264
MARIE SYRKIN
writes: "Miss Arendt's other famous sentence, that without the coopera–
tion of the Jewish Councils four and a half to six million Jews would not
have perished seems to me almost self-evidently true." Since this is
indeed the crucial sentence, one might have assumed that Miss McCarthy
would have troubled to check the text. Miss Arendt actually wrote: "But
the whole truth ' was that there existed Jewish community organizations
and Jewish party and welfare associations on both the local and inter–
national level. Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish
leaders, and these leaders, almost without exception, cooperated in one
way or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish
people had really been unorganized and leaderless there would have
been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would
hardly have been between five and six million."
Even without a pair of Jewish spectacles the difference between
Miss McCarthy's paraphrase and the text is apparent. Miss McCarthy
confines the charge of Jewish guilt to the Jewish Councils (whose
ambiguous role had been discussed by Jewish historians of the period
long before Miss Arendt) whereas Miss Arendt accuses the Jewish
people in its totality, in every part of the world, of complicity in the
holocaust. Is Miss McCarthy really surprised that those familiar with
the heroic efforts of Jews in Palestine and America to save European
Jews through illegal immigration, ransom, negotiation and organized
resistance should be outraged? I shall make no attempt to reargue the
case here; I merely suggest that Miss McCarthy try to understand
what the "hue and cry" is about.
When she writes specifically of the Jewish Councils, Miss McCarthy
declares categorically: "And where the terror ruled-in the camps,
prisons, and ghettoes-Miss Arendt in
Eichmann in Jerusalem
does not
propose that anyone could have done anything but obey." Where on earth
does Miss McCarthy suppose that the Jewish Councils functioned?
Miss Arendt's strictures fall most heavily on the Jewish Councils in the
Polish ghettoes; nor does she exclude the Jewish Council in the con–
centration camp of Theresienstadt from her list of the culpable. And
yet Miss McCarthy assures us that she read the book twice.
What is one to make of this myopia? The most charitable interpreta–
tion of lapses such as Miss McCarthy's and of the confusion among her
"Gentile friends and relations" is ignorance of the events recorded by
Miss Arendt and a consequent inability to appreciate the implications
of the text no matter how explicit.
But Miss McCarthy does not let it go at that. She tells us that she
found Miss Arendt's account of the extermination of six million Jews
