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Friday, May 17, 1985
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
PURELY COMMENTARY
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PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
The Holiday Of Shavuot Is For All The Generations
Shavuot is not for the calendar alone.
It is occasion to take pride in the heritage
that sustains and reaches to the heights in
the people's spiritual dignity.
There is a compelling duty to give it
emphasis in the days approaching the
Festival of the Law, in the aftermath of a
heartrending dispute over another mem-
ory in Jewish experience, the one that was
aroused by the German cemetery visit by
the President of the United States.
There is a traditional resistance to
the latter, and it is in holding high the
people's banner on which is inscribed the
Decalogue and the other great gifts to
mankind.
Shavuot becomes an occasion, so close
to the desecrations perpetrated on the
40th anniversary of the military libera-
tion from the Nazis, to proclaim the
Jewish spirit as the predominant ideal, as
the real resistance to tyranny.
Therefore, Rabbi M. Robert Syme, in
his sermonette of a week ago, merits
commendation for alluding to the desecra-
tions in which Jewish clubs participate by
staging events unrelated to the Shavuot
ideal on evenings and mornings when the
traditional legacies should be observed
and respected.
There is a relation to this ideal also in
the Sabbath Eve which should be re-
spected in the home and the spiritual
sanctuary. This is especially relevant to
Shavuot.
The Clubs
Let there be a soft approach to the
criticism °Lille Clubs — capitalize the C in
a recognition of club values even though
they are for the few who can afford them.
They had a much earlier lesson that led
them to adhere to Jewish duties. It takes us
back to the generation that was so anti-
Zionist that some refused to contribute to
the Allied Jewish Campaign. Thereupon,
the loyalists taught them a lesson. A col-
lective rule was adopted by all the Clubs,
compelling those seeking Club member-
ship to be contributors to the Jewish com-
munal fund.
Could this apply to public functions
which belong in a spirit of spiritual iden-
tification with the Jewish people to reserve
sacred occasions for homes and syna-
gogues? There are nights in the week and
month and year, other than the most sac-
red on the Jewish calendar, for public
exhilaration. It is in such an approach to
dignity and self-respect in Jewish identifi-
cation, since we speak of Jewish Clubs,
that the Syme admonition deserves ac-
knowledgement.
Let the reply to those who taunt Jewry
and encourage continuance of hatreds be
expressed in the high idealism imbedded i n
the Torah-inspired ideals of Shavuot. Let
its great principles provide the truest form
of resistance to humiliations and to
tyranny itself. Most important in its obser-
vance is the self-respect it inspires. That
makes it a supreme dedication.
Inerasable Facts
Donumentaries, reminiscences, re-
peated verdicts condemning the horrors in
a tragic period in German history,
endlessly point the finger of guilt at the
Germans. Yet, there is a growing number
of those who express annoyance over re-
membering. They advocate a time to forget.
Some even say they are tired of repetitive
reference to the Holocaust.
The tragic days Of an American
President's visit in Germany on the an-
niversary of the military collapse of
Nazism keeps emphasizing the need to re-
member, never to forget, never to forgive.
There is a reservation: responsible people,
certainly all knowledgeable Jews, take
into account the Righteous Gentiles, the
resisters who did not swallow the Nazi
ideology, and the Germans who heiled Hit-
ler only under threat to their very lives.
They existed. They are honored. That's
why the debt of gratitude. Wherever there
are memorials to the victims of Hitlerism,
the respect and gratitude is also expressed
in the term Righteous Gentile.
Taking this into account, the respon-
sibility becomes even more compelling to
keep reminding what may become a
forgetting generation of the horrors whose
perpetrators must remain punishable and
to keep piling up the evidence.
William L. Shirer, whose evidence
against the Germans occupies the most
important place in the assembled
documentaries, added to the record impor-
tant comments on President Reagan's
German visit blunders in a letter that was
published in the New York Times on April
25. His comments:
I don't know where President
Reagan got his information that
most of the German soldiers who
are buried at the Bitburg military
cemetery were as much victims of
the Nazis as the victims done to
death in the concentration camps.
To equate them seems to me a hor-
rible violation of the truth.
As perhaps. one of the few
Americans still living who went
into Poland in 1939 and into the
Netherlands, Belgium and France
in 1940 with the German Army as a
neutral war correspondent, I can
testify that not one of the hun-
dreds of German soldiers I talked
to during those campaigns con-
sidered himself a "victim of
Nazism." On the contrary, the
German soldiers fought for the
Fuhrer and the Fatherland, as
they often put it, with immense
enthusiasm and dedication, and
very bravely. They appeared to
me to believe fanatically in Hit-
ler's cause and in the leader him-
self.
Even four years later, when
one might have thought the Ger-
mans feared the war was lost,
German troops opposite us on the
U.S. First Army front fought stub-
bornly and well.
During my sojourn on that
front in the fall and early winter of
1944, I helped interrogate a
number of German prisoners,
some of them teenagers, a few
hours after their capture, when
they were still under the shock of
being. taken. I cannot remember
one who did not express his utter
loyalty to Hitler and the Third Re-
ich.
The idea that most German
soldiers felt themselves "victims of
Nazism" is false. It saddens me
that the President has embraced it
and that he cannot see the dif-
ference between those loyal
soldiers of the Third Reich and the
millions butchered in the camps. I -
do not believe he can further re-
conciliation with the Germans on
the basis of a falsehood.
