouble with the very title, having always hated the term extermination. It is the word choice of the murderers, and echoes their belief that they were getting rid of vermin, lice, vile creatures, not humanity. As a student of and lecturer/author about this grotesque period in general and antisemitism in particular, I've always felt that that ugly word is a trap, not unlike African-Americans using the n-word: rather than take the pain from the term, it smears the user. Rats are exterminated; human beings are tortured, murdered, slaughtered en masse. But that's this excellent author's choice, and since I treasured Friedlander's poetic memoir, When Memory Comes, and his exquisite profile of the until-then unknown Kurt Gerstein (a deeply religious German Protestant soldier who found himself in charge of shipping the deadly poison Zyklon B to the murder camps, tried to notify others, and finally committed suicide), I must forgive and accept.
How can one review a book of such scholarhip in a necessarily brief web review? By partially quoting the author's introductory quotation from a diary written in 1943 in Warsaw, which states, "No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth. . . . Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth." One must (sadly) applaud the rarely-acknowledged reference to the estrangement between Western and Eastern Jews before the Shoah: the religious, Eastern ones finding the Westerners lacking Jewishness; the Westerners feeling the Easterners appeared backward and primitive. I have not seen the following put so clearly: No less blatant than their powerlessness was the inability of most European Jews to assess the seriousness of the threats that they faced. After all, during the first half-decade after Hitler rose to power, barely one-third of German Jewry emigrated, even with the persecution and the indignities that descended on it month after month, year after year. . . . But then, we in the 21st century, with 20/20 hindsight, know what horrors humans are capable of; could they possibly? I appreciate that Friedlander underlines a fact which too few historians have emphasized: that the different levels of anti-Jewish ideology could be formulated and summed up in the tersest way: The Jew was a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the Aryan race and to the German Volk. (His italics). In other words, this wasn't a drunken Mel Gibson hissing infantile antisemitic slurs, or a flustered comedian rudely lashing out with the n-word; this was a society-- a nation, even a continent--which saw the Jews as cockroaches, spreading filth and destruction: it was either us or them. Extermination, indeed.
I could fill this entire review with lines and images which made me catch my breath: the euthanasia of the mentally ill and elderly, accepted by doctors, hospitals and German society itself, which had been going on for years, paving the way. The crazy rumours which were accepted by 100s of 1,000s of Jews, nearly always beliefs now clearly seen as pathetic but understandable optimism and absurd hope: Hitler was dead; German soldiers were abandoning the battlefields; liberation is imminent (the latter, believed by many in December, 1939, when there were only a million or so dead). The great Italian filmmaker Antonioni loving the despicable, vile, Jew-hating Nazi film Jud Suss, and awarding it the top award at the 1940 Venice Film Festival, admitting it was propaganda but welcoming it, and admiring how the despicable, absurd, fictional Jewish anti-hero violates the young girl. . . [which was] done with astonishing skill. And I appreciate, although pained by, the author's heartbreaking admission that [T]here is something at once profoundly disturbing yet rapidly numbing in the narration of the anti-Jewish campaign that developed in the territories newly occupied by the Germans or their allies. History seems to turn into a succession of mass killing operations and. . .little else. How true, how inevitable, how devastating. And, yes, Hitler used the word extermination five times during major speeches in the fall of 1941, alone.
It can't all be here, but much of it is: Anne Frank's own reaction in her diary of the rumours of mass gassing of Jews; the outrageous failure of religious Protestants and Catholics to try and save their neighbours who had given them their Messiah; the sick, perverted, scientifically worthless racial experiments on the bodies of the dead; the way even the tiniest Jewish communities on remote Greek islands were tracked down and shipped to death camps; how 250,000 Jews died on the death marches alone. And the too-few good people as well: Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Eastern Europe, handing out thousands of transit visas to doomed Jews, who later wrote that he just acted according to my sense of human justice, out of love for mankind. And the ways that both Bulgaria and Denmark rose above all other nations in saving their neighbours at the risks of their own, non-Jewish lives.
This is an important addition to the enormous library dedicated to this utterly outrageous, still-unbelievable mass slaughter, which occurred during the lifetimes of our own parents, even during some of our own. And we had thought the Dark Ages were long over? There are flaws, such as the favourable reference to Canada's lunatic, eternally-elected Prime Minister who deliberately kept Jews out of our glorious land, William Lyon Mackenzie King, but they are minor. And $49.95, plus GST, is a lot of money for a single volume. But each of us can learn much from merely reading and pondering the names of the three major sections of The Years of Extermenation alone: Part I: Terror (1939-1941); Part II: Mass Murder (1941-1942); Part III: Shoah (1942-1945). Read this, learn from it, weep, and vow to live the words never again.
Allan Gould is an author and journalist who has long studied with Kolel and supported it. He is teaching his fourth course for Kolel in Toronto, in the fall of 2007, on Modern Jewish Literature. (Visit his website: http://www.allangould.com)
