My Generation (21 page)

And in another passage Rubenstein concludes with stunning, if grim, perception: “The camps were thus far more of a permanent threat to the human future than they would have been had they functioned solely as an exercise in mass killing. An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead.”

Sometime ago I watched a late-night discussion program on television, the moderator of which was the entertainer David Susskind. Assembled for the event that evening were perhaps half a dozen writers whose expertise was in the subject of the Nazis and their period, and also in the continued presence of a kind of
Lumpen
underground Nazism in America. I believe most of these men were not Jewish. I remember little about the program save for the remarkably foolish question posed by Susskind near the end. He asked in effect: “Why should you gentiles be interested in the Nazis? Why, not being Jewish, are you concerned about the Holocaust?”

There was a weak reply, sotto voce, from one of the participants to the effect that, well, there were others who suffered and died too, such as numerous Slavs; but the remark seemed to be ignored and I bit my tongue in embarrassment for all concerned, of course unable to utter what I was longing to say, namely, that if the question was unbelievably fatuous, the reply was shamefully feeble and off the mark. Most emphatically (I wished to say) Mr. Susskind
should
be enlightened about the vast numbers of gentiles who partook in the same perdition visited upon the Jews, those who were starved and tortured to death at Ravensbrück and Dachau, and the droves who perished as slaves at Auschwitz. Such ignorance seemed to me by now impermissible.

In this respect the fatal date April 4, 1943, which I referred to before, is instructive. For if that day demonstrates the way in which the dynamo of death was cranked up to ensure the Final Solution, it also plainly shows how the policy of extermination had never been limited to the Jews. Nor did the new policy indicate any preservative concern on the part of the Nazis for the Poles and other undesirables—only that their deaths as slaves would come about less methodically than the deaths of the Jews, who had been suddenly tendered unquestioned priority in the process of annihilation by gas.

The statistics are meager, and so we have no way of knowing the number of non-Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers prior to this cutoff date; not many, compared to the Jews, but certainly they numbered in the tens of thousands. Yet to escape the crematoriums was, of course, to gain only the most feeble hold on the possibility of survival. Statistics regarding the non-Jews who perished during the four years of the existence of Auschwitz as a result of starvation and disease are likewise inexact but somewhat more reliable. It would appear that out of the four million who died, perhaps three-quarters of a million—or approximately a fifth of the total—fell into the category which the Nazis termed Aryan. This was at Auschwitz alone. Multitudes of innocent civilians were murdered elsewhere.

These vast numbers would possibly seem less meaningful if the victims had been part of the mere detritus of war, accidental casualties, helpless byproducts of the Holocaust; but such was not the case, and there can no longer be any doubt about which other people were to fall within the scope of the Nazis' master scheme for genocide. Rubenstein quotes from a letter written in the fall of 1942 by Otto Thierack, the German minister of justice, who stated his intention of granting to Himmler “criminal jurisdiction” over Poles, Russians, and Gypsies, as well as Jews, and whose use of the word “extermination” is blunt and unequivocal. There is, I think, something profoundly minatory and significant—telling much about the Nazis' eventual plan for these “subhuman” peoples of the East—in the little-known fact that the first victims of Zyklon B gas at Auschwitz were not Jews but nearly one thousand Russian prisoners of war.

In the face of the destruction of the European Jews, so nearly completely successful and so awesomely the product of a single-minded evil beyond comprehension, one hesitates before bringing up the suffering of these other people. Nonetheless, the unutterable degradation, horror, and vile deaths which they so often shared with the Jews remain to trouble the mind—all the more so because of the continuing ignorance regarding their fate. Theirs is a history of anguish which still seems to dwell dimly if at all in the public consciousness. It also must be remembered that these human beings perished not randomly but often by systematic means and in prodigious numbers. A man who is possibly our most unimpeachable witness, Simon Wiesenthal, the head of the Jewish Center of Documentation in Vienna, expressed his feelings on the matter in a recent interview:

I always insist that the victims must not be divided into Jews and non-Jews. I brought over eleven hundred Nazis before courts in different countries, Nazis who killed Jews and gentiles and Gypsies and Serbs and so on, and I've never thought about the religion of the victims. I've battled for years with Jewish organizations, warning them that we shouldn't always talk about the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. I say let's talk about
eleven million
civilians, among them six million Jews, who were killed. It's our Jewish fault that in the eyes of the world this whole problem became reduced to the problem between the Nazis and the Jews; the problem obviously was much broader. The Jews need the help of others to prevent new holocausts.

