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PARTISAN REVIEW
Whiteman, a clinical psychologist, he presented her with photographs
and various papers to document this saga. She too wanted to find out
what had happened to Jewish children who fled eastward in September
1939,
and how some among them managed to survive.
In
Escape Via
Siberia
(1999),
she tells how, from Tashkent, Lonek was miraculously
rescued by a
Kindertransport
that was stranded in Iran, and then got to
Palestine-by way of India and Egypt-and whose interim guardians
had to dupe hostile populations and the authorities throughout the
British mandate. Whiteman keeps evoking how Lonek felt: he cried a
lot, was inconsolable, wondered whether he would ever again see his
parents. Minute details of recovered memories and feelings alternate
with descriptions of political and geographic facts, as well as with the
specifics of the many life-threatening situations-which, as Lonek
recalled, overwhelmed the thousands of children who were saved by the
Kindertransport.
As
THE WORD HOLOCAUST
started to be applied to such slaughters as
have taken place in Rwanda, Burundi, and Bosnia, and to local disas–
ters, Hitler's persecution of the Jews-the systematic and automated
mass killings in order to implement the "final solution"-increasingly
has been referred to as the Shoah. However, Jurgen Habermas has inter–
preted the term Shoah to include "the deep layer of solidarity among all
that wears a human face... [which] Auschwitz has changed."
If
we
accept this definition, we again put the Nazi atrocities on a par with
other genocides, as one horror among others, just another example of
human excess.
But the survivors of Auschwitz and the other death camps insist that
their experiences were unique, if only because they kept themselves alive
by their conscious determination to bear witness. I would add that
Habermas's formulation, although imbued with good will, liberal
humanism, and philo-Semitism, constructs yet another idealized vision
of mankind out of dystopia. So does the claim that the Shoah defines the
twentieth century-with or without Jews, the state of Israel, or an
updated Zionism. Michael Bernstein explained it well in the
Times Lit–
erary Supplement
(March 3,
2000):
The Shoah cannot be distinctively revelatory about human nature
as such, and about specifically post-Enlightenment European cul–
ture, without unintentionally making that culture the privileged
