The Last Witness
Imagine
it: the end of an era. The last person able to testify to all that transpired,
to all that befell us, the last person who could affirm that we indeed saw what
we saw, is gone. Of all the rememberers, I alone am left to sit here, knowing
that my time will also come. And then, what becomes of the tale?
I am
limited in what I remember; I was not yet three when the war ended. What value
is there in the few horrific scenes I can conjure? The historical record is not
enriched by them. My memory has become a datum, a relic. Valid, but
inessential.
While
they still lived, I stood among the other survivors, seasoned, wizened men and
women who were perpetually old, prematurely gaunt. Their bodies reflected those
days. The deep shadows of what they had once taken in never left them.
They
would glance at me in passing, surveying my inconsequentiality, often with
patience, often without. I was a fly. “Do you really know, child,” they would
ask, “do you really know what it is to have your parents shot before your eyes,
do you really know what it is to have your grandparents thrown out of the
upstairs window during a liquidation?”
Did I
know? I would put my hands in my pockets and shrug, looking, in those early
days, for a cigarette. Did I know? The question was an accusation. You do not
understand, they were saying, you were too young to make sense of it. The
carnage and death, the murder by fever and by hunger—all of which I witnessed,
some of which I experienced—were not valid to them because I could not have
made sense of such experiences as they occurred. My testimony was that of a
blind man. I heard the noises, put it all together later; not acceptable in a
court of law, not sufficiently real.
“You say
you were there,” they argued. “But you really weren’t.”
Then they
would appear astonished at the pain that came over my face from such
invalidation and would hastily take pity.
“Bist
geven a yingeleh,” they would say. It’s not your fault, you were just a
kid. Children, they meant, are frivolous; let’s not take their experiences
seriously.
They are
all gone now. Their hoary heads and Polish teeth have crossed the great divide,
and I alone, I alone am left to tell the tale. I’m a bit of a fake, don’t you
think? A bit of a liar, no?
When
those memories I did possess would beckon, I trembled. Sleepless nights would
become my lot, filled with chills and despair. They were without solace,
without consolation. I would not allow love. Love promised that what little
memory I did have would be submerged. Love meant the cesspool that was
Bergen-Belsen would disappear.
When I
was 10 years old, my father murdered, my mother married a man in Montreal who
forbade mention of the Holocaust. Shall we let it disappear, I wondered? And if
we did, would I continue being? I lived with him but did not take up with him.
I did
not, could not, remember what brought on my nocturnal fits of madness; there
were no visual scenes in my imagination when primordial terrors wracked my
body. I could not remember why I would periodically get mammoth rheumatic tremors
that seized me in the darkness and in the light. I did not remember why
Mother’s moans of terror shuddered within me decades after she died. I knew
that I was afraid of her, not for what she had been but for what she had
become. I knew that I did not have, did not want to have, the toughness in her
that allowed her to survive. Yet did it enter me, yet does it overtake me. It
turns people away when they sense it; I am not easy to love.
For all
that, I did not visit my past, really, never gave it a glance, until I turned
50. Slowly I stared at it, slowly, with index cards, I put it into
chronological order: the Hague, Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen, the Hague.
Soon
after the end of the Holocaust, in Montreal, I fell in with other child
survivors. They made up fully a third of my seventh-grade class. We were silent
about our past. When the topic came up, we would become restless and look about
anxiously for distraction. We did not want to be witnesses; we just wanted to
be like everyone else. Eventually we each became an anti-witness. We didn’t
want to hear about it, talk about it; we pretended that the ordeal happened to
others, to those who did have numbers on their arms. Perhaps we understood that
the mature survivors constituted the most humiliated group of people on earth,
and we wanted no part of their residual shame.
Mother
died when I turned 40. Freddie, a tad older than I, came to sit with me at her
shivah.
“Do you
remember, Joseph,” he said, “do you remember how we used to play hide-and-seek
around the corpses in Bergen-Belsen?”
I did not
remember, but it was this question, coming from him, that allowed me to accept
myself as a survivor. And it has taken nearly three decades following that
shivah for me to have learned that what my mind does not remember, my body
does, and so does my soul.
Hesitantly
I take my place among the survivors. I get into the line at the gates of the
death camps, and I am there, more in death than in life.
