552
PARTISAN REVIEW
In Auschwitz and Majdanek, in Belzec and Treblinka,
In Ponari and Bergen-Belsen-
You know how
to
describe that spectacle in its every line,
every groan, every glance.
You have the imagination, and You have the strong nerves of
diivinity-
-Uri Zvi Greenberg, "Streets of the River"
We don't have the "strong nerves of divinity." We won't watch a con–
tinuous showing of, let us say, six hours each day over a period of fifty
years. Lanzmann's attempt is therefore doomed to failure in the same sense
that the efforts of Tolstoy, Joyce, and Proust were shattered by the limits of
human time. It is not possible to document everything.
It
is impossible to de–
scribe that spectacle in its every line, every groan, every glance. But that is
the thrust of Lanzmann's efforts. It is his way of comprehending the
"incomprehensible."
IfAdolf Hitler had given strict orders to destroy all the house pets and
farm animals throughout the Third Reich, dogs and cats, parrots and goldfish,
horses, cows, goats, sheep, and pigs, we can assume there would have been
outbreaks ofcivil disobedience throughout occupied Europe and in Germany
itself. After all, one cares for one's dog or cat. People would have tried to
hide their house pets until the mad verdict was over. The extermination of
horses, cows, and pigs would have incensed millions whose livelihood this
would have jeopardized, not to mention the threat to the war effort, or the
fact that everyone would have realized immediately that whoever had given
the orders to destroy the animals was stark raving mad.
But there is no point in such reflections: aJew is neither a goldfish nor
a pig. In the Department ofJewish Affairs of the Reich Ministry of Defense,
at 116 Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, Adolf Eichmann and his aides sat and or–
ganized the killing of six million human beings in accordance with vague,
sketchy instructions in a letter ("to carry out all preparations with regard to a
total solution of the Jewish question") that had been sent from the office of
Hermann Goring to Reinhard Heydrich. The enormous project was carried
out without burdening the German taxpayer with a single penny's expendi–
ture: historian Raul Hilberg explains on camera that the Gestapo purchased
group-fare tickets at a discount (half-price for children) from the Reich rail–
road authority. The tickets were paid for with Jewish money expropriated
by the Gestapo from bank accounts owned by Jews. The special tracks, the
camps and barracks, the disrobing rooms, the gas chambers, and the crema–
toria were built by Jewish slave labor. The production line itself was oper–
ated by a handful of Germans, aided by Lithuanian and Ukrainian guard
