Have Your Say

People often ask me if I’m Jewish, if that’s why I study the Holocaust. After I respond that I’m not, their answers usually range from “—” or “hmm” to “awfully depressing, isn’t it?” And while I do concede, yes, it is a depressing topic, I must likewise assert that while six-elevenths of the victims of the Holocaust were indeed Jewish, five-elevenths were not. I study the Holocaust without any ties to Judaism. Notwithstanding that Nazi policy concerning the Jews was that they all needed elimination while partisans, Roma, homosexuals, Free Masons, Catholics, prisoners of war, and political prisoners simply needed concentrating away from the Aryans, the end calculations of deaths during the Holocaust are quite near an even Jew to non-Jew split. Minimizing the deaths of the five million non-Jews during the Hitlerean Reich has been a real travesty of post-Auschwitz studies. That, and it seems that if those whose pedigree doesn’t follow what the Nazis defined as “Jew,” (look again at page 298) that there isn’t much reason to think about the Holocaust. Who are some post-Holocaust thinkers? Goldhagen, Wiesel, Levi, Friedländer, Spiegelman—all of theirs is an interest and attachment to the topic because they are Jewish. What does Burr name his protagonist in You or Someone Like You? Rosenbaum. The choice is clear: to best enable a correct association with the Holocaust, Israel, Jewishness. etc. a Germanic name works the best. But Anne’s not Jewish, and therefore neither is Sam. Reading this book has been ever so encouraging to my interest in the topic because I feel as if Anne gives me a voice as she attacks the latent, or not so latent, hypocrisy of contemporary Jews vis-à-vis the Holocaust. Jewish funding has provided for all of the scholarship around the Holocaust, that thus, the Jews have won it as their topic. Even Anne can’t compete with their talons: she looses her pupils and her forward momentum after being called a Nazi. The Holocaust is sensitive, and it owns such a heavy lexicon. Chandler Burr’s new novel has solidified for me the reason why I should have interest in the Holocaust and the writings which have come afterwards. The goal of reading Holocaust literature is not an attempt to transport oneself to the middle of the twentieth century, to the marshy Upper Silesian barbwired arbeit macht frei Lagers, but to learn, instead, of the stories and of the people who rose out of the ashes after twelve years of the Thousand Year Reich. It seems impossible that central and western Europe in the 1940s allowed the Endlösung, this sordid finality, this end-all-be-all Nazi program, to exist. White men exterminated white men in civilized, modernized countries. Just as the guillotine seems an impossible death sentence in modern times, the gathering and exterminating of eleven million people, six million Jews seems just as archaic, inhuman, and impossible—or is it decidedly modern in comparison? What more important event occurred in the twentieth century to define the progress of human modernity? Doesn’t that history belong to all of us?

Andrew Jones
Bainbridge Island, WA