TOM BAUM COMMENTARY
Reflecting On The Holocaust
hunger through graft, greed, payoffs
ather than searching for
and reciprocal deals. To him, surviving
lessons of the Holocaust in
in Auschwitz meant taking what one
anticipation of Yom
could whenever the opportunity arose.
HaShoah on Tuesday, April
Daniel avoids any hopeful
13 (Nisan 27), I would prefer
prediction; he averts blithe
to reflect on its implications
and buoyant prophecies.
— a more modest goal, per-
His answer to his attempt
haps, and one that may not
to make sense of the tattoo
offer any clear conclusions.
on his arm" seemed to res-
My texts for this are the voices
onate with fear or anxiety.
of two survivors. I do not
The lesson? If a "lesson"
want them to symbolize or
emerges from such com-
represent anyone or anything.
ments, it may be simply
They speak for themselves;
that "the worst can hap-
the questions they provoke
pen." Otherwise, there is
and any inferences are my
none.
SIDNEY
own. For each of these peo-
Daniel M. sincerely
BOLKOSKY
ple, survival has not been a
believed in this concise and
Special to
singularly happy condition.
simple value system of graft
The Jewish News
To the unasked question
and greed, this unabashedly
of what he believes he
misanthropic attitude. I
learned, Daniel M. answers
have dwelled on Daniel M.,
that the lesson echoes clearly
an extreme example of one who finds
for all time: take what you can when
absolutely no meaning in the Holo-
you can at anyone's expense; "every-
caust, no lesson of any life-enhancing
body gets paid." Everyone has a price
value, in part because I hear an echo
and the Holocaust reveals the meaning
of his sentiments in almost every testi-
of life in stark relief. There is no joy,
mony I have taken. With such voices
no goodness, no redeeming social
in my mind and heart, I do not
value, no value whatsoever in the
believe in lessons from the Holocaust
world, which is after all a continuation
— only in memory. If there are severe
of the world of Auschwitz.
implications to glean from that histo-
In either world, Auschwitz or the
ry, they will more likely come from
post-Holocaust one, Daniel M. grati-
the perpetrators. Not Hitler or
fied his appetites, his lust or his
Himmler, but the bureaucrats, the
doctors, the civil servants who carried
is
professor
of
history
Sidney Bolkosky
out their routine jobs for railroad,
and director of the honors program at
police and business employees. Their
the University of Michigan-Dearborn
voices sound eerily like Daniel's: they
and a Holocaust scholar.
111
LETTERS
synagogue to attend. The
Downtown Synagogue
was having services at the
Millennium Theater near
Northland Mall and had
its doors open to all wish-
ing to attend. No one was
at the door collecting
tickets and all were made
welcome.
I was impressed with
the warm, friendly atmos-
phere present throughout
each of the two services I
attended.
I appreciated the open-
door policy with no pres-
sure of any kind for ticket
costs; and it provided me,
a traveler, with a house of
worship. Of course, any-
one would know a syna-
1999
did what allowed them to carry on
their lives. In texts like Michael Mar-
rus' The Holocaust in History and Raul
Hilberg's The Destruction of the Euro-
pean Jews, one of the most frequent
words in describing these bureaucratic
and labor forces is "conscientious."
Conscientious, not brutal or sadistic,
not vicious or Jew hating.
Survival not
always a state
of happiness.
I will not speak here of the 1.5-mil-
lion railroad employees or comparable
people without whom the Holocaust
might have sputtered to a halt. I will
mention only one man, conscientious
and diligent. To both question and
affirm Daniel's depressing, nihilist
conclusion, I will close with the story
of a woman who arrived in Auschwitz
when she was 14. By the time the
boxcar doors opened, she had become
what Elie Wiesel called himself in
Night, "a starved stomach." After
bewildering and terrifying procedures,
now alone, she found herself on a
shelf next to a seasoned veteran pris-
oner. That veteran had learned how to
save a small piece of bread with mar-
garine and hide it beneath her cup.
gogue can not exist without an income.
I mailed in a modest contribution and
pondered membership, but living in
Florida keeps me out of state most of
the year.
Inside:
Kosovo: A Jewish Viewpoint
Ethnicity, Law And A Handshake
David L. George
Hudson, Fla.
A First
For Sinai
Shui
in the
Surrounded by neglect,
the Isaac Agree
Downtown Synagogue
is a tenacious outpost
of spirituality.
I enjoyed your article on the
milestones for Sinai Hospital
("Goodbye Sinai, Hello Sinai-Grace"
March 5).
However, your reporter was not
made aware that in 1960 Sinai Hospi-
tal established the first low-vision clin-
ic in Michigan and one of only a few
in the country at that time. The clinic,
part of the Department of Opthalmol-
When the prisoners were abruptly
awakened, she would immediately eat
the bread and thus find the strength to
start each day. The new arrival, the
starved stomach, stole the bread. And
as she relates this, she weeps, lament-
ing her breach of morality that
allowed her to steal the bread. She
weeps, 45 years after the fact, still rec-
ollecting with shame her self-preserv-
ing act. That, I think, is the meaning
of the Holocaust to her.
As you keep that image of a weep-
ing Jew in mind, recall the German
Franz Suchomel, former guard at
Treblinka interviewed by Claude
Lanzmann in the film Shoah. Lanz-
mann asked him how it was possible
to "process" 18,000 people a day —
from boxcar to chimney. We must
hear and see the woman in our
mind's eye as we listen to Suchomel's
reply — cold, unperturbed, matter-
of-fact: "Please, Herr Lanzmann," he
remarked broadly and condescend-
ingly, "let us not exaggerate: it was
15,000." No tears, no remorse, only
a bureaucratic insistence to get the
record straight.
I think it is incumbent upon us,
when we think about the Holocaust,
to keep both images in our minds and
both voices together, and wonder at
the two cultures that produced such
people and how utterly removed they
seem from each other. If we can ever
figure out the connection between
these two, perhaps we may discover
some lesson or meaning in the Holo-
caust. ri
ogy, is now known as the Vision Reha-
bilitation Institute.
Dr. Morris J. Mintz
Farmington-H-
Sharing Seders
With Immigrants
I would like to take the opportuni-
ty to applaud the Congregation
Shaarey Zedek Men's Club and my
fellow congregants Libby and Andy c__\
Beider for their blessed campaign of
getting together seder and sederless
families primarily from the former
Soviet Union.
Our guests, formerly of St. Peters-
burg, Russia, were two delightful,
intelligent and very eager-to-learn
teenage girls, one less than one year in
this country, and the wonderful