In the Shadow of the Holocaust: When the Victim Becomes the Perpetrator (Part II)

How the politics of European memory obscure what we see today in Israel and Gaza.

文章信源：纽约客（The New Yorker)

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4

In November of this year, I left Berlin for Kyiv and took a train through Poland and Ukraine. To talk about my relationship with Jewish history in these countries, this is one of the best places to go. Many American Jews travel to Poland to visit what little (if any) is left of the old Jewish quarter, taste food reconstructed from recipes left behind by long-vanished families, take a journey through Jewish history, visit Jewish ghettos and Nazi concentration camps. ghetto refers to the Jewish ghetto in Nazi-controlled areas.) During World War II, Nazi Germany forced Jews to live in conditions of extreme isolation and seclusion. The ghetto not only separated the Jewish community from the rest of the population, but also separated the Jewish community from each other. The Nazis established at least 1,000 ghettos in the territories of Poland and the Soviet Union that they occupied and annexed. The term originated in the Jewish ghetto of the Middle Ages. I'm getting closer to this history.

I grew up in the USSR in the 70s and grew up in the long shadow of the Nazi Holocaust. This is because only some members of my family survived the Holocaust, and because Soviet censors forbade it to be mentioned publicly. Around the age of nine, I lost sleep when I learned that some Nazi war criminals were still at large. I imagined one of them crawling in from the balcony on the fifth floor of our house and kidnapping me.

In those summers, our cousin Anna and her sons would come to see us from Warsaw. Her parents decided to commit suicide after the Warsaw ghetto was burned down. Anna's father jumps off the rails in front of a train. Anna's mother tied three-year-old Anna around her waist with a shawl and jumped into the river. They were rescued from the water by a Pole and survived the war by hiding in the countryside.

I know the story, but I'm not allowed to bring it up. Anna herself didn't know she was a Holocaust survivor until she was an adult, and she didn't rush to tell the story to her children, who were about my age.

I first went to Poland in the '90s to investigate the fate of my great-grandfather, who spent nearly three years in the Białystok ghetto, a Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis in occupied Poland in 1941 and whose inhabitants were transported to extermination camps in 1943, where only a few hundred survived, before being killed in Majdanek.

The war of memory of the Holocaust took place simultaneously in Poland and Germany, and while the views of the dispute were not the same in both countries, a common feature was the involvement of right-wing politicians with the Israeli state.

As in Germany, Poland saw grandiose commemorations at both the national and local levels from the 90s to around 2000. These events broke the silence of the Soviet era. The Poles built museums and monuments to commemorate the Jews who died in the Holocaust (half of all those killed in Nazi-occupied Poland) and the disappearance of Jewish culture.

Then came the backlash. This coincided with the rise to power of the right-wing, non-enlightened Law and Justice Party in 2015. The Poles now want a version of history in which they and the Jews were victims under Nazi occupation, and that they were trying to protect the Jews from the Nazis.

This is not the case: it is extremely rare for Poles to risk their lives to save Jews from the Germans, as my cousin experienced, but the opposite is not uncommon: entire communities, or state institutions that have survived from pre-occupation Poland (such as the police or city halls), carry out mass murder of Jews.

However, historians who have studied the role of the Poles in the Nazi Holocaust have come under attack. Jan Tomasz Gross, a Princeton-born historian born in Poland, was interrogated and threatened with prosecution because he wrote that Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans. Even after his retirement, the Polish authorities pursued him with great difficulty. The head of the innovative Polish Jewish History Museum in Warsaw, Dariusz Stola, was ostracized by the government. Historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking have been dragged to court for writing about the head of a Polish village who was a collaborator in the Holocaust.

When I wrote about the cases of Grabowsky and Engrekin, I received the most terrible death threats of my life (I received many death threats, but most of them I can't remember). One of them was sent to one of my work mailboxes with the following content:

"If you continue to write lies about Poland and the Poles, I will hit you with these bullets. Look at the attachments! 5 kneecaps on each side, so you can't walk anymore. But if you continue to spread your hatred of Jews, I'll next shoot 5 bullets into your pussy. The third step you won't even notice. But don't worry, I'm not coming to you next week or two months from now, I'll be back when you forget this email, maybe five years from now. You're on my list......"

Attached is a photo: two shiny bullets in the palm of one hand.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, whose head was appointed by the Polish government, tweeted to condemn my article. The World Jewish Congress also tweeted against me. A few months later, a college speaking invitation was canceled because the university told my speaking agent that I might be an anti-Semite.