And so I
sometimes entertain this fantasy that, because of my sheer youth during those
years, I am the Last Witness. The Holocaust will pass out of experience and
into history. There will be no one left to say “and then they took my parents
away and I never saw them again,” or “Moishalleh died in my arms; he had not
eaten anything in two weeks and his nine-year-old frame could not take it any
more,” or “my high school teacher examined all the boys in the class, and all
the circumcised ones were expelled.”
I carry
this fear that when I disappear, so will the last memories of that great
darkness, so will the fecal stench that attended the typhus, so will the
ravages of the outdoors that attended the roll calls, and the stiffness,
everywhere, of the corpses. And in the absence of such primary memories, how
long will it take for a civilized country again to allow a leader into office
who harbors evil beliefs and insidious desires? And how long until the
physicians and lawyers and judges and philosophers and writers and musicians
and composers and conductors join his cause?
I wonder:
If I indeed turn out to be the Last Witness, will my death mark the beginning
of the Great Forgetting?
At such
moments, fortunately, I have also come to realize the arrogance of such
questions, and to understand that such arrogance is where idolatry and atheism
begin.
For I
will not be the Last Witness; the last Witness will be the greatest, the most
humiliated Witness of all. I speak of course, of G-d Himself. He Who is
everywhere had to have been there, too. He had to have been present, and
He had to have witnessed His reputation as redeemer and savior of Israel sink
into the mud of Treblinka and Belzec.
“What
will the Egyptians say?” Moses asks when G-d threatens to destroy Israel after
they worship the Golden Calf. “Do you want them to say that You took the Jews
out of Egypt only so that You might destroy them Yourself when they reached the
desert?”
The
argument worked; He was averse to being misconstrued.
There is
a scene in the great Rolf Hochhuth play The Deputy in which a priest
asks the character Hochhuth, based on Josef Mengele, something along the line
of, “Have you no fear of divine retribution? Do you not believe that G-d will
call you to account for this?”
And
Mengele is made to answer: “You have no idea, no idea, how I wish with all my
heart that He strike me down, that He slay me every time I send a child to the
gas. But He doesn’t.”
No one
came out of the Holocaust looking worse than G-d. He is compassionate, the
theologians used to say! He hates evil, they claimed! Omnipotent, they said!
Caring for His chosen people, the liturgy reads: “Ha-oneh le`amo yisrael
be-et shavom elav” (“He Who answers the prayer of His people whenever they
turn to Him”). Not this time, not six million times.
Yet
although He did not save six million of His people, in an extraordinary
reversal of roles and of history, His people, the ones who did survive, saved
Him.
The
rabbis who escaped the infernos spent scant time contemplating, much less
bemoaning what the philosopher Martin Buber has called the eclipse of G-d.
“With ten
trials was Abraham tested,” the Mishnah recalls, and he passed them all. Why
didn’t Abraham ask G-d all those moral questions about his final trial, the
binding of Isaac? “Didn’t you just promise me a chapter ago that my seed will
come through Isaac? What am I now supposed to tell people about divine
commitments? Is Isaac guilty of something that merits the death penalty? With
respect to Isaac, shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” Abraham,
who clearly knows such questions, does not ask them. When you are in love, as
Abraham was with G-d, your love sabotages all such inquiries. Rashi, the great
medieval teacher and exegete, says it most clearly: “Lo hirher ahar midotav
merov ahavato” (“Because of his great love for G-d, Abraham was not interested
in G-d’s intentions and agendas”).
The rabbi
of Zanz-Klausenberg, who came out of the camps shaven and shrunk, raged for
years about his Holocaust experiences, yet skipped nary a beat in his loving
worship of his creator, and embarked almost at once on a successful campaign to
build a hospital. The rabbis of Bobov, Ungvar, and Satmar created housing for
the poor and provided food programs for the infirm. Like the rabbi of Modzhits,
another survivor, who composed and sang his way through the 1950s and 1960s,
they built houses of worship, ritual baths, and educational institutions in
numbers unmatched ever in Jewish history.
The
mighty theological questions emerging from that muddy darkness, they found,
merely led back to the gates of Auschwitz, and they chose not to go back there.
Never would they be humiliated again, and never again would they permit G-d
such humiliation.
And they
had confidence that He Who commands the dawn to follow the night will represent
them fairly when the last witness is gone, that He Himself will report on the
heroism of the victims and on how, in their last moments, they sanctified His
name.
