AESTHETICS OF EVIL
227
I want to ask Miss Arendt now: what were the alternatives before
the leaders of the Jewish Councils between 1941 and 1944? Could
they have chosen between good and evil? But in 1951 you wrote
that no one under a totalitarian state had any choice except between
murder and murder.
Yet today Miss Arendt in an interview with a
Newsweek
reporter,
defending the position she took in
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
condemns
even more explicitly than she did in her book the leaders of the
Jewish Councils: They should have told the Jews they could not
help them, they could only share their fate . But, the interviewer then
wanted to know, what should the Jews have done? To this question
Miss Arendt replied: they should have gone underground. But a
whole people cannot go into clandestinity; a whole people cannot
hide: And does Miss Arendt suppose that the Jews never thought of
hiding? I quote from Raul Hilberg: "In Galicia the Jews were
particularly aware of their fate because they had already witnessed
the mobile killing operations in 1941. In the words of the SS and
the police report, they 'tried every means in order to dodge evacua–
tion.' They concealed themselves in 'every imaginable quarter, in
pipes, chimneys, even in sewers.' They 'built barricades in passages
of catacombs, in cellars enlarged to dugouts, in underground holes,
in cunningly contrived hiding places, in attics, and sheds.' . . . The
Germans in Galicia proceeded without restraint." And how could
the Jews of Warsaw-between ghetto walls-have gone underground?
Let me repeat once again: Miss Arendt's book
On the Origins
of Totalitarianism
strongly stressed the impossibility of effective re–
sistance to totalitarian rule. Had her book been written and read and
credited during the war, there would have been no underground
resistance movements anywhere in Europe-and certainly no under–
ground movement of European Jews. Had
On the Origins of Totali–
tarianism
been read and believed true in East Germany before 1954,
there would have been no Berlin uprising. Had it been read and
believed in Poland and in Hungary before 1956, there would have
been no Hungarian or Polish revolutions, and Miss Arendt, in 1957,
would have not had to write an epilogue for a new edition of her
book so as to explain how the Hungarian revolt could have taken
place. Every position Miss Arendt maintained in her book on
