Hitch-22

by Christopher Hitchens

  To me, the facilitation in the camps of any action forbidden by the Germans was part of the struggle against the Hitlerite enemy. Ever since then, when I pass a synagogue on Yom Kippur Eve there comes before my eyes the picture of the barracks in Auschwitz where a small number of worshippers was able to experience the atmosphere of the High Holy Days.

  These are noble, even exalted, sentiments, which would provide some evidence for those who maintain that religion is at least a supplier of consolation. But they are somehow boringly expressed: they have a tinge of the “Popular Front” to them, with their “facilitations” and other rather wooden expressions. They don’t possess the defiant excitement of Primo Levi, who once wrote so bitingly that if he was god, he would have wanted to spit on anyone who prayed in Auschwitz. In a way Szmulevski survived precisely because he was a good Party man. He lived to help arrange the postwar trials of the Auschwitz criminals, including one historic session that was organized by Germans and not by the Allies. He was able to testify and also to bring important photographic evidence. In 1960 he was garlanded with a high Resistance decoration by Josef Cyrankiewicz, the Socialist-turned-Communist prime minister of Poland who had been a fellow inmate of the same camp.

  And this is where my real problem with him begins to take on shape. I sit in Poland, reading again his bureaucratic prose, and find that he claims to have taken up a job “within the national administration” after 1945. What does it mean, this post “within the national administration”? It means, as I eventually discover from the Polish “Ministry of Interior” archives in the Hoover Institution at Stanford, that Szmulevski was a full colonel responsible for Department Seven of the Milicja Obywatelska or “Citizen’s Militia,” headquartered in an old Warsaw palace that had been a seat of secret police authority since tsarist days. He never once alludes to this in his account of being forced out of Poland in 1967, preferring to blame historic anti-Jewish prejudice for the whole business.

  Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that “other” cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still “Operation Reinhardt,” or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, “roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.” We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.

  You can’t visit the area, though, without noticing the marks of what became a second erasure. The city of Wrocław/Breslau had been almost schematically rebuilt by the Communists along the lines of its prewar layout and architecture, and right down to its main square and Grass Market it looked like a storybook German town. But in that case, where was everybody? (And where had they gone? You can find one—restored—Jewish cemetery but try finding another one where any of the tombstones are incised in German.) I went to call on the mayor, a sturdy, thoughtful man named Rafal Dutkiewicz, who ruefully said that the problem with citizenship in his rather large bailiwick was that “nobody is really ‘from’ here.” Again I consult the rugged statistics offered by Professor Snyder: almost eight million German civilians were expelled or fled (or fled and returned and were then expelled) from Poland at the end of the Second World War. The eastern German lands from which they had fled or been pushed were then annexed by Poland. To make up the shortfall of population, Poles were moved into these Silesian provinces. And as if to encourage that process, the eastern half of prewar Poland was in turn annexed by the big brother Soviet Union, and a million expelled Poles became settlers in the areas from which Germans had been evicted. A huge zone of silence and complicity was created by this double negation.

  There’s no exact moral equivalence between these crimes against humanity. It’s true that perhaps 600,000 Germans were killed in the whole business, which also involved the cleansing of Germans from the Czech lands, but many of these died in the fighting which the Nazis had so insanely prolonged. (Breslau/Wrocław was declared a “Fortress” or “Festung” city by the Third Reich and actually surrendered after the fall of Berlin itself, by which time it had been so much reduced to shards that there was nothing left to fight over.) So you could say, as some people defensively say about the leveling of such cities as Dresden and Würzburg, that the Nazis started it, and the Germans were punished for it.

  What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin’s tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy’s children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy’s graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.

  And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and “security” departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason.[78] Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It’s easy to say, with Albert Camus, “neither victims nor executioners.” But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.

  He could be as scathing as the Russian Hebrew writers in his denunciations of Jews and Israel—more precisely the Israeli government. He followed Mendele when he compared Jews to hunchbacks (“Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,” 1951) though he also echoed Kafka’s allegory of Jewish deformity, “A Report To An Academy.” Berlin believed that emancipation had turned the Jews into homeless, psychologically deformed strangers trying to gain acceptance in the Gentile world.

  —David Aberbach on the centennial of Isaiah Berlin, June 2009

  “Die Judenfrage,” it used to be called, even by Jews. “The Jewish Question.” I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish “problem.” Again, the word “solution” can be as neutral as the words “question” or “problem,” but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.

  But it could be that any search for any “solution” is
in itself potentially lethal or absurd. The Jewish quest for some ultimate answer to the “question” has taken intensely religious and nationalist forms as well as, in more recent times, the identification of huge numbers of Jews with Marxism. My mother’s family was not involved in any of the grandeur or tragedy of this: they sought to get by and to assimilate and to survive, while making a few observant gestures in the direction of their ancient faith and a few protective gestures in defense of the State of Israel.

