HUE AND CRY
93
I have already given some indication of Abel's morality as a critic,
which permits him the free use of pseudo-paraphrase and downright
invention. Now I have space for only three more examples. The first
is the shifting use he makes of the word "victims." Miss Arendt criticizes
the Jewish leadership; the Jewish leaders became victims; ergo, Miss
Arendt criticizes the victims. The implication is that she is criticizing
four and a half to six million innocent people. Second, he says he
"wondered" when he read Miss Arendt's book why she did not deal
with the killing of the Jews in the Ukraine. He did not wonder long; the
reason was obvious to him: because this would have destroyed her whole
thesis about the role of the Jewish leaders in the extermination of the
Jews. She mentions several times the
Einsatzgruppen
shootings of the
Jews in the Russian territories: they were shot on the spot together
with Communist functionaries, Gypsies, criminals, and insane people.
There were no Jewish organizations in Russia, but there were Jewish
councils in Poland, yet she does not deal with the extermination of
Polish Jewry-a thing about which I wondered myself. But since I
genuinely wondered, I was able to find a genuine answer on pages
197-198. The answer is Eichmann; he had nothing to do with the
shootings in the East or with the gassing of Polish Jews or the manage–
ment of Polish ghettoes. He was concerned with the logistics of supply–
ing Jews to the death camps. Here too was where the Jewish Councils
came in; they were, so to speak, Eichmann's draft board. Where the
Einsatzgruppen shot masses of victims on the spot, there was no trans–
portation problem, no question of selection, and no need for Jewish
organizations, even if they had existed. The story of the Jews of the East
was separate from the story of Eichmann, to which Miss Arendt restricted
herself as much as possible.
An explanation, incidentally, of the ease with which not only Jews
but other groups were rounded up and massacred in the Russian
territories was offered me by a Polish friend. The Stalinist state ap–
paratus had abolished all other social structures, and when it collapsed
after the invasion in the occupied territories, there was nothing, a social
void.
It
was impossible to hide, for there were no hiding-places-no
convents, estates, private peasant farms. Most of the Jewish children
who survived in Poland were hidden in convents, and villagers used to
sell food to Jews hiding in the woods, which would have been impossible
in a Russian collective, where everything was known. Stalin's totalitarian
state had eliminated privacy.
Returning to Abel, here is the third example. "Why did Eichmann
not suspect that the killing of so many defenseless persons was evil?