But the point I struggled vainly to make, looking at David Susskind and murmuring to myself in the dark, was that even if all this were not true—even if the Jews had been without any exception the inheritors of Hitler's hatred and destruction—his question would have been very close to indecent. I could not help thinking whether there was something paradigmatically American (or certainly non-European) in that question, with its absence of any sense of history and its vacuous unawareness of evil.

By contrast, how pervasive is the sense of evil in Rubenstein's essay, how urgent is the feeling that an apprehension of the devil's handiwork and an understanding of the Holocaust are the concern of Jew and non-Jew alike. We are all still immersed in this deepest pit. In
The Cunning of History
, written by a Jewish theologian, the fact of the Holocaust as
the
cataclysmic tragedy of the Jewish people is assumed,
a priori
as it should be, just as it is assumed that the annihilation of the Jews acquired a centrality in the Nazis' monstrous order of things. Rubenstein's analysis of the historical sources of anti-Semitism provides some of his most illuminating passages.

But among the qualities which I find so powerful about Rubenstein's book, as opposed to a great deal which has been written about Auschwitz, is how, despite the foregoing, he has acquired a perspective—a philosophical and historical spaciousness—that has allowed him to anatomize Auschwitz with a knowledge of the titanic and sinister forces at work in history and in modern life which threaten
all
men, not only Jews. I intend no disrespect to Jewish sensibility, and at the same time am perhaps only at last replying to Mr. Susskind, when I say how bracing it is to greet a writer who views totalitarianism as a menace to the entire human family. As an analyst of evil,
Rubenstein, like Hannah Arendt, is serene and Olympian, which probably accounts for the unacceptability I have been told he has met with in some quarters.

Rubenstein's apprehension of the larger menace of Nazism, and Simon Wiesenthal's insistence that we must recognize the ecumenical nature of its evil—the “broader problem”—found little echo or corroboration in last April's television series
Holocaust
. It must be clear by now that even with good intentions the rendering of major historical events in their subtlety and complexity is quite beyond the power of American television. And
Holocaust
may have been, in its soft-headed vulgarity, one of television's more creditable dramatic efforts. Like
Roots
, the earlier TV extravaganza about American Negro slavery, the program was obviously “carefully researched,” and its nine and a half hours of slick footage possessed, one felt, an underpinning of authenticity that seemed to permit little major violation of the basic historical record. In fact, as in the earlier sequences of
Roots
, which captured some of the aspects of the African slave trade with surprising verisimilitude, the initial parts of
Holocaust
, in episodes depicting the effects of the Nazi poison as it invaded the lives of Jews and incipient fascists alike, had moments of striking and cautionary power. It became all the more oppressive, then, that aside from its totally objectionable features in matters of taste—mainly the strident commercials which intruded at intervals like chanted obscenities—the series slid into rhythmically spaced troughs of sentimentality and melodrama.

When drama erodes into melodrama one of the warning signals is the appearance of token figures. In
Roots
, which soon vitiated its early promise by turning the history of slavery into an equation in which all black was good and all white was evil, tokenism came in the form of a single decent white man; in
Holocaust
, the brief glimpses of an anti-Nazi Christian prelate and a “good” Nazi official (and also one or two Jewish Kapos and finks) served as a kind of bogus leavening to what had degenerated into skillfully rigged but hollow theatrics. Least of all did the program deal satisfactorily with that appalling edifice which provided the culminating scenes and, presumably, lent to the series its metaphorical meaning—Auschwitz.

The scenes of naked Jews being consigned to the gas chambers, though embarrassingly staged, were presented with graphic emphasis. But despite an offhand allusion to I. G. Farben, which seemed both strained and obvious,
and a brief reference to the Poles, which, in the context in which it was made, gave the mistaken impression that theirs was an infinitely more pleasant lot than that of the Jews, there was conveyed no sense whatever of the magnitude and deadliness of the slave enterprise. There was no suggestion that in this inconceivably vast encampment of total domination (predominantly gentile at any given time) there were thousands of Poles and Russians and Czechs and Slovenes dying their predetermined and wretched deaths, that in droves Catholic priests and nuns were being subjected to excruciating and fatal medical experiments, that members of Polish and other European resistance groups (whose struggle and great courage were never once hinted at in the program) were being tortured and, in some cases, gassed like the Jews. In short, the suffering and martyrdom of these others were ignored, to the great loss of historical accuracy and, I am afraid, of moral responsibility. We shall perhaps never even begin to understand the Holocaust until we are able to discern the shadows of the enormity looming beyond the enormity we already know.

