NORMAN MANEA
191
EK: Some people now are speaking of the "red Holocaust." What do
you think of that?
NM: This genocide is certainly not the first in history, nor even the first
in the twentieth century. There are others, all emblematic of horror in
all of its variety and scope. [ don't believe, however, that they should all
be described as variations of one and the same expression, be it the
"black Holocaust" (of African slaves in America), the "red Holocaust"
(the Gulag), the "yellow Holocaust" (China under Mao's terror, Cam–
bodia under Pol Pot), the "green Holocaust" (Rwanda), and so on.
The word
Gulag,
for example, coined by Solzhenitsyn, expresses rather
precisely the bureaucratically organized terror of the Soviet system, which
also occurred in Eastern Europe. That doesn't mean that the Gulag, with
its millions upon millions of victims and a bloody and macabre history,
which even now has been incompletely examined, becomes more impor–
tant as the" red Holocaust." For the sake of historical understanding and
out of respect for the victims a certain specificity must be observed.
It
is inappropriate, I would say, to group all genocides under some
far-reaching category that obscures the very distinctions. There are sim–
ilarities and differences among these catastrophes, whose appalling real–
ity must be acknowledged. Mass murders aren't in competition with one
another. Their names can only be as specific as the events themselves.
It's also not about the appropriation of suffering or a "monopoly" of
suffering, as certain commentators using cheap political showmanship
put it. Such rhetorical tricks rather show a complete indifference to the
specificity of human tragedies.
EK: "No one gets around Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the negative culmi–
nation of our civilization; there is nothing that could surpass Auschwitz.
Man will struggle over this dreadful event for a long time to come." So
stated lmre Kertesz in the
Neue Ziiricher Zeitul1g.
The Gulag also
counts as a "dreadful event," another monstrosity of our century,
perpetrated in the name of Marxist ideology. Some Eastern Europeans
use the argument "One should also not forget the Gulag," only to fore–
stall criticism of the pre-Communist fascist past. Such criticism of
nationalism supposedly originated from an external Western conspiracy.
NM: I'd rather not get into this awful subject; I prefer to have others
answer, scientifically and objectively, whether Auschwitz was more hor–
rible than other catastrophes of the twentieth century. Human tragedies
are unique, all similarities to the contrary. Every human being is unique.
