“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
Reflections on the Warsaw Ghetto
TO BEGIN WITH, the question of qualification: “People in the Ghetto”—who has the right to talk about them? Everyone, as long as the intention is an objective portrayal of how it really was. But if one abandons the historiographical terrain and strives for something that can be called, unclearly and perhaps a bit ostentatiously, the phenomenology of the victim’s existence in the ghetto, if one aims for reflection that must be based on direct experience but that is to be extracted from its immediacy and filtered through the medium of thought—then above all others those are qualified who experienced the events in person.
The author of this introduction already feels uncertain, for he was not in the ghetto himself. But perhaps he can turn to an admissible metaphor and state: Since the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws the ghetto caught up with every Jew (“Jews: persons regarded as Jews according to the Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935 . . .”), even if earlier he had shared the dream of assimilation and casually brushed off his Jewish identity. But, sad privilege that it is, I need not base my attempt at justification only on a metaphorically extended ghetto experience: Two years in the concentration camps, of them a year in Auschwitz, may, indeed must, suffice. Behind the electrically charged barbed wire I and others like me had experiences that were probably not basically different from those of the ghetto inmates. Perhaps only our dread was not as great since we had, after all, already left the Waiting Room of Death, and the ghetto dwellers were still cowering in it. Our train had already arrived. What those behind the ghetto walls had feared was already reality for us.
Still another attempt to revive the horrors? One has already had enough of all that, right? It is all very familiar. The ghetto—and then what? Dresden is thrown into the discussion, and Hiroshima, and Vietnam, and—who knows—perhaps even the homes of the Palestinians blown up by Jewish commandos. Man is not good; that’s the way it was, it is, and will be, and history is not the teacher but the torturer of mankind. What the ghetto was like? This way and that. Bad, of course. But why stir up the past, etc. Perhaps that is why it is good to tell what it was: so that the How can achieve its specific dimension, and historical detachment may feel shame at its nice objectivity.
Let me repeat the phrase “Waiting Room of Death,” even though it can be objected that this metaphor borders somewhere on the journalistic. But, just a moment! The ghetto, the Nazi-German ghetto that we are talking about here was the anteroom of death; and whether the metaphor is journalistic or not, it is totally congruent with the reality experienced in an accursed time. Not every ghetto was comparable to the one invented and structured by the Nazis. The ghettos that separated Jews from Christians from the late Middle Ages into the eighteenth century were prisons, certainly; and in this regard they were hardly different from the Warsaw Ghetto. But it must never be forgotten that they were at the same time also a kind of home for the homeless.
For the Jew the historical ghetto was not only spatial separation, which he felt to be a dishonor, but his consciously lived separation from the Christians, who ate impure food and worshipped an un-God. It was the topographical counterpart of a mental and religious attitude. In addition, the Jews in the historical ghetto were more or less secure—to the extent that Jews could be secure at all. What was it that Klabund once wrote?
On Sunday a word is dropped in church
On Monday it snowballs through the streets
On Tuesday they talk of racial hate
On Wednesday the roar is heard: pogrom!1
Close enough. Murder, burning houses, torture, and rape were a danger but killing was not an absolute, unavoidable certainty. One could escape it through flight, through servility, through baptism, also with the help of money. Hope was not forbidden. “Next year in Jerusalem,” that was the ritualized illusion. But it was not madness. Death lay as a shadow over the historical ghetto; it was not yet decreed as ineluctable. In the Nazi ghetto it was different, completely and totally different, even if in the end one or the other did manage to survive and even if there were a few whom the wind swept to Jerusalem like drifting sand. There could be no hope. Put differently and more correctly—since the theological concept of hope in its immanent-transcendental ambiguity obscures the real state of affairs: There could no longer be any trust in the world when all were forced to see daily that not only the improbable was taking place but also what until then had been deemed completely impossible. The ghetto wall was also the demarcation line that separated the Jew from the human being. The latter, even in his crippled form as an oppressed Pole, was permitted in principle to live—as a slave, to be sure, without schools, without civil rights, without dignity, if you will; but he was not prevented from breathing. The oppressed non-Jew could be expelled, deported, thrown into prison, in certain circumstances—and they occurred only too often!—murdered. But he knew precisely and made no secret of it when associating with Jews, that a world separated him from them: the insane world of the Nazi race theory. Thus the total solitude of the Ghetto Jew.
