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42 Friday, April 3, 1987
(313) 353-1424
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
t is pointless, at this late
date, to worry about an
absence of awareness of
-the Holocaust. What art
could not accomplish, televi-
sion did. The Holocaust is
famous. It is frantically
remembered. But as what?
That is the problem that
must now trouble the custo-
dians of memory. The fear
that the world will forget
must now give way to the fear
that the world will remember
wrongly. What ideas, what
images, what feelings will
stick? And the correction of
the memory is what the trial
of John Demjanjuk in Jerus-
alem may accomplish.
' Demjanjuk is accused of
war crimes in the death camp
of neblinka, where he is al-
leged to have worked effi-
ciently and enthusiastically,
whipping and torturing the
Jews he was assisting into the
gas chambers. Survivors of
neblinka (there were 50, out
of 850,000) have identified
Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Mr-
rible," the Ukrainian guard
whose abominations were
striking even in that charnel
house. "You expect beatings,
but he held .a sword and cut
live flesh from human be-
ings." (Demjanjuk asserts he
is a victim of mistaken iden-
tity.) Judging by the photo-
graphs, Demjanjuk might be
a Nazi by Hals. He sits in the
courtroom (really a converted
movie theater) looking like a
mechanic he became in Cleve-
land, a thick, plain, beefy
man, the very image of
coarseness, the very opposite
of lucidity.
The very opposite, in short,
Of Adolf Eichmann, his only
' predecessor in the Israeli
dock. Eichmann was the man
in the glass booth, where he
May as well have sat, too,
when he performed his per.
fidious duties. A detached
man with theories and with
tastes,. with an air of physical
punctiliousness, a war
criminal of some elegance,
ridiculously proud of his
mind.
At first the comparison
between Eichmann and
Demajanjuk turned many •
Israelis against the current
Leon Wieseltier is literary
editor of The New Republic.
trial. Eichmann had set a
kind of standard, of genocide
and of gentility. He was
responsible for millions of
deaths, and he seemed willing
to join his prosecutors in
discussions of principle. Dem-
janjuk is a kind of comedown,
a debasement of precedent.
He was, after all, only a
minion, appearing where his
masters Bormann or Mengele
should have appeared.
Not least because of the
prominence, even the patho-
logical prominence, of the
Holocaust in contemporary
Jewish culture, the Demj an-
juk trial seemed de trop to
many Israelis. "Who Cares?"
was the headline of an Israeli
political weekly. "My genera-
tion's emotions were burned
out during the Eichmann
trial,"a prominent liberal
politician told reporters.
"That, for most of us, closed
the books on the subject:' It
was not long, however, before
the emotions of another
generation came to matter.
Within a- week of the trial's
opening, the courtroom was
packed, and the "educa-
tional" significance of the
event was the conventional
wisdom.
Even for the new genera-
tion, the education may be
redundant, except in remind-
ing a captious Israeli cit-
izenry of one of the state's
reasons for being. But
another sort of education
about the Nazis may still be
required — precisely to cor-
rect a conception of the
Holocaust that remained in
the wake of the Eichmann
trial and the ocean of com-
mentary upon it. The pro-
ceedings in Jerusalem in 1961
inculcated, especially among
intellectuals and historians,
an image of the Holocaust
that gave pride of place to its
impersonality. Eichmann had
been a bureaucrat, a manager.
The great drama of his cap-
ture and conviction produced
a powerful interest in the
bureaucratic and managerial
character of modern mass
murder. The. Eichmann trial
exposed a man who was not
only a fiend, but an expert.
More, it exposed a man who
was a fiend because he was an
expert. Thus its subject final-
ly was not a man, but a sys-
tem -- the application to evil
of the technological and ad-
ministrative achievements of
the modern industrial state.