Israel has maintained friendly relations with Poland in the war on memory of the Holocaust in Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki issued a joint statement opposing "actions aimed at attributing atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nationalities to Poland or the Polish nation as a whole."

This statement falsely claimed: "The Polish Underground State, led by the Polish government-in-exile, established a mechanism for providing systematic help and support to the Jews." Poland underground state refers to the underground resistance groups loyal to the Polish government-in-exile during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II: both military and civilian.) ）

Netanyahu is forging alliances with the unenlightened governments of Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, in part to prevent the EU from forming a consensus against Israel's occupation of Palestine. For this, he was willing to lie about the Nazi Holocaust.

Every year, tens of thousands of Israeli teenagers visit the Auschwitz Museum before graduating from high school (although last year's tour was canceled due to security concerns and the Polish government's growing insistence on erasing Polish participation in the Holocaust from history).

It's a powerful identity journey that takes place just a year or two before young Israelis join the military. Noam Chayut, one of the founders of the Israeli anti-occupation advocacy group Breaking the Silence, wrote about his high school trip in the late '90s:

"At this moment, in Poland, as a teenager still in high school, I am beginning to experience a sense of belonging, self-love, strength and pride, as well as a desire to contribute, to live and to be stronger, and I want to be so strong that no one dares to try to hurt me. ”

With this feeling in mind, Chayut served in the IDF, and he was posted to the occupied West Bank. One day, he was posting a notice of property forfeiture and some children were playing nearby. Chayut smiled at a little girl. He thought the smile was kind and not threatening. The rest of the children scattered and ran away, but the girl froze, terrified, and eventually she turned and ran away.

Later, when Chayut published a book about the transformation that the encounter had brought about, he wrote that he did not know why it was the girl, "after all, there was a child handcuffed in a jeep, and a girl whose house we broke into late at night and took her mother and aunt." There were also a lot of kids, hundreds of kids, who were screaming and crying as we rummaged through their rooms and stuff.

"There was a kid from Jenin, and we blew up the wall of his house with explosives, making a hole just a few centimeters above his head. Miraculously, he was not injured, but I'm sure he suffered severe damage both in hearing and mentally. ”

But that day, in the girl's eyes, Chayut saw the reflection of devastating evil. He had long been indoctrinated that this evil existed, but only between 1933 and 1945, and only in places ruled by the Nazis. Chayut titled his book The Girl Who Stole My Nazi Holocaust.

5

I traveled to Kyiv by train from the Polish border. In September 1941, nearly 34,000 Jews were shot dead in Babyn Yar, a huge canyon on the outskirts of Kiev, in just 36 hours. Before the end of the war, tens of thousands more died there. This is what is now known as the "bullet massacre". The Holocaust by bullets refers to the mass shooting of Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators in the territories seized from the Soviet Union.) As many as 2 million Jews were killed in these mass shootings and related massacres. ）

Many of the countries where these massacres took place (e.g., the Baltic region, Belarus, Ukraine) were recolonized by the Soviet Union after World War II. Dissidents and Jewish cultural activists risked losing their freedom to preserve the memory of these tragedies, collect oral testimonies and names, and where possible, personally clean and protect the sites where the massacres took place.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the commemoration of the Holocaust was accompanied by efforts to join the European Union. In his 2005 book A History of Postwar Europe, historian Tony Judt wrote: "Acknowledging the Holocaust is our gateway to contemporary Europe." ”

In 2002, for example, just two years before Latvia joined the European Union, a monument was unveiled in the Rumbula forest on the outskirts of Riga (where some 25,000 Jews were killed in 1941).

And after the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, the country embarked on an ambitious path towards the European Union, and a major effort to commemorate the Niangzi Valley massacre took shape at this time. Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, several smaller buildings had been completed and ambitious plans for a larger museum complex were in place. With the Russian invasion, construction was suspended. A week after the start of the all-out war, a Russian missile fell directly next to the memorial complex, killing at least four people. Since then, a war crimes investigation team has been reconstituted by a number of individuals involved in the project.

In order to win Israel's support for Ukraine, Ukrainian President Vladimir A.

