64
PARTISAN REVIEW
Now I think I understand what I couldn't understand before: how
it happened that people who lived near German concentration camps
didn't do anything, didn't help. In Claude Lanzmann's long docu–
mentary on the Holocaust,
Shoah,
there is a dialogue with one of the
survivors from Chelmno, the place in Poland where Jews were first
exterminated by gas,
400,000
of them.
"It was always this peaceful here. Always. Even when they were
burning
2000
people -Jews- every day, it was just as peaceful. No
one protested. Everyone went about his work. It was silent. Peaceful.
Just as it is now," he said... .
I
don't think our responsibility is the same - and I am not trying to
equate the victims with those who murdered them in cold blood - all
I'm saying is that it exists, this complicity: that out of opportunism and
fear we are all becoming collaborators or accomplices in the
perpetuation of war. For by closing our eyes, by continuing our
shopping, by working our land, by pretending that nothing is
happening, by thinking it is not our problem, we are betraying those
"others" - and I don't know if there is a way out of it. What we fail
to realize is that by such divisions we deceive ourselves too, exposing
ourselves to the same possibility of becoming the "others" in a
different situation.
The last time I saw Drazena she told me she was okay. She's
staying in a friend's apartment until the autumn and freelancing for a
local newspaper. Afterwards she will manage to find something else.
She also told me that she is writing a war diary since that is the only
way she can attempt to understand what is happening to her. "And
what I find the most difficult to comprehend is the fact that there is a
war going on," she said. "I still don't understand it. It's not that I
expect a miracle to end this nightmare immediately. No, no. I mean,
it is just hard for me to grasp that what is going on is the war. Do you
know what a war is?" she asked, but I could tell from her look that
she didn't really expect an answer.
.. . We are the war; we carry in us the possibility of the mortal
illness that is slowly reducing us to what we never thought possible
and I am afraid there is no one else to blame. We all make it possible,
we allow it to happen. Our defense is weak, as is our consciousness of
it. There are no them and us, there are no grand categories, abstract
numbers, black and white truths, simple facts. There is only us - and,
yes, we are responsible for each other.
And
I
also wanted to tell Drazena that she should go out and dance
in her high-heeled shoes, if only she could.
Thank you.