The Last
Witness will join the legions of victims in the celestial palace that is touted
as the place where Elijah, in G-d’s presence, will provide the mighty
answers—including one that deals with the great absence while one-and-a-half
million Jewish children were being murdered.
Two lines
will form in heaven, each of them silent. No one will be asking Elijah a
thing.
The first
line, with Dostoevsky as its guide, might say: “Elijah, tell G-d that we really
have no interest in post-facto explanations about His great absence; it’s just
too late for explanations, too much injustice, too much cruelty has been
allowed to happen. The notion of an adequate answer to such horror is itself
repulsive.”
The
second line, forming the dialectic, would have Abraham as its guide. It might
assert, “It was never about us, Elijah; we never sought, and still don’t need,
explanations. It was always about G-d. We just couldn’t bear His vast
humiliation, and we did what we could to mitigate it. Blessed be His name for
ever and ever.”
And, were
I the Last Witness, I would rage against both camps and ask how dare they
remain silent, what self-absorbed luxury were they indulging, anyway, when the
memory of that time, of those children, is in danger of dissipating?
“Where is
G-d?” I would thunder at Elijah.“Is He out there reciting the names of the
camps? Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor? Is He reading the names of the
victims?” I would pound the tables with both hands. “Is He weeping?”
About the Author
Joseph Polak is Hillel Rabbi and University
Chaplain at Boston University. He is completing a memoir on the first 10 years
of his life, which include surviving both the Holocaust and its aftermath.
God, the Holocaust, and
Divine Memory
November
2012
To the
Editor:
I read
with aroused interest Rabbi Joseph Polak’s “The Last Witness” [July/August].
What got my attention was Polak’s imagining briefly the unanswerable question
in relation to the Holocaust. As he uniquely cries it out:
“Where is
G-d?…Is He out there reciting the names of the camps? Belsen, Treblinka,
Majdanek, Sobibor? Is He reading the names of the victims?…Is He weeping?”
These
questions are meant to rebuke two opposing assertions put to Elijah as to the
“great absence while one-and-a-half million Jewish children were being
murdered.” The first imagined assertion is Dostoevskian, that there can be no
answer to, or explanation of, such transcendent injustice and cruelty. God
should stay silent. The second, opposite, assertion is Abrahamic, that man
cannot question God, cannot demand explanations and answers of such awesome
divinity.
The
rebuke is rageful. How dare anyone remain silent? What self-indulgence allows
such silence?
Polak’s
questions admit of no answer. They ask what kind of a God would allow such
suffering and killing? Who is this God? Wherefore His “great absence”? What
penance does He do? Polak “would pound the tables with both hands.” His God
must be held to account. Polak is engaged in an imagined confrontation with his
creator, from whom he demands some action of remembrance, contrition, and
atonement.
I, a
non-believer, take a different view. I ask no such questions (of whom, after
all?). I am interested in Polak’s questions insofar as they reveal to me the
absurdity of belief and faith in light of the overwhelming evil of the
Holocaust (in which an uncle and cousin of mine were killed, and during which
another cousin of mine suffered but survived the depredations of the
concentration camp).
I get no
succor or relief from being able to make my God human and contend ferociously
with Him. It is a wasted effort. For its presupposition is that there is some
divinity worthy of such contention, which concedes reification of a notional
God.
If there ever
were an occasion that informs Jews that God is not great, that belief and faith
in Him are preposterous, and that by them we diminish ourselves and the meaning
of the Holocaust, then the Holocaust itself must be that occasion.
Itzik Basman
Toronto, Ontario
_____________
To the
Editor:
Joseph
Polak’s heartfelt and stirring article resonates within me. Like him, I was
born in the Hague, Holland. Unlike him, I survived in hiding, not in
Bergen-Belsen. My memory was questioned by adults, my suffering diminished by
the assumption of adults that the madness had not touched we youngsters: “You
were only a child.”
Joseph
and his friend played hide-and-seek around the corpses in Bergen-Belsen. I did
not play at all. We children who grew up overnight, did not know play. We were
co-operative with our hiders, remained silent unless bidden to talk, and we did
not cry.
It
appears we two little Dutch boys, Joseph Polak and I, now aged 70 and 72
respectively, are indeed fated to be among the last Shoah survivor witnesses,
along with G-d. But can we trust Him to be a reliable witness?