Volodymyr Zelensky launched a solemn political campaign. In March 2022, he gave a speech in the Knesset. Instead of emphasizing his Jewish roots, he focused on the inseparable historical ties between Jews and Ukrainians. He unequivocally compared the Putin regime with the Nazi Party. He even claimed that the Ukrainians had saved the Jews eighty years earlier. (As in the case of Poland, any claim that such aid is widespread is false.) ）

But this tactic, which worked with Poland's right-wing government, did not benefit the pro-European Ukrainian president. Israel has not provided Ukraine with the help it has begged for in the war against Russia, even if Russia openly supports Hamas and Allah. Allah, the Lebanese Islamist political and military organization, was formed after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with the main goals of eliminating Israel and expelling Western forces from Lebanon. The organization is funded by Iran. ）

Around the time of the October 7 attacks, one phrase I probably heard the most in Ukraine was "we have to be like Israel." Politicians, journalists, intellectuals and ordinary Ukrainians all share the story Israel tells about itself: a tiny but powerful island of democracy, firmly defending itself against the enemies that surround it.

Some Ukrainian left-wing intellectuals have suggested that Ukraine is waging an anti-colonial war with an occupying power and that it should see itself as a mirror image in Palestine, not in Israel. These voices are few and often come from young Ukrainians who are studying or have studied Xi abroad. After the Hamas attack, Zelensky wanted to rush to Israel to show support and solidarity between Israel and Ukraine. The Israeli authorities seem to have other intentions — the visit did not take place.

Ukraine has been unsuccessfully trying to get Israel to recognize that Russia's invasion resembles a genocidal German aggression, while Moscow has built a propaganda world around portraying the Zelensky government, the Ukrainian army, and the Ukrainian people as Nazis.

The Second World War is the central event of the myth of Russian history. During Vladimir Putin's administration, with the death of the last witnesses to the war, the commemoration turned into a celebration of Russia's victimhood. The Soviet Union lost at least 27 million people in that war, with Ukrainians in particular.

The Soviet Union and Russia have been at war almost all since 1945, but "war" is still synonymous with World War II, and "enemy" is used interchangeably with "fascist" or "Nazi". This makes it very easy for Putin to dress up Ukrainians as Nazis when he declares a new war.

Netanyahu likened Hamas's murder at the festival to a "bullet massacre." This comparison has been cited and disseminated by world leaders, including President Biden. It has helped to reinforce Israel's justification for collective punishment of the population of Gaza.

Similarly, when Putin refers to "Nazis" or "fascists," he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia has a reason to carpet bomb and besiege Ukrainian cities and kill Ukrainian civilians.

Of course, there are major differences between the two: Russia's claim that Ukraine attacked it first and its portrayal of the Ukrainian government as fascist are all wrong, while Hamas is an outrageous force that attacks Israel and commits atrocities that we do not yet fully understand. But if such discussions are to justify the killing of children, does the difference matter?

In the first weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces occupied the western suburbs of Kyiv. At the time, Yurii Savchuk, the director of the World War II Museum in Kiev, was living in the museum and was rethinking the core exhibits.

The day after the Ukrainian army drove the Russian army out of the Kyiv region, he met with the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhny, and received permission to start collecting antiquities. Savchuk and his staff traveled to Bucha, Irpin and other towns that had just been "deoccupied" (as Ukrainians often say now) to interview people who had yet to tell their stories.

"That was before the exhumation and reburial. We see the war for what it really is, and all the emotions. Fear and terror pervade the air of these places, and we absorb it in every breath we breathe. Savchuk told me.

In May 2022, the museum held a new exhibition called "Ukraine – Crucifixion". The exhibition began with the display of the boots of Russian soldiers previously collected by the Savchuk team.

It's an unexpected reversal: both the Auschwitz Museum and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., have hundreds or thousands of pairs of shoes from Holocaust victims on display. They express the magnitude of the loss, albeit only a fraction of it.

The exhibition in Kyiv shows the scale of terror. The boots are arranged on the floor of the museum in the pattern of a five-pointed star. The five-pointed star, the emblem of the Red Army, has become as evil in Ukraine as the Nazi swastika.

In September of this year, on what was once Victory Square, Kiev removed a five-pointed star from a World War II monument. They renamed the square because the word "Victory" is reminiscent of the Russian celebration of the Great Patriotic War. Russia still calls this war today. The city also changed the date on the monument from "1941-1945" – the time of the Soviet-German war – to "1939-1945." Monument by monument to revise memory.

