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Out of the Silence
pating rabbis and theologians. Nor did
more than a handful of the 38 respon-
dents raise the question on their own.
To these thinkers, and to most U.S.
Jews, the Holocaust was in its own
nether world: Everyone knew it had hap-
pened, yet no one would confront it.
Everyone knew it had somehow rede-
fined them as Jews, but no one would say
how.
Jews had become "more" American:
They moved to the suburbs, assimilated
more, intermarried more. Yet, they had
also become "more" Jewish: Synagogue
construction and membership boomed,
UJA contributions multiplied. And in a
move that may have reflected one of the
ultimate lessons from the Final Solution,
fewer Jews Americanized their last
names. Jews now knew that, in the final
analysis, they had no place to hide, not
even behind a name. Even the most as-
similated Jews in Europe had perished
in the Reich's gas chambers.
`You Danced
The Hora
While We
Burned'
Israelis, like American Jews, initial-
ly reacted to the survivors who settled
among them with confusion and dismay.
To Israelis, survivors were a rebuff, a
living testament that these hardy pio-
neers — tillers of the soil and progenitors
of the new, self-sufficient Jew — had been
too weak to help the Jews of Europe, that
they had been safe while their brothers
and sisters literally went up in smoke.
According to The Seventh Million, a
new book by Israeli journalist, Tom
Segev, some survivors even claimed that
Israelis had implicitly abetted Hitler.
"You danced the hora while we burned
in the crematorium," said Yosef Rosen-
saft, a survivor who eventually settled in
America. Another survivor, Dov Shilan-
sky, later the speaker of Israel's Knes-
set, said, "The question lurks in our
hearts: 'What did our brothers outside of
hell do?"
Israelis only wanted to hear stories
Ugly Truths
There were strong psychological and
political reasons for silence about the
Holocaust: Shame; a desire by survivors
to reconstruct their lives; a Cold-War
mentality that persuaded Jews not to de-
flect attention from the enemy of the
present to the enemy of the past.
And also, as Dr. Berenbaum said, the
trauma was still too deep and immedi-
ate.
"Until I started working on the Holo-
caust," he said, "I didn't understand the
story about Lot's wife being turned into
a pillar of salt. What happened to her
is the same as what would have hap-
pened to the survivors if they had looked
back: They would have been paralyzed.
It was all too fresh for them, too close."
The silence was ruptured slightly in
1961 with Israel's trial of Adolf Eich-
marm; it broke even more with the 1967
Six-Day War.
about survivors' heroism and resistance
— not about their suffering. Shortly af-
ter Yoel Palgi, an Israeli paratrooper, re-
turned in June 1945 from a mission to
Hungary, he wrote in his notebook:
"Everywhere I turned, the question was
fired at me: Why did the Jews not rebel?
Why did they go like lambs to the slaugh-
ter? Suddenly, I realized that we were
ashamed of those who were tortured,
shot, burned. There is a kind of general
agreement that the Holocaust dead were
worthless people. Unconsciously, we have
accepted the Nazi view that the Jews
were subhuman...History is playing a
bitter joke on us: Have we not ourselves
put the six million on trial?"
Perhaps the most bitter joke was that
Israelis started calling survivors sabon
— or "soap," a reference to the general
belief (a fallacious one, as it turned out)
that Nazis produced soap from the bod-
ies of murdered Jews.
Within a short time after the survivors
started arriving, an implicit compact was
fashioned between them and native Is-
raelis:
The Holocaust had proven that the
only haven for Jews was an independent
nation; the rest of the world had done
nothing to save the Jews; "Holocaust and
heroism" were virtually the same; and,
as Tom Segev writes, "the less everybody
talked about the Holocaust, the better."
— A.J.M.
First, for Jews, there had been fire: the
Holocaust. Now there was water: Arabs
boasting of pushing the Jews into the sea.
In either case, elimination from the face
of the earth was the intent.
In One by One by One, journalist Ju-
dith Miller says the Six-Day War trans-
formed the Holocaust into "a sign not
only of suffering, but also of resurrection,
somewhat akin to Christ's crucifixion and
the resurrection for Christians...[It] be-
came for some Jews...a militant symbol,
a reason for the redemption of the Jew-
ish people through a triumphant state."
Silence about the Holocaust perma-
nently broke in 1978 with a TV mini-se-
ries. By sanitizing genocide, "The
Holocaust" made it palatable for gener-
al audiences who knew little about it.
And it convinced survivors to finally
speak up "not because they liked the
show," said Professor Geoffrey Hartman,
faculty adviser to Yale University's Holo-
caust video archives project, 'but because
they disliked it and wanted to tell the
real story in their own words."
Survivors held conferences and lob-
bied for museums and memorials, fear-
ing that with their death, the memory of
the Holocaust would also die. American
Jews began to treat survivors as symbols
of the imperishable will of the Jewish
people. And Jimmy Carter created a na-
tional commission to plan a Holocaust
museum in Washington. Creating a mu-
seum was no easy matter. Members of
the United States Holocaust Memorial
Council first had to determine what the
Holocaust was:
An event unique in all history? Or an
occurrence that was more universal and
commonplace, although on a different
scale?
Did the term apply just to the Nazi
campaign against Jews? Or to all —
Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses and many more — who per-
ished in the death camps?
And should the "memorial" be just that
— a structure, inert and implacable, de-
signed in tribute to the victims and lib-
erators and rescuers? Or a museum that,
by instructing visitors in the rise of
Nazism and the schematics of the Final
Solution, caution all against the tinder-
The silence was
ruptured
slightly in 1961
with Israel's
trial of Adolf
Eichmann, it
broke even
more with the
1967 Six-Day
War.
box of prejudice and evil and fanaticism.
The memorial council soon divided be-
tween the 'Dreamers" and the "Builders."
The former, led by council chairman Elie
Wiesel, could inspire, but knew little
about fund-raising and construction. In
1987, Mr. Wiesel resigned ("My monu-
ment," he said, "is one of words.") and
President Reagan appointed Baltimore
philanthropist and developer Harvey M.
Meyerhoff to take his place.
(Recently the new Democratic White
House told Mr. Meyerhoff, a Republican
appointee, that he would no longer be
chairman after April 30.)
While these political and philosophi-
cal wars were waging, the Holocaust was
shifting from being a stigma to almost
being a badge of honor. It was also being
invoked at every turn. Israeli Prime Min-
ister Yitzhak Shamir wrapped his poli-
cies in the language of the Holocaust;
Jewish fund-raising in the United States,
especially to help Soviet Jews, was said