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into national martyrs. Only in recent months has the term, "casualties of
terrorism" come into use and blocked the linguistic erosion.
In this context, the Jewish response to the Holocaust (during and
after) again exposed the rejection of sacrifice. The tension between vic–
timization in Jewish and Israeli culture and the profound rejection of the
impulse to sacrifice in the Holocaust has not been emphasized enough,
nor how much it formulates the core of modern Jewish myth. Despite
the unprecedented dimensions of suffering and death, the Holocaust is
not shaped in Jewish consciousness as a myth of sacrifice. Facing the
machinery of destruction that deprived men, women, and children of
the right to exist as human beings, that turned them into refuse to be
removed as efficiently as possible, most Jews responded with a struggle
to survive-from the armed and organized uprisings in the ghettoes and
camps, to a teenage girl's diary, to those who came to cope with the
divine rift in the shadow of the crematoria and the task of the human
being to repair it. Above all, it was the solitary physical and emotional
struggle for survival, in the depths of Hell, of women, children, and men
from all groups and of all ages, as echoed in the words of Rabbi Isaac
Nussbaum, who was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto : "This is the hour of
the Sanctification of Life and not of the Sanctification of the Name in
Death. Once, the foes demanded the soul, and the Jew sacrificed his
body for Sanctification of the Name. Now, the enemy demands the Jew–
ish body and the Jew is obliged to defend it, to preserve his life."
In
the
Holocaust, there were no martyrs, only the slain and the saved . Death
was not surrounded by a halo of holiness. And even those who took
their own lives acted out of despair, and not as testimony to faith. That
devotion to life also characterized most of the survivors of the Holo–
caust, who contributed to building the State of Israel and to prosperity
in the countries to which they immigrated . They, as well, did not sanc–
tify death, suffering, or victimhood, but only the struggle to survive; or,
as Primo Levi put it, the struggle to be among the saved and not among
the drowned-not an evident struggle, as his own death testifies.
THE TRADITIONAL JEWISH-CHRISTIAN TENSION surrounding the status
of sacrifice, guilt, and atonement resonates in the whole history of rela–
tions between Europeans and the Jewish people up to the Holocaust.
Only in its wake-with recognition of the State of Israel and with the
decision of the Second Vatican Council to exonerate the Jews for the
Crucifixion of Jesus-was the Jewish people relieved (at least by decree)
of its mythic role as pariah and as bearer of a sin whose punishment was
eternal wandering or destruction. But in contrast with the change in the
