CYNTHIA OZICK
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exceptional, thing to volunteer for the S.S.; to force aged Jews to their
knees to scrub the gutter with their beards; to empty Zyklon B canisters
into the hole in the roof of the gas chamber; to enact those thousand
thousand atrocities that lead to the obliteration of a people and a
culture.
The victims take our pity and our horror, and whatever else we can,
in our shame, cede to their memory. But they do not puzzle us. It does
not puzzle us that the blood of the innocent cries up from the ground -
how could it be otherwise? Even if humanity refuses to go on remem–
bering, the voices crushed in the woods and under the fresh pavements of
Europe press upward. The new plants that cover the places where corpses
were buried in mass pits carry blood in their dew. Basement-whispers
trouble the new blocks of flats that cover the streets where the flaming
Warsaw Ghetto fell. The heavy old sideboards of the thirties that once
stood in Jewish dining rooms in certain neighborhoods of Berlin and
Vienna are in Catholic and Protestant dining rooms now, in neighbor–
hoods where there are no longer any Jews; the great carved legs of these
increasingly valued antiques groan and remember the looting. The books
that were thrown onto bonfires in the central squares of every German
city still send up their flocks of quivering phantom letters.
All that - the looting, the shooting, the herding, the forced
marches, the gassing, the torching of synagogues, the cynicism, the
mendacity, the shamelessness, the truncheons, the bloodthirstiness, the
fanaticism, the opportunism, the Jews of Europe as prey, their
dehumanization, the death factories, the obliteration of a civilization, the
annihilation of a people - all that it is possible to study, if not to
assimilate. Pious Jews, poor Jews, secular Jews, universalist Jews, baptized
Jews, Jews who were storekeepers, or doctors, or carpenters, or
professors, or teamsters, Jewish infants and children - all annihilated.
Thousands upon thousands of Jewish libraries and schools looted and
destroyed. Atrocity spawns an aftermath - perhaps an afterlife. In the last
four decades the documents and the testimonies have been heaped higher
and higher - yet a gash has been cut in the world's brain that cannot be
healed by memorial conferences or monuments. Lamentation for the
martyred belongs now to the history of cruelty and to the earth. There
is no paucity of the means to remember; there may be a paucity of the
will
to remember. Still, we know what we think of the murders and the
murderers. Weare not at a loss to know how to regard them.
But what of the bystanders? They were not the criminals, after all.
For the bystanders we should feel at least the pale warmth of recognition
- call it self-recognition. And nowadays it is the bystanders whom we
most notice, though at the time, while the crimes were in progress, they
seemed the least noticeable. We notice them now because they are the