[
New York Review of Books
, June 29, 1978.]

In his 1980 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Czeslaw Milosz expressed alarm over the fact that the actual existence of the Holocaust was being questioned in books and pamphlets published throughout Europe and America. He then went on to say: “[The poet] feels anxiety, though, when the meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes gradual modification, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities. He feels anxiety, for he senses in this foreboding of a not distant future when history will be reduced to what appears on television, while the truth, because it is too complicated, will be buried in the archives, if not totally annihilated.”—W.S. (1982)

T
oward the end of World War II, in the winter of 1945, two momentous events took place simultaneously at distant parts of the earth. It can be safely assumed that none of the participants in either of these grim dramas had the remotest knowledge of the others' existence. In southern Poland, the army of the Soviet Union had finished evacuating the German concentration camp of Auschwitz. In the Pacific Ocean, eight hundred miles south of Japan, three United States Marine divisions were commencing the invasion stage of one of the bloodiest campaigns ever fought, the battle for the island of Iwo Jima, which would be of critical importance as a way station for the flight carrying the first atomic bomb.

It might be said that the war in Europe and the Pacific conflict took place on different planets. Most servicemen engaged in war against the Japanese gave little thought to remote campaigns like the ones in Italy and France. It was a global struggle too vast to comprehend while it was happening. But when it was over and somewhat more comprehensible, we could see that the war left us with, if nothing else, two prodigious and enduring metaphors for human suffering: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. History has carved no sterner monuments to its own propensity for unfathomable evil.

After VJ Day, there was a space of a year or so when it was truly possible to conceive of a world without war. Progenitors of the baby boom, most veterans were diligently amorous. It may be that the gloom descended soon
after Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech. For me the sense of the future closing down permanently came only six years later, when as a Marine reserve I was called up for duty in the Korean War. Back in infantry training again, I had the nightmarish perception of war as a savage continuum, not a wholesale if often lethal adventure men embarked upon, as in World War II, to strike down forces of evil, but a perpetual way of life in which small oases of peacetime provided intermittent relief. In Asia there was an explosion waiting to happen; America stood ready to light the fuse the French had laid down, and in the next decade the sequel of Vietnam came as no surprise.

In that same decade of the 1960s I became engrossed in the issue of racial conflict in America—especially as it was reflected in the history of slavery—and found myself pondering the extent to which race and racial domination played a part in the recent wars. The stunning late-nineteenth-century insight of W. E. B. Du Bois—that the chief problem of the coming century would be that of color—had swiftly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Du Bois was speaking of his own African-American people but his prophecy would embrace the globe. If in the First World War nationalistic ambitions largely fueled the conflict, World War II was the incubator of a poisonous worldwide racism. A poster I recall from the Pacific war was of a bucktoothed and bespectacled rat, with repulsively coiled tail and Japanese army cap; the caption read
KNOW YOUR ENEMY
.

All Americans fighting in the Pacific were racists. Marines were indoctrinated to regard Japanese soldiers as dangerously rabid animals. The paucity of enemy prisoners taken by our troops was due in part to the Japanese creed of fighting to the last breath, but it was also because of our own policy of extermination, often with an intriguing new weapon, the flamethrower, which roasted our adversaries in their bunkers and burrows. The enemy repaid our racism in kind and generally surpassed us; few people were treated more barbarically than those starving prisoners, many of them European and American but also Asian, who existed amid squalor and privation in the Japanese camps.

Hiroshima had a profound direct effect on my life; Auschwitz would come much later. In the summer of 1945 I was a young Marine officer slated to lead my rifle platoon in the invasion of Japan. Most of us were spunky but scared, and we had much to be scared about. The carnage had reached a surreal intensity. Already on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, 17,000 Americans had lost their lives, including many of our friends. It had been predicted that the
invasion would produce over half a million American casualties, while perhaps as many as three times that number of Japanese would be killed or wounded, including countless civilians.

