CYNTHIA OllCK
Of Christian Heroism
There
is
a story about Clare Boothe Luce complaining that
she was bored with hearing about the Holocaust. A Jewish
friend of hers said he peifectly understood her sensitivity in
the matter; in fact , he had the same sense of repetitiousness
and fatigue, hearing so often about the CTlIcifixion.
Herbert Gold, "Selfish Like Me"
I.
Of
the great European murder of six million Jews, and the murderers
themselves, there is little to say. The barbaric years when Jews were
hunted down for sport in the middle of the twentieth century have their
hellish immortality, their ineradicable infamy, and will inflame the night–
mares - and (perhaps) harrow the conscience - of the human race until
the sun burns out and takes our poor earth-speck with it. Of the murder
and the murderers everything is known that needs to be known: how it
was done, who did it, who helped, where it was done, and when, and
why. Especially why: the hatred of a civilization that teaches us to say
No to hatred.
Three "participant" categories of the Holocaust are commonly
named: murderers, victims, bystanders.
*
Imagination demands a choosing.
Which, of this entangled trio, are we? Which are we most likely to have
become? Probably it is hardest of all to imagine ourselves victims . After
all, we were here and not there. Or we were Gentiles and not Jews or
Gypsies. Or we were not yet born. But if we had already been born, if
we were there and not here, if we were Jews and not Gentiles ...
"If' is the travail of historians and philosophers, not of the ordinary
human article. What we can be sure of without contradiction - we can
be sure of it because we
are
the ordinary human article - is that, difficult
as it might be to imagine ourselves among the victims, it is not in us even
to begin to think of ourselves as likely murderers. The "banality of evil"
is a catchword of our generation; but no, it is an unusual, an
*We owe the perception of these categories to Raul Hilberg's book,
Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders.
- C. O.