With the fairness exercized by the
media, the NYTimes followed this letter
with an anti-Nazi declaration by a Ger-
man humanist. It does neither diminish
nor erase the Shirer evidence. He remains
Witness Number One in not absolving the
entire German nation of the crimes that
must never be forgotten.
Then there was another bit of evi-
dence, in the form of a very revealing let-
ter in the Detroit Free Press on May 4. It
exposed the annihilation of the French vil-
lage of Oradour-sur Glane. It speaks for
itself:
Ever since it was announced
that President Reagan would visit
the German cemetery at Bitburg,
I've wondered how long it would
be before attention was drawn to
the connection between the 2nd
SS Panzer Division, whose troops
are buried there, and the French
village of Oradour-sur-Glane. I've
thought, too, that the French have
shown admirable restraint in not
voicing publicly the revulsion they
must feel at the prospect of the
Bitburg visit.
Although your April 28 story,
"Diplomatic Quagmire: Soldiers'
unit linked to atrocity," describes
what took place at Oradour-sur-
Glane on June 10, 1944 — just four
days after the Normandy invasion
— it can hardly convey the horror
of the SS action there. My wife and
I visited the site of the village last
June. It was never rebuilt; the
French have -left it just as it was
after it had been savaged by the
Germans. Cars, farm vehicles,
children's tricycles, for example,
stand rusting where they were
left.
Plaques mark each .spot at
which groups of villagers were
massacred. At the bottom of each
are two words: Recueillez-Vous. At
the entrance to the ruins a sign
reads: Souviens-Toi. The English
translation of those two phrases is
roughly the same: Remember. The
French do.
German sub-lieutenant Heinz
Barth is quoted as telling his
soldiers, just before the village
was decimated, "Today, in
Oradour, you are going to see the
color of blood."
The day we were there we
found one tiny red flower on a
stone slab beside a wall of the
church in which many of the vil-
lagers were killed. Above it was a
simple plaque that read: "Here
hundreds of women and children
were massacred by the Nazis. You
who pass, remember them. You
who believe, pray for the victims
and their families." I trust
President Reagan will pray for
them when he visits Bitburg.
GEORGE A. HAVILAND
Birmingham
There is a special reason for asking
that this •letter be read and circulated
widely. It serves as another reminder that
Jews were not alone in the suffering under
the German Nazis. There were not Six
Million victims: there were Twelve Mil-
lion who died at the hands of the German
barbarians. Therefore, the protests are
universal. Therefore, it is mankind that
will neither forget nor forgive. Therefore,
those who resisted, Jews and Germans,
will be honored with respect in recogni-
tion of the courageous who did not totally
submit to the terror.
Holocaust Books Reveal Agonies
Immense in scope, echoing the
agonized screams of the victims of the
most atrocious, barbaric inhumanities
ever to strike mankind, the Holocaust li-
brary keeps growing. The books by the
victims are filling the shelves.
Much of what continues to be pub-
lished requires the reader's strong heart
and ability to withstand the depressively
unavoidable resentments over what had
occurred and what may still be accepted
and endorsed by the evil-minded. It is be-
cause such elements still exist, some func-
tioning in the media, that the accumulat-
ing documentaries must receive the
widest circulation.
`I Didn't Say Goodbye'
Herself a survivor, Claudine Vegh
interviewed 28 surviving children of the
Nazi era. In their stories they recall the
last hours of their being with one or both
of the parents. As the title of her book, I
Didn't Say Goodbye (Dutton) indicates,
the separations were speedy. In each in-
stance it was terrifying.
The circumstances under which their
stories are told, the remembering of the
terrors, the horrifying feeling that the
events described could have occurred —
they combine to lend special significance
to the recorded heartbreaking tales.
Of course, the 28 interviewed are
grown men and women. The fact that they
now speak their minds, recalling the de-
vastations, is as much an addendum to the
accumulated records of the mass murders
as they are additional indictments.
The interviewed are often left in won-
derment: why did it happen, how,did par-
ent or parents die, why the inhumanity?
Therefore, interviewer Claudine Vegh, as
a survivor herself, as one of the seriously
injured, utters a cry of bewilderment in
one of her comments on the tasks she has
undertaken in this book:
In fact, there are very few
people who know about the cir-
cumstances in which their parents
perished — some felt the need to
find out from archives, to read all
the documents available on the
subject; others have deliberately
avoided everything that evokes
their past, they have tried to erase
it from their memories. But they
often wonder: "Where did they
die?" In the sealed convoys? In the
camp itself? Were they selected on
arrival? Did they die of exhaus-
tion, of cold, of hunger? Were they
beaten to death? Did they die in
the gas chambers?
"I always said: my father was
shot by the Germans. It's a nobler
death than the furnaces." (Samuel).
"To be fatherless when you know
that your father died naturally is bad
enough; in this case it's even worse."
(Joseph).
"The furnaces, what were they?
Was he burnt like Joan of Arc?"
(Andre).
The mourning of the Jewish
child whose parents perished as a
result of persecution cannot be
compared to the experience of the
orphan whose parents died of ill-
ness, from an accident, from a
natural disaster, through war,
bombing or whatever else' can
nowadays be feared in the domain
of "arbitrary death."
The Jewish children have
never forgotten that the declared
intent of Auschwitz was the total
extermination of the Jewish
people, which implied their own
destruction. That is why they can-
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