Herman Melville wrote, “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.” I cannot say, from this distance in time, what is more firmly lodged in my memory—the desperate fatalism and sadness that pervaded, beneath our nervous bravado, the days and nights of us young boys, or the joy we felt when we heard of the bomb, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the thrilling turnaround of our destiny. It was a war we all believed in and I'd wanted to test my manhood; part of me mourned that I never got near the combat zone. But Hiroshima removed from my shoulders an almost tactile burden of insecurity and dread. Later I often used the word “ecstasy” to describe my reaction. I used it again only a few years ago in, of all places, Tokyo, when a TV interviewer asked me to express my views about Hiroshima and related matters.

Afterward I had the feeling I'd misspoken badly. But later, at a party, a Japanese man of my vintage approached me, murmuring a little surreptitiously that he'd seen me on television and wanted to tell me something he'd never told anyone before. He said he'd also been a young infantry officer, the leader of a heavy mortar unit training on Kyushu to repel our invasion, when word came of the bomb and the end of the war. We might have blown each other up, he added, and when I asked him how he'd taken the news he said, “I felt ecstasy, like you.”

This brings me to an issue which has incited more controversy than perhaps any other in the writing of the history of World War II; and that is the justification for the dropping of the atomic bomb.

As I've said, I belong to that small body of veterans who were headed for the invasion; we're getting smaller each year through obvious reasons of attrition, and many of us remain extremely sensitive to the moral implications of the bomb. We were never a large group, in terms of the general population; there were originally a quarter of a million of us. Perhaps less than 100,000 are left. Despite what I've just said about the lifelong gratitude most of us felt for the bomb and its makers, there are a few of us, I suspect, who wouldn't be troubled if it were never shown conclusively that Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been avoided. Even the most callous exserviceman might be shaken by proof that his own salvation was bought by the needless sacrifice of 200,000 innocent human beings. Therefore, there
were more than a few of us who were disturbed by the revisionist view espoused by numerous historians who, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bomb, two years ago, took the occasion of the
Enola Gay
exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution to make what was tantamount to a dreadful accusation: namely, that President Harry Truman behaved in an irresponsible, even criminal, fashion in ordering the bomb dropped when he was aware that the weapon was really not necessary for ending the war. The
Enola Gay
, of course, was the B-29 aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The
Enola Gay
exhibit, many of you will recall, became the focal point of the controversy, and the dispute became nasty when such groups as the American Legion and the Air Force Association protested the underlying assumptions of the display, claiming that it was anti-American, that it muddied the patriotic waters with ambiguities and bothersome questions about the bomb's ultimate worth, as if its use were not absolutely just. Quite simply, the critics of the exhibit wanted a celebration. The Smithsonian backed down, and the exhibit became a tame and harmless sideshow. This was unfortunate since the original text reveals that the questions raised were legitimate. It is still worth pondering, as the Dutch-born historian Ian Buruma has pointed out, “whether [dropping atomic bombs] was an act of racism; whether the bombs were dropped to warn the Soviets, and keep them from invading Japan; whether Truman should have paid more attention to Japanese peace initiatives; and whether there were better ways than nuclear bombing of ending the war swiftly.” But perhaps most importantly the Smithsonian's capitulation to the American Legion sent the wrong message to the Japanese, who have been scandalously negligent in facing up to many of the enormities of their own past. If the Americans can continue to insist on their own righteousness, the Japanese are now able to say: why can't we do the same? I will return to this Japanese historical amnesia in a moment.

One does not wish to regard these revisionist historians with impatience or contempt. They are, by and large, serious and dedicated scholars who have invested much intellectual capital in presenting their theses. One of the best known, Gar Alperovitz, has written hundreds of pages in several books attempting to prove that Truman dropped the bomb to show our supremacy to the Soviet Union. Other critics, notably the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, are convinced that the Japanese would have surrendered anyway, and that therefore Truman, knowing of this, must have possessed the capacity for irrational behavior bordering on madness; in other words, Truman's
decision was an act of megalomania. One of the revisionist scholars, Philip Nobile, went so far as to canvass various writers, especially writers who were also veterans of World War II like myself, asking if they would sign a petition to President Clinton, the purpose of which would be that he apologize to the Japanese people. Needless to say, I declined, but in a book he edited,
Judgment at the Smithsonian
, to which I contributed my dissent,
¹
he made clear that his own anti-bomb, anti-Truman viewpoint was based largely on moral outrage, on outrage which in turn derived from some religious wellspring: Nobile is an active Catholic layman and often uses words like “atonement,” “repentance,” and “original sin.” As if all this were not enough, an ABC television news special, led by Peter Jennings, a Canadian, was unequivocally slanted against the bomb and Harry Truman.
²

