EDITH KURZWEIL
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induced (former) Nazis to argue that these tales were exaggerated, to
quibble that the number of victims was below six million, and to recall
that political enemies, homosexuals, and handicapped Germans had
been put into concentrations camps even before the Jews . (This sort of
relativizing fails to account for the fact that the automated killing fields
were being built later on, and outside German borders.) But some Ger–
mans who held that "camp workers" were simply following orders
often fudged the moral line between victims and perpetrators. Primo
Levi answered them categorically, that in the camps it had been clear
that he was a guiltless victim, and that his jailers were murderers. Ques–
tions about bystanders, whether or not they could have or had wanted
to intervene-early on when it might have been possible, or later when
it was more dangerous-remain murky, as does the history of hindsight
that asks, for instance, why the Americans didn't bomb the railroad
tracks to Auschwitz, why Red Cross teams of inspectors allowed them–
selves to be duped by SS-supervised tours, and why German and Aus–
trian Jews did not foresee their doom. Still, the more current perceptions
are replacing the realities of what some French have come to call the
univers concentrationnaire,
as more survivors have felt compelled to
erect museums and monuments, and to sanctify the ground of former
death camps.
IN MAy I945, the world asked how the descendants of Schiller and
Goethe could have invented such a "machinery of death." At that time,
there was too much suffering and misery, and too many intractable prob–
lems to solve to fully focus on the fate of the camp survivors: the Allies
had to set up the United Nations, had to decide on the rules for bringing
the top Nazi brass to trial, had to check the spread of communism and
other totalitarianisms, had to help reconstruct the economies of a war–
ravaged continent, and so on. Since the Europeans, whose countries had
been devastated, had to rebuild their cities and keep their populations
warm and minimally fed, the future of survivors was held in relative
abeyance. Indeed, intra-European issues, such as keeping Germany down
without shutting it out, getting along with the Soviets and the Americans
in the aftermath of the Yalta agreements, and avoiding age-old ethnic
squabbles and wars, preoccupied politicians and populations. Anti–
Semitism remained strong, but mostly was swept beneath various rugs.
The G.I.'s dollar bills and Hershey bars became the prevailing currency,