6

In 1954, an Israeli court heard a defamation case involving a Hungarian Jew named Israel Kastner. Ten years ago, Germany occupied Hungary and belatedly rushed to carry out the massacre of local Jews. As a leader of the Jewish community, Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann himself.

Kastner proposed to buy the lives of Hungarian Jews with 10,000 trucks. When this plan failed, he negotiated to save the lives of 1,685 people by chartered train to Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews were loaded onto trains and sent to death camps.

A Hungarian Jewish survivor publicly accused Kastner of collaborating with the Germans. Kastner filed a lawsuit for defamation, only to find out that he was on trial. The judge concluded that Castena had "sold his soul to the devil."

The accusation that Kastner collaborated with the Nazis was based on the fact that he did not tell the people that they were going to die. His accusers claimed that if Castena had warned the deportees, they would have rebelled, rather than going to death camps like lambs to the slaughter.

The trial was interpreted as the beginning of a discursive confrontation in which the Israeli right advocated pre-emptive violence and considered the left to be deliberately defenseless. Before the trial, Castena was a left-wing politician, and his accusers were right-wing activists.

Seven years later, the judge presiding over the Casterna libel trial, along with two other colleagues, tried Adolf Eichmann, the devil himself. The prosecution argues that Eichmann represents only one version of the eternal threat facing Jews. The trial helped to cement the assertion that Jews should be prepared to preemptively use violence in order to prevent extermination.

Arendt, who covered the trial, did not accept that claim. Perhaps it was her phrase "banal evil" that led to the original accusation that a Jew trivialized the Holocaust. She didn't. However, she did not think that Eichmann was the devil, and that the devil might not exist. Her reasoning is that there is no such thing as a fundamental evil. Even extreme evil is always ordinary, as she later said, "born in a bad environment" and "thoroughly shallow".

Arendt also objected to the prosecution's story of the Jews being a "supernatural victim of the principles of history from Pharaoh to Haman—in her words."

This story, which is rooted in biblical legends about the Amalekites, holds that each generation of Jews had to face their own Amalekites. The Amalekites were a people in the Negev desert who fought against the ancient Israelites on several occasions. In the Hebrew Bible, the Amalekites are described as a staunch persecutor of the Israelites, and as a result, the Amalekites are considered Israel's old enemies.) ）

I learned this story when I was a teenager in my first Torah class.

The class was taught by a rabbi who brought together children from the suburbs of Rome. This area was inhabited by Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, who lived here while waiting for documents to be allowed to enter the United States, Canada, or Australia.

In this story, as the prosecutor said in the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust was a doomed event, part of Jewish history, and only Jewish history. In this version of the story, the Jews always had reason to fear extermination. In fact, they can only survive if they act as if extinction is imminent.

When I first learned about the legend of Amalek, I felt that it was completely reasonable. It describes my knowledge of the world, and it has helped me to relate my own experiences of being teased and beaten to my great-grandmother's admonitions about the dangers of using common Yiddish in public, and the inexplicable injustice of my grandfather, great-grandfather, and many other relatives being killed before I was born. I was 14 years old and lonely. I recognized that myself and my family were victims, and that the legend of the Amalek people injected meaning and a sense of community into my sense of victimhood.

In the aftermath of the Hamas attack, Netanyahu has been wielding the weapon of Amalek legend. Netanyahu exploits the logic of the legend that Jews occupy a unique place in history and have a monopoly on victimhood. It is precisely this logic that strengthens Germany's bureaucracy in the fight against antisemitism and strengthens the pernicious alliance between Israel and the far right in Europe.

However, no country is always a victim, and no country is always a perpetrator. Israel's demand for impunity stems in large part from the Jews' perpetuated victimhood. Similarly, many of Israel's critics have tried to justify Hamas's terrorist acts as a predictable response to Israel's oppression of Palestinians. In contrast, in the eyes of Israel's supporters, Palestinians in Gaza are unlikely to be victims, because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight for a rightful victimhood is never-ending.

For the past 17 years, Gaza has been a place of extreme population density, poverty and walling. There, only a small percentage of people have the right to leave, even if only for a short time. In other words, it is a ghetto. It was not the Jewish ghetto of Venice, nor the Jewish ghetto of the inner city of the United States, but the Jewish ghetto of Eastern Europe under the occupation of Nazi Germany.

In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have been subjected to almost non-stop attacks by the Israeli army. Thousands of people lost their lives. In Gaza, on average, one child is killed every 10 minutes. Israeli bombs hit hospitals, maternity wards and ambulances. Eight out of every ten Gazans are now homeless, on the move again and again, never reaching safety.

