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LIONEL ABel
sidered: The only point of view which could have been expressed
against that of the Council leaders-assuming I am right about
what their point of view was-would have had to be a view not
exclusively concerned with the survival of the Jews, but rather
with some other political or ideological value, for the sake of which
those Jews committed to it might have called upon the entire Jewish
population to sacrifice themselves immediately in order to do some
damage-which could not have been great, in any case-to the
Nazi war machine. The horror and the irony of the situation may
be expressed thus: It was probably the leaders in the Jewish Coun–
cils, the very men who were surrendering Jews to the Nazis for
extermination, who represented in the discussions with Socialists and
left-wing Zionists the value of saving the lives of Jews above all
other considerations.
Miss Arendt evidently did not investigate whether any such
discussions took place or speculate on what arguments might have
been employed. And she limits herself to the description of the
sensational facts, which, while they add to our nausea, add nothing
to our clarity about what actually happened in Nazi Europe and
why the Jewish leaders behaved as they did. Miss Arendt writes: "In
Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials
could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property,
to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their
deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments,
to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until,
as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community
in good order for final confiscation. They distributed the Yellow
Star
badges, and sometimes, as in Warsaw, 'the sale of the armbands
be–
came a regular business; there were ordinary armbands of cloth and
fancy plastic armbands which were washable.' In the Nazi-inspired,
but not Nazi-dictated, manifestos they issued, we still can sense how
they enjoyed their new power-'The Central Jewish Council has been
granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and
material wealth and over all Jewish manpower'-as the first an·
nouncement of the Budapest Council phrased it." (About the
Budapest Council's statement: How does Miss Arendt know that
the Jewish leaders enjoyed making their pronouncement, which she
admits the Nazis required them to make? And how, I wonder, could
