LmERS
T o the Edito r:
I am a great admirer of Cynthia
Ozick, whether in her novels or in
her essays, and of her unambivalent
attitude about being Jewish in the
post-Holocaust era. Two years ago, I
invited her to be on a panel with
Gunter Grass, and she refused, saying:
"I will never be on a panel with a
German." When I suggested that
Grass is a different German, as he al–
ways talks about German responsib–
ility for Auschwitz, she retorted, "He
likes to talk about Auschwitz because
it deals with dead Jews."
I was, therefore, very surprised at
the vagueness and ambiguity in her
essay "Of Christian Heroism"
(PR
1,
1992). While her skepticism and ana–
lytic objectivity can be deduced from
her statement "How I want to assent
to his [Paldiel's] thesis," and al–
though she obviously does not as–
sent, her essay will no doubt be mis–
understood. I am afraid that her
skepticism will be negated by the ti–
tle "Of Christian Heroism" or by
the inclusion of this essay as an in–
troduction to the book titled
Rescuers . Portraits of Moral Courage in
the Holocaust.
How is it then that, if she can–
not accept Paldiel's view of the righ–
teous persons, she presents herself in
such a vague, un-Ozick-like way? In
her essay "Primo Levi's Suicide
Note," she talks about Levi's being
brought to the boiling point by a
letter from a German who pleads
with him to "remember the innu–
merable Germans who suffered in
their struggle against inequity." She
seems to agree with Levi who, in re–
sponse to that letter, scorned "the
apologists, the liars, the false repen–
tants," but in her own essay, there is a
feeling of hagiography when it
comes to rescuers.
I personally do not think that
Mordechai Paldiel, Director of the
Department for the Righteous at Yad
Vashem, is an objective observer. If
he were, he wouldn't call Freud's
theories "brainwashing." His posi–
tion, however, is very important be–
cause we are faced here with the po–
tential for distortion of history.
Paldiel is like a gardener whose life
depends on the number and the
quality of the trees he takes care of. I
know of only one of these trees, and
it is rotten.
In my memoir,
The Lost
Childhood,
I describe how the
Germans on whose estate my sister
and I worked in 1944-45 didn't
know that we were Jews, as
we
had
false papers claiming we were Polish
Catholics. In 1962, a young German
arrived in Tel Aviv at my sister's
apartment and announced that he
was
Wolfgang, the little boy she had
taken care of at the estate in
Herzberg. His parents had told him
so much about her that he had to
meet her and see Israel. He stayed in
Israel for six months, and he decided
that because they had saved our lives,
his parents were righteous Gentiles
who should be inscribed at Yad
Vashem. Wolfgang got my mother's
and my sister's approval for the in-