This solitude is not that of the colonized, about which a man like Frantz Fanon tells us when describing the condition of the Algerians under French rule. To be sure, what Fanon said of the colonial slave holds true also for the Jew: that the master “makes” the servant and thereby determines him in his entire being. However, the colonial master “makes” his dehumanized human workhorse for the purpose of exploitation, and the clear, immanent law of exploitation demands in turn that everything be taken from the exploited but that his life be spared. For the Nazi, on the other hand, the death of the Jew, the Final Solution, took uncontestable priority over exploitation. The Ghetto Jews were made to work until they died like dogs. Decisive, however, was not their work but their death. For this reason, the answer given by the Ghetto Jew—given to himself, to his existence, his master, and the world—was necessarily a different one. “The glance that the colonized cast on the town of the colonial master,” Fanon says, “was a glance of lustful envy. The dream of possession, of all manner of possession: to sit down at the table of the colonial master, to sleep in his bed, if possible, with the master’s wife.” The dream of the Ghetto Jew did not go that far. He did not wish to wear the SS man’s smart uniform. Because he despised the Death’s Head Priest, one can object, and would be partly right in doing so. But just partly! If the Jew in the Nazi-German ghetto so seldom reached the point of a hate that was fraught with envy, of the dream of possession, it was because he was unable to summon the necessary strength. He had internalized the image of himself created by the Nazi; he had become the louse of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. From what remained of the religious conceit of chosenness and his faulty knowledge of talmudic wisdom he despised the blond “German woman”; but he also revered her and did not even dream of approaching her rosy body. His reaction was fear and flight. His history—which will not be discussed here, since its basic elements are common knowledge—had prepared him for the role that the Nazi forced him to play to its very last consequences. His unspeakable solitude was also determined by flight and fear. The fugitive does not have a good, or even a bad, comrade; the sole comrade of the person driven by fear is his fear. To introduce a concept that was developed by Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he and his companions in fate belonged to the “series” and not to a “group.” Hence the peculiar dialectic of Jewish solidarity, which realized itself in suffering —no matter what Frau Hannah Arendt may have told us in her remarkably uncomprehending Eichmann book, which does not even contain relevant factual knowledge—in suffering, and only in rare instances in a seemingly impossible struggle, which was doomed to failure from the start. The Jewish Kapos and block seniors, the Jewish ghetto police and base ghetto notables suffered along with their victims, despite everything. They beat their fellow Jew and in doing so were beating themselves. They drove him into the gas chambers and never once believed that they could save themselves by such betrayal. The solidarity that extends only to suffering and does not include struggle within its horizon is as miserable as the Nazi wanted the Jew to be.
If the historical ghetto—in which the Jew consciously separated himself from the Christian, who for him was a heathen—can be seen as the distorted form of Jewish national sovereignty, as a caricature of the Promised Land, if you will, then the Nazi-German ghetto was the realization of the mad Nazi dream of the Jewish subhuman, over whom the Nazi superman ruled for the sole purpose of finally killing him. The Nazi actually succeeded in creating “his” Jew according to his own distorted pattern. Could the Ghetto Jew do other than accommodate himself to the image that the superman desired? Become and die! the master commanded. The Jew, accustomed only to the world’s hate, obeyed. He wailed, and struggled with his comrade in death for a spoonful of soup. He was nimble at black-marketeering. He had always manipulated money only—and, oh, how wretchedly little—and thus in the ghetto, too, he believed in the flimsy illusion of the unreliable possession of cash. He put on airs when it mattered, and had the band play a tango—which he knew to be the dance of death. At times it seemed as though he wanted to dupe and deride the Nazi: You wanted to have me so shameful! Take a look; I’m even more shameful, shameful to the point of complete absurdity, so that your design becomes a travesty and you yourself become a fool and are fooled. Weapons of flight and fear. One can scarcely talk of Jewish “collaboration,” then! In the face of the ghetto all political and moral categories break down, become simply unusable. What the Nazis perpetrated on those concentrated in the Eastern ghettos lay far beyond all judgment. For what can one do with a concept like “cruelty,” which can be used, after all, to describe the behavior of a spiteful sergeant! What