Robert Krell
Vancouver, British Columbia
_____________
Joseph
Polak writes:
I am
struck by how well Mr. Basman read my article, and am grateful for the
frankness with which he presents his non-belief. And, if I understand him
correctly, he is proposing a kind of Occam’s razor in Holocaust theology: It
takes fewer assumptions from the experience of the Holocaust to conclude that
there is no G-d than it takes to conclude that there still is one.
Alas,
were Mr. Occam alive, I think he would take issue with Mr. Basman. The
Holocaust does not pose a single challenge to G-d as Creator, nor to the
integrity of His recorded revelation, nor—come to think of it—to most of the
classical philosophical proofs that Anselm and Descartes proposed. It does
raise questions about our understanding of His role in history—perhaps because
we got this wrong in the first place, or perhaps because without the advantage
of old-fashioned prophetic revelation, it is impossible to make sense of this
role. However, let me assure Mr. Basman that Jews who observe the Sabbath or
immerse themselves in the study of the tradition do not seem to feel that they
are alone. Nor do they feel that they are deluding themselves.
My
article is not about G-d’s existence but instead about divine memory: It is a
sort of Midrash on the 2,000-year-old High Holiday liturgy, which claims ve-en
shikcha lifnei kisei kevodecho (“there is no forgetting before Your
glorious Throne”). More than us, it is G-d Who will have to live with the
memory of the Holocaust. What is He doing with this memory?
To my dear friend Robert Krell, the psychiatrist
who has dedicated his life to helping child survivors of the Holocaust maneuver
their way out of the horror of their memories, my answer is not much different.
If G-d can forget nothing—in some ways, that’s terrible. So what is the best
way for Him to deal with the Holocaust? Repress it? I think He will be more
reliable on keeping the message alive than Dr. Krell gives Him credit for! Or,
as I say in the article, I certainly hope so.
(today) Dear Rabbi Polak:
I just today discovered the publication of my letter in November 2012 Commentary concerning your cri de coeur essay, The Last Witness, itself appearing in the July/August 2012 edition
of the magazine. I also noted your gracious but respectfully dissenting
response, which I very much appreciated.
I’ll hope you don’t mind a pretty brief, direct response rather than
engaging the labyrinthine process of writing back via Commentary.
I wonder whether, respectfully, if I’m comprehending your meaning,
you’ve accurately characterized my essential point:
... And, if I understand him correctly, he is proposing a kind of
Occam’s razor in Holocaust theology:
It takes fewer assumptions from the experience of the Holocaust to conclude
that there is no G-d than it takes to conclude that there still is one...(my
bolding emphasis)
The problem with this characterization, as I read it, is that it locates
what I’m saying within the framework, and upon the premises, of Holocaust
theology, and that you say I say it simplifies matters considerably—hence the
razor, less assumptions—to conclude from the experience of the Holocaust that
there is no God rather than that there is one. But I do not come to my
nonbelief from the experience of the Holocaust. The formulation that I do puts
my nonbelieving cart before my nonbelieving horse.
Rather, I come to my nonbelief by all the intellectual, emotional and
experiential means at my disposal over the course of my reading, thinking,
academic, writing and lived life. My idea of a “Godless Holocaust” comes from
all of that, not the other way around. So for me there is no Occam’s razor that
I bring to the Holocaust theology; for me there ought be no theology-- the
inquiry into the existence and nature of the divine and its relation to, and
influence on, all things—in relation to the Holocaust or to anything else.
One other point—and I mean not to engage in a debate about whether God
exists: you say, “My article is not about G-d’s existence but instead about
divine memory...” In my field of meagre competence, the law, and the litigated
law at that, and from the little I know about formal logic, what you say is a
proper example of begging the question, as well as begging the subsidiary
question.
The question begged is God’s existence, that, again, only respectfully,
not to be o’erleaped by “a sort of Midrash” on divine memory, which presupposes
divinity,
The subsidiary question begged, to my mind, indeed perhaps a matter for
Holocaust theology as well as other modes of thought and inquiry, is, exactly,
the resolution of the awful, terrible tension between belief and faith on one
scale and God’s existence on the other. Enragedly pounding the table with both
hands, ferociously contending with Him, heartbreakingly asking “Where is G-d”
seem to me the wrong responses and the wrong question. The question should be,
I argue, foundational not presuppositional. How can there be a God who can
visit such incomprehensible, underserved smiting on His Chosen people? How can
I, by any means issuing from my mind and heart, reconcile my belief and faith
with the experience of the Holocaust?
