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PARTISAN REVIEW
before Deportation
[I999]),
my maternal grandmother inadvertently
documented (much of it in code) how Jews were being disenfranchised;
how being deprived of travel by tram or train; and marketing for just
one hour at the end of the day, isolated them. She ended up having
eleven persons in her four-room apartment; she had
to
try supporting
her family by crocheting gloves for sixteen hours per day. Even my for–
merly wealthy paternal grandparents did not have enough money to buy
food and medications at the end of
I941.
By then, Germany no longer allowed Jews to leave any more than
America allowed them to land. Kaplan mentions that a few "ordinary
Germans" did help Jews. She points out that the vast majority looked
the other way when-early on-their children taunted Jewish children,
when Jewish laborers at their places of work looked more and more
emaciated and hungry and wore ever-shabbier clothes, and that they
eagerly did take over Jewish enterprises and move into "Jewish" apart–
ments after their owners were relocated
to
ghettos, or deported.
We need more of such serious research, instead of postmodern spec–
ulations, or Oscars for a glamorized Oscar Schindler, or the imagined
life of a little boy in a sanitized concentration camp-who in real life
would have been exterminated before ever entering it at all. This would
mean that the Holocaust, also, would become a less fruitful subject for
academic ruminations and media events . Only then might the brutality
of it all become less taken for granted and, possibly, be recognized for
the abominable aberration it was. Only then, I believe, could it fade into
the distant past, analogous
to
the crusades, the Armenian massacre and
the Trojan wars-not
to
be forgotten or denied, but to be disentangled
from the currently fashionable tendency to relativize that evil.