can be done, I say, with everyday words when not only customary everyday reality was exceeded but when every day deeds were committed that will forever remain indescribable? Weapons of flight and fear, even they are ennobled in the face of the enemy. Who, of all those who were not there, dares to chime in and speak of the “lack of dignity” of a people that let itself be led to the slaughtering block “like a flock of sheep”? Yet, even if every response to the dehumanization process of the Nazis is legitimate and must be accepted (since the code of honor in the duel between the hunter and the hunted also includes the hare’s agile double-back), let it be said that there is a hierarchy of responses. One person was a “collaborator” and enjoyed himself a bit before they got rid of him. The other armed himself with the wisdom of the victim and bowed down before the misdeeds of a God who was Moloch. The third died bravely, like a soldier, with no heroic act of resistance, certainly, but still as the helper of his weaker comrade. We esteem him more than the wise, hoary victim at his prayers, who in turn takes precedence over the clumsily heel-clicking chairman of some Jewish Council. But high above both stands the one who rebelled. The one who took up arms, mostly primitive arms, and opposed the highly technical battle equipment of the murderer, was . . . What? Well, at the risk of lapsing into a trivial formulation: He was the hero absolute. And one can only be amazed, can only marvel at the great number of men and women who freed themselves not only from the ghetto but from a two-thousand year history—in the situation that had been readied for them, the situation of death, in which the upright person is already cut down while he still thinks he is in battle position. Resistance, violence, they were not the “solution”—there was no other but the one planned at the Wannsee Conference!—but no matter how futile, they were historically and humanly the most valuable responses and held most promise for the future. In his book Treblinka (of which, unfortunately, too little notice was taken in Germany), the young French author Jean-François Steiner, probably the sole person to have attained a visionary grasp of the situation in the ghetto and death camp without having been “on the spot,” has one of the protagonists say: “I don’t want to live, I want to take revenge!” Indeed, in deliberations devoted to the men and women in the Waiting Room of Death one cannot omit the problem of revenge, or more concretely, of avenging violence that is intended as the nullification of the oppressor’s violence. Let us not forget that the history of the Warsaw Ghetto culminated in an armed insurrection that militarily was wholly absurd and can be justified only morally, as the realization of humane vengeance. In revolt, that of Warsaw or also that in Treblinka, the Ghetto Jew, while totally preserving his qualities, transcended himself and attained to an entirely new ontic dimension. He was the prey who bore within him a two-thousand-year history of humiliation. But for one moment he became the hunter, not for the joy of hunting but from the will to remain who he was and at the same time to become another. The history of the revolts in the ghetto and in various camps permits us to see how things really were. In the numerous documentary works, to which nothing need be added here, we read that it was by no means only heroes who became heroes there, who took up iron bars and set out with them against tanks. The nimble black-marketeer was there, the scholar who still the day before, while studying the Scriptures, was determined to offer himself up as a compliant victim, the brutal ghetto policeman, some Jewish Council’s list-compiling bookkeeper for slaughter-cattle, the socialist, accustomed from early on to the thought of physical resistance, the simply apprehensive father of a family. They had been lost in the “series” and now closed ranks in a “group.” The group-forming agent was the determination for revenge. What an unpopular term is being introduced here! I already hear protests: No, that’s not the way it was! An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, jus talionis; for God’s sake, that is by no means what the Jews wanted who were rousing themselves to resistance!
Yes, it is! I believe that is what they wanted. I myself, the author of this contribution, wanted just that; and countless comrades along with me. That they and I did not rise in revolt remains our very painful, constantly reopening wound. Certainly, the Jew as the Nazi saw him and forced him to see himself was not suited for that. He told the sad joke about two Jews who, sometime around 1943, were talking about the coming days of the allied victory. One of them says: You know, I picture it like this. I’m sitting, as I used to, in the coffee house, a stack of liberal newspapers in front of me. Who comes in but Hitler—small, bent, shabby, humble. He comes up to my table and asks: Excuse me, might there be a paper available? And I look at him over the top of my glasses and say politely but firmly: Not for you!