  In my mother’s case I have become convinced that she was willing to give up even the smallest adherence to the synagogue if it would smooth the accession of her two sons into polite English society, and that she only began to feel passionate about the Jewish state in the Middle East as she began to experience her own desperate need for a new start somewhere else: it was either that fresh beginning or an end to every hope. Our very last telephone conversation, when she expressed a desire to immigrate to Israel after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, was bewildering to me at the time and has sent me down many pathways since. And I always keep open the possibility that I could be mistaken and that she might have had her own reasons for being reticent. This is from a letter sent to me recently by one of her oldest friends:

  She told me that she went to live with an aunt and uncle in Liverpool in a very Jewish community—perhaps went to school there or secretarial college and her first boyfriends were medical students up there. I have no idea how long she was there but it sounded as though she was happy and from there I presume she went into the WRENS [Women’s Royal Navy Service]. At what time she decided to conceal her Jewishness I have no idea, possibly on going into the WRENS.

  This seems probable enough when I think about it: the Royal Navy was a fairly big tent and broad church but even in a wartime battle against Hitler a Jew (or “Jewess”) might have been conspicuous. On HMS Jamaica my father had had a literary shipmate named Warren Tute, who became a minor novelist in the postwar years and wrote one rather successful book, The Cruiser, in which my father appears under the name (no first or “Christian” name) of Lieutenant Hale. At one point in the story the master-at-arms of the vessel, which is called HMS Antigone, is mentally reviewing the ship’s crew:

  He knew that Stoker First Class Danny Evans would be likely to celebrate his draft by going on the beer for a week in Tonypandy and then spending the next three months in the Second Class for Leave. He knew that Blacksmith First Class Rogers would try and smuggle Service provisions ashore for his mother and that Telegraphist Jacobs was a sea-lawyer who kept a copy of Karl Marx in his kitbag.

  Martin Amis often points out that you can tell a lot about a novelist by the trouble he takes over the names of his characters, and Tute clearly didn’t break much of a sweat inventing a Welshman named Evans or a blacksmith named Rogers. By the same token, he didn’t mean us to think that the name “Jacobs” was anything more than a synonym for the vaguely suspect and unsound. I don’t think he was misrepresenting the atmosphere of the Navy by much: Jacobs would not have been persecuted (my father would never have countenanced anything remotely like that), but I don’t exactly see him rising through the ranks, either. “You catch it on the edge of a remark,” as Harold Abrahams observes of discreet English non–philo-Semitism in Chariots of Fire, and that’s how I caught it, deciding to subtitle my first essay on the subject “Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs.” How much more lazy a phrase could there be than “a copy of Karl Marx,” and yet wasn’t there still something in this age-old identification of the Jew with the subversive? If so, good. Remember that it is “free-thinking Jews,” not Jews as such, who are defined as the undesirables by T.S. Eliot in After Strange Gods.

  If my mother’s intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and “conversions” on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn’t really believe that the human species is subdivided by “race,” let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why—and then I’ll stop asking rhetorical questions—did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked “Are you a Jew?” I would never hear myself deny it?

  As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for “mind” or “intellect,” and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over “exile” or “return.” It’s everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the “messianic” Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.

  In her preface to his collection of essays The Non-Jewish Jew Tamara Deutscher, widow of the great Isaac, relates the story of how her husband, future biographer of Leon Trotsky, studied for his bar mitzvah.[79] Considered the brightest boy in any yeshivah for years gone by or for miles around, he was set to speak to the following question: somewhere in the looped intestines of Jewish lore there is mention of a miraculous bird which visits the world only at intervals of several decades and then only very briefly. On its periodic landings it delivers and leaves behind a beakful of bird-spit. This avian drool, if you can seize hold of even a drop of it, has wonder-working properties. Now comes the crucial question (surely you saw it coming?): Is the bird-spit to be reckoned as kosher or as treyfe? The boy Isaac spoke for several hours on the rival theories of this dispute, and on the competing commentaries on those rival theories, and of course on the commentaries on those commentaries. He used to say later that such onerous mental and textual labor did not serve to train the mind at all but rather—like the rote memorization of the Koran—stultified it. I am not sure that I agree. Much of my Marxist and post-Marxist life has been spent in apparent hair-splitting and logic-chopping, and I still feel that the sheer exercise can command respect. It may even build muscle…

  Should I, too, prefer the title of “non-Jewish Jew”? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:

  What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

  An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in “thinking with the blood,” to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about “rootless cosmopolitanism” finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does
this mean that I think there are Jewish “characteristics”? Yes, I think it must mean that.

  During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other’s candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town’s few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. “What do you think?” she asked. “Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?” It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.

  The Jewish Orthodox word for a heretic—which a heretic may also use for himself or herself—is apikoros. It derives from “Epicurean” and perfectly captures the division between Athens and Jerusalem. One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—“may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing”—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying “questions” would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that “he may tarry,” Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.