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me to wonder if Sartre could distinguish between the real and the in–
vented Jew. The true issue is that if Jews do not define themselves, they
will be defined by anti-Semites, or their very close cousins the philo–
Semites who define Jews as people who have suffered. What forces Jews
ever deeper into this dilemma is historical revisionism, by which another
generation of Nazis forces another generation of Jews to focus on the
Holocaust. Revisionists are more than maddening quacks insisting the
world is flat in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Where
there are denials of the facts of the Holocaust there are invariably trails
that lead to organized neo-Nazis. For how can anyone support a political
movement that once arbitrarily murdered six million people as the official
enactment of a state policy? It must be denied in order to be done all over
again. The mentality was clearly exposed by an anonymous hand that
scrawled on the walls of a Paris suburb, "Auschwitz was a lie," and in the
same handwriting, "Gas the Jews."
There is good reason to focus on the Holocaust sites of Central
Europe. Since the fall of Communism, revisionism has taken on an even
more dangerous form in this part of Europe. I ran into this on my first
trip to post-Communist Poland. I was sharing a train compartment with a
nineteen-year-old Pole from Cracow. He was very excited to meet an
actual Jew. I was his first Jew and he was my first Polish philo-Semite, the
weird new breed of Polish anti-Semite. He loved Isaac Bashevis Singer
and had read all of his books. Upon learning I was Jewish, he immediately
wanted to apologize to me for Gomulka's anti-Zionist campaign of 1968.
"That was the greatest disgrace in Polish history," he magnanimously de–
clared. Later he got down to questioning me about the avariciousness of
Jews and the length of their noses. The point about the 1968 smear
campaign is the claim that the Communists were as bad as the Nazis. If it
is accepted that the Communists were as evil as the Nazis, it would not
take long to get the idea accepted that the Nazis did no worse than the
Communists, that the Holocaust was something like Gomulka's 1968
campaign. This is only one of the dangerous games being played by many
establishment figures in today's new united Germany. When it is written
in the opinion pages of
Die Welt
that Erich Honecker was "the greatest
German murderer and war criminal" it is hard to believe that there is not
some international revisionism underfoot. Honecker did not murder six
million people, cause the deaths of twice that many, author a Final
Solution, establish a massive network of killing centers. If the Nazi record
can be reduced to that of Erich Honecker, then the neo-Nazis are in
business, and as they like to say, "Gennany can be proud again."
Jews have good reason to work actively to keep the memory of the
Holocaust, but still, if today's Nazis can turn today's Jews into a people
