562
PARTISAN REVIEW
trees, you have to think of small plants with shallow roots.' "
Arkin says, "Enough, enough of this Weimar schmaltz. Cut it, Mar–
gotte!'
And Uncle Sammler, that Cyclops saved from the killing, says: "The
idea of making the century's great crime look dull is not banal. Politically,
psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only
camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it
look ordinary, boring, or trite? With horrible political insight they found a way
to disguise the thing. Intellectuals do not understand. They get their notions
about matters like this from literature. They expect a wicked hero like
Richard the Third. But do you think the Nazis didn't know what murder
was? Everybody (except certain bluestockings) knows what murder is. That
is very old human knowledge. The best and purest human beings, from the
beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred. To defy that old
understanding is not banality. There was a conspiracy against the sacredness
of life. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish
conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial. This woman
professor's [Hannah Arendt] enemy is modern civilization itself. She is only
using the Germans to attack the twentieth century.... Making use of a tragic
history to promote the foolish ideas ofWeimar intellectuals."
No, no: they were definitely
Human beings: uniforms; boots.
How shall I explain? They were created
in God's image.
r
was a shadow.
I had a different Creator.
-Dan Pagis, "Slavery," from the collection,
Metamorphosis
The Polish stationmaster at Sobibor, a man who looks and acts like a
pedantic grammar-school teacher, tells in the film how labor details ofJews
were first brought in to build the camp. "We thought it would be a sort ofla–
bor camp. Early in June, the first transport arrived, accompanied by SS
troops in black uniforms.
It
was in the afternoon just after I had finished
work. There were screams and groans in German, crying, whining, a lot of
noise. When I came back to work the next morning, it was already abso–
lutely quiet. I had no idea they were involved in the total extermination of
all
the Jews. I asked myself: Where are they? Where did they put all those
Jews? All was quiet. There was an idyllic silence."