The term "open-air prison" appears to have been coined in 2010 by then-British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is now the British Foreign Secretary. This description has been used by many human rights organizations documenting the situation in Gaza. But, just like the Jewish ghettos in occupied Europe, there are no prison guards in Gaza. It is not the occupiers who control Gaza, but the local armed forces.

The more apt word ghetto would probably have drawn criticism, as it would have drawn parallels between the plight of besieged Gazans and the plight of Jews living in quarantine. It will also provide us with language to describe what is happening in Gaza. This ghetto is now being cleared.

The Nazis claimed that ghetto was necessary to protect non-Jews from Jewish-borne diseases. Israel claims that the separation of Gaza, like the wall built in the West Bank, is intended to protect Israelis from Palestinian terror.

The Nazi claims have no basis in reality, while the Israeli claims stem from real and repeated acts of violence. This is the essential difference. Both propositions, however, suggest that an occupying authority could choose to isolate, exploit, and now fatally endanger the lives of entire peoples in the name of protecting their own people.

The practice of comparing Palestinians who have been forced to leave their homes with Israelis who have been forced to leave their homes has existed since the early days of the Israeli state, but it has only been swept away.

In 1948, the year of Israel's founding, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the tragic conditions in which Palestinians (mostly women and children) left the village of Tantura after the Israeli army occupied the village: "The old man was so weak that he was on the verge of death", "one boy was paralyzed with both legs", "another boy had his hands chopped off".

"A woman holds a child in one hand and an elderly mother in the other. The mother couldn't keep up, she yelled and begged her daughter to slow down, but she didn't agree. Finally, the old lady collapsed on the road, unable to move. Daughter tugging at her hair...... I'm afraid she won't be able to catch up.

Worse than that, some have compared the scene to Jewish mothers and grandmothers staggering behind a gang of murderers and unable to keep up. The reporter stopped here.

"There is clearly no room for such comparisons. He wrote, "This fate is of their own accord." ”

In 1948, the Jews took up arms and claimed land that had been given to them by a United Nations decision. This decision divided the land of Palestine under British control. The Palestinians, with the support of the surrounding Arab countries, did not accept partition and did not accept Israel's declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the original state of Israel, beginning what is now known as Israel's War of Independence.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. And those Palestinians who did not flee were driven out of their villages by the Israeli army. Most of them never returned.

Palestinians remember 1948 as Nakba, an Arabic word for "calamity," just as Shoah is the Hebrew word for "calamity." Such comparisons are unavoidable, and as a result, many Israelis assert that, unlike the Jews, the Palestinians are self-inflicted on their suffering.

The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a thick book. This is the first academic research work on Stepan Bandera published in Ukraine.

Bandera is a hero of Ukraine: he fought against Soviet power, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of monuments to him appeared in Ukraine. After World War II, he went into exile in Germany, where he led the partisan movement and was poisoned by KGB agents in 1959. Bandera was at the same time a staunch fascist, an ideological fanatic who wanted to establish a totalitarian regime.

These facts are described in detail in the book, which has sold about 1,200 copies. (Many bookstores refuse to sell the book.) Russia uses the cult of Bandera in Ukraine as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state and happily exploits it. And the response of the Ukrainians is mostly to whitewash the legacy of Bandera.

It is always difficult to understand that someone may be an enemy of an enemy, but not a force for good. Someone can be both a victim and a perpetrator. Vice versa.

By Masha Gessen, TA began writing for The New Yorker in 2014 and became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2017. Gerson is the author of 11 books, including "Survival Under Authoritarianism" and "The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Recaptured Russia," which won the National Book Award in 2017. TA has written for the New York Review of Books and The Times on topics such as Russia, Ukraine, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, about Putin and Trump. At the same time, TA is also a science journalist, writing about AIDS, medical genetics, and mathematics. Most famously, TA was once fired from the Russian popular science magazine Vokrug sveta for refusing to send a journalist to observe Putin gliding with a Siberian crane. T.A. is a distinguished writer-in-residence at Bard College and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the Nieman Fellowship, the John Chansler Fellowship, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Criticism. After more than two decades as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gerson has lived in New York since 2013.

Translator:

Yaqi, media person, queer. Focus on international politics, gender issues and their intersectionality, as well as the ways in which they are addressed.

Disappeared Xiao Zheng