AESTHETICS OF EVIL
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known in advance that Hitler's decision about the remrumng Jews
in Lodz would be so senseless or so mad? Chaim had been a brutal
and unscrupulous servant of the Nazis. But it is said that when he
saw at last that his plan had failed, he voluntarily got on one of the
vans headed for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Certainly Miss
Arendt should have told the whole story of the Lodz ghetto.
But just as she omits those facts which would serve to ex–
plain the behavior of the Jewish Councils, she has omitted facts
which would serve to extenuate their actions. She does mention
the one instance, tow,ard the end of the war, of allied intervention
to save Jewish lives: Roosevelt's threat to Hungary that it would
not be treated as a civilized nation if the deportation of Jews from
that country were not stopped. But she does not mention the various
previous occasions when the leaders of the Jewish Councils begged
the Allies to intervene for the Jews by bombing trains so that
deportees could escape and threatening harsh treatment after allied
victory if the deportations were not stopped. On these occasions,
which Miss Arendt does not mention, but which Hilberg does not
fail to, the leaders of the Councils got no response from the Allies.
Now surely their isolation from the West must be taken into ac–
count in any reasonable judgment of their cooperation with the
Gennans.
Making her terrible charge against the Jewish leaders, Miss
Arendt yet does not feel obliged to make the charge specific.
Charging them with collaborating in the destruction of their
fellow Jews, she never specifies why they did so. Was it out of
political stupidity or moral baseness? Sometimes she implies that
the Jewish leaders were merely stupid in helping their own de–
stroyers; at other times that they were receiving material benefits
beyond the hope of personal survival. When she mocks Kastner for
having sacrificed over four hundred thousand lives in order to save
a few more than a thousand, one does not know whether to weep over
the disproportion between the numbers of the saved and the slain,
or whether to regard Kastner as a fool or a knave. In fact Miss
Arendt's figures are false; Kastner by his ransoming operation
saved some eighteen thousand Jews; moreover his ransoming opera–
tion had nothing whatever to do with the deportations and ex–
terminations directed by Eichmann. Kastner negotiated the ransom
