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Haaretz
original article
Fri., January 01, 2010 Tevet 15, 5770 | Israel Time: 02:12 (EST+7)
Too much ado over a symbol
By Jeremy Rosen
In case you were asleep at the time, in late December, the iconic cut-out
banner over the gates of Auschwitz was stolen.
The sign's words, "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work sets you free"), are now
understood by our culture as an intimation of doom, something of an updated
version for the words Dante envisioned over the Gates of Hell: "Abandon hope
all ye who enter here."
But "Arbeit Macht Frei" is far more sinister and horrific, for the camps
embodied not only the loss of hope, but of life, too, and the slogan's
ironic words mocked the poor victims as they passed underneath them. The
language of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has become
permanently associated with the wickedest of all evil - all the more so
because it was carried out by such apparently cultured and sophisticated
human beings.
What happened beyond those gates was not a war crime in which rival armies
and their supporters massacred people in a frenzy of revenge. It was not the
mindless cruelty of individual soldiers bringing their own prejudices into a
conflict and behaving inhumanely. It was not the result of ancient tribal
rivalries and conflicts over territory or of a desire to avenge past
offenses. It was exclusively, and uniquely, a premeditated plan, designed by
bureaucrats and executed by commanders, both civil and military. It was
carried out with efficiency and expediency, with the goal of exterminating -
not of subjugating or diminishing, undermining or displacing, but actually
of wiping out like vermin millions of innocent human beings. It was not
carried out by primitives, religious fanatics or reformers millennia ago. It
was done by men and women on the cusp of modern, rational civilization.
Having said all that, I am both amused and annoyed at the exaggerated furor
over the theft of the sign by a handful of petty criminals, apparently to
sell it for scrap. Now we will have a legion of Polish jokes, like: How many
Poles does it take to steal a gate? Even if, as is now claimed, the theft
was carried out on demand, for a foreign collector of Nazi memorabilia - so
what? If the pieces had not been recovered, would a replica not have had
exactly the same impact? It was the people who were massacred that count,
not the wooden barracks or the railway tracks. Will Holocaust deniers be any
more or less vocal if they see a replica rather than the original?
Poland's president, prime minister and police chief all rushed to condemn
the outrage in the media. Why? What were they so concerned about? Public
opinion? The prime minister and the president of Israel took time off from
crucial negotiations to call for immediate action. The U.S. State Department
dispatched an official protest to Poland. The outrage was out of all
proportion. What was stolen is no more than a symbolic artifact, not a
priceless archaeological jewel or an essential piece of a nation's ancient
heritage. It was not like the demolition by the Taliban of ancient Buddhas
hewn out of stone. It was not even equivalent to the hundreds of Torah
scrolls that are stolen every year from poorly protected synagogues
worldwide and sold for a quick buck. The purloined item was mid-20th century
industrial scrap.
But of course it is more than that, because Auschwitz has
now become a religion in its own right. For religious Jews, who
proportionally lost most in terms of numbers during the Holocaust, the
response has always been less of memorials and more of reinforcing
tradition. They do this by observance, study and having large families.
Replenishing the destroyed fountains of Eastern European Jewry is their
constant leitmotif and is omnipresent in common discourse. A religion that
rebuilds and thrives is the most effective means of avenging and remembering
the past. A religion that means something is a way of life and not just a
system of empty rituals.
But for many Jews, the trauma of the Holocaust, of what seemed like the
death of God - or perhaps his abandonment of his people - was too much to
allow them to continue the old rituals and ways of life; they needed a new
religion. As people overcame the initial reluctance to speak about the
traumas, Jew and non-Jew alike have thrown themselves into this new religion
whose credo is the slogan "Never again." Yet the sad fact is that although
nothing of the same magnitude has happened again, lots of other "nevers" are
happening again and again all over the world.
Auschwitz has become the equivalent of a religious symbol used by Jews to
justify their rights and demands, and is often thrown back in their faces by
their enemies whenever something happens that they do not approve of, or
whenever Israel does something unacceptable. It is the symbol of the Jews
and yet at the same time, it is the sword of the anti-Semites who constantly
use it against us, as if to say: "You who suffered so much should not now
defend yourselves so aggressively against the helpless and the defenseless."
We all have our myths, our narratives that justify our existence as
individuals and as peoples. We are convinced of our rights. Each one of us
is so conditioned by our own symbols that we cannot possibly react
sensitively to those of others. We can only feel our own pain, cannot
imagine anyone else's. Unless we can all step back from our various received
myths and try to see the really important issues, then what hope is there of
increasing human understanding and compassion in our world?
Jeremy Rosen is a rabbi and writer. He lives in New York and blogs at
www.jeremyrosen.com/blog.
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