Of course, it is entirely understandable that a phenomenon as unique and monstrous as the atomic bomb, and the indescribable suffering it caused, should arouse much soul-searching. And it is doubtless healthy, too. The use of any weapon so terrible, and the political power that puts that use into play, needs vigilant scrutiny not merely now but for generations. Therefore revisionism, puzzling and exasperating as it often has been, is a welcome activity, especially in an America too often blind to its own global propensity for
force majeure
. One must honor doubts, whether their roots are psychological, political, or religious. Never let it be forgotten that, even as I speak, there are innumerable atomic weapons stashed away all around the world, and that the end of the Cold War did not relieve us from the necessity of constantly pondering their existence. Yet as I reflect on that event of 1945 I can't help being convinced that Truman had no alternative to his decision, and that his choice was the right one, even though its absolute rightness can never really be proved. Its rightness can never be proved, at least to universal satisfaction, because so much of the decision was bound up in the understandably bellicose psychology of the moment. Might not Truman have behaved differently if he, like most of his fellow Americans—especially young marines such as Lieutenant William C. Styron—were not consumed with a need for retaliation and with the savage rage against the enemy that three and a half years of brutal fighting had engendered? It is easy, from the comfortable perspective of hindsight, for a psychiatrist like Robert Jay Lifton, who through no fault of his own did not serve in the war, to confuse such rage with megalomania and to regard the decision to use the
bomb as a form of madness. Perhaps only those who literally and truly remember Pearl Harbor can comprehend the national fury.

Yet it is hard to see how even a Harry Truman totally dispassionate and unaffected by rage could have acted in any other way. And this opinion derives from two hard facts embedded in the conduct of the war itself. First, it must be remembered that by the time the first atomic weapon was dropped, in August 1945, the mainland of Japan had been subjected to the most ruthless destruction visited upon a nation in the history of warfare. On a single night in March over 100,000 civilians died when General LeMay's B-29s firebombed Tokyo. The bombs had produced an incendiary storm destroying helpless hordes in heat so violent that those who had sought shelter in underground tunnels suffered an actual liquefaction—not lucky enough to be swiftly incinerated but broiled alive—while people who had tried to find safety in the river shallows were burnt to ashes. I still have a letter from a marine friend of mine who was on the island of Saipan when those B-29s took off, and he watched them in their flight toward Tokyo. “Why I was unable to feel repelled or to be touched by a tremor of pity, I could not say,” he wrote, “even as I gazed through the twilight at the howling monsters speeding northward to drop their cargoes on numberless cowering Yokohama mamas and the toothless slant-eyed old farts in baggy drawers and schoolgirls and roly-poly wee baby-sans. My Presbyterian conscience bade me weep but I was dry-eyed. Which is what war does to you,” he concluded, “it fucks up your heart.”

What my friend was witnessing happened to be a routine example of strategy that began in the 1930s with Japanese bombing of civilians in China, resumed in the Nazi destruction of Guernica in Spain, and continued with the firebombing by the Germans of London and Coventry and Manchester and other urban centers in Britain. Let us not minimize the primitive moral appeal of the question: “Who started it, after all?” Our own evil was bound to follow. The British and Americans' senseless air attack on Dresden, in which multitudes were cremated, was a horrible amplification of this barbaric custom. Now, there is no moral justification for the destruction of civilians under any circumstance. But it has to be understood that by August, Harry Truman and his advisors saw the dropping of the atomic device as a logical extension of strategic bombing. As the late McGeorge Bundy wrote: “[By the summer of 1945] both military and political leaders gradually came
to think of urban destruction not as wicked, not even as a necessary evil, but as a result with its own military value.”
³
One need not justify the morality of his decision to understand that Truman regarded the atom bomb as just another, only more effective, weapon in the arsenal of total destruction. In their different ways, Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill would have all approved.