This was the reaction of the Jews according to Nazi design: Fear and flight were carried over into the time of freedom, and revenge consisted only in ridicule and painful shame. It was reserved for few to discover their authenticity in battle and in genuine revenge. For few and many. For the power of the oppressor—dividing and ruling, in the end decreeing inescapable death—had succeeded in destroying the practical, the psychological, and the existential foundations of the human act of vengeance.
It must be recognized and appreciated that this vengeance was not a cocky, romantic vendetta in the Romance tradition, nor was it the comparatively simple “violence” that Fanon, or Che Guevara, or Regis Debray proposed for the battle of the colonized and oppressed. As little as the Jew fixed his gaze with “lustful envy,” as did Fanon’s colonized man, onto the homestead of the oppressor—since, after all, he both despised and respected the master—that is how little his actually hopeless revenge could be the violence and revolution of the Algerian or the black-skinned American. For him more was at stake, and it was something different, something that elsewhere I myself termed—inappropriately, as I now realize—the “reattainment of dignity.” Because in an act of sudden freedom, only a few minutes before its time, he snatched to himself what was nothing but certain death; because he was alone, completely and despairingly alone; because as the reward for his violence, and this is the decisive point, he could not, like the Algerian, expect liberation; his revenge had to have a completely different existential character.
What kind was it? Well, this much is clear: it had the character of authentication and the free acceptance of a situation that in its lack of any freedom was entirely unacceptable. The “reattainment of dignity” was indeed an inadequate formulation. For what is usually called dignity could not be taken from anyone by the Nazi, nor by anybody else. An entire history of persecution, insanely anchored in the notion of deicide, was unable to rob the Jew of his dignity, whether it was the money-lending Jew, or the talmudist, or the great Jewish poet and scholar. As concerns Jewish revenge, or the violence of countervio-lence upon which he decided literally at the last moment in the concentration camp or in the ghetto, what makes it so singular and irreducible was the freedom of choosing death, which was opposed to death as a decree of the enemy and made into reality. Was it suicide? Naturally, it was that too. But what differentiated it from real suicide, which one can regard as the final and most consistent form of the flight-and-fear reaction, was the ultimate fact that the ring of total isolation had been broken: death was not only suffered but also meted out. Here the redemptory application of violence had been found in its purest form. Here revenge was cleansed of a Christian moralism that was never able to prevent it, that always merely denied it. Here and here alone, as far as we can survey history, the dreadful and, in all its dreadfulness, empty phrase about “cleansing the ignominy through blood” made good sense.
But I’ve jumped ahead. Revolt and avenging, liberating force were the final aim, the historic and moral goal that was not attained often enough. They were the utopia that was only occasionally realized. Chronologically, too, they lay at the end of a long journey through the night. It will be necessary to return to what was for every Jew the irreplaceable existential value of consummated revenge, which—it dare not be forgotten for a second—was never carried out on the defenseless but on a heavily armed oppressor. There will also be discussion further on of the task that was fulfilled in the insurrection and without which perhaps a state like Israel would be unthinkable. First, however, we want to return to the point where, in the haste to progress to something brighter, we left the ghetto with quick step, so to speak, and were searching for the revolutionary situation, for the anti-ghetto. In reality, as everyone knows, there was little fighting and much suffering in the ghetto, and a description of the essence of ghetto existence must in the end adhere more to the sluggish hours, days, months, years of suffering than to the moment of revolt and transcendence.
What is there to add that would go beyond the rather thorough documentation already available? Too much and too little. Too much to be mastered here in the abundance of its material. Too little to illuminate entirely new formal-philosophical aspects. Perhaps there are only isolated phenomena that are not yet known well enough so that it may be worthwhile pointing them out. First of all—and I am now speaking from my own concentration camp experiences as well as my study of the ghetto literature—there was the physical compression of human masses within the most confining space. In the ghetto Sartre’s all-too-often quoted words: “L’enfer, c’est les autres”—“Hell, that is the others,” took on a very concrete sense that was felt bodily. The victims were not only made into a “series” by their oppressor; since they constantly saw, smelled, and touched one another, they were physically deindividualized and made into an opaque mass of flesh. Whoever reads about the ghetto and then reads something pseudoclever or even genuinely clever about our modern “mass civilization” must let out a bitter laugh. Masses, “mass man”—that is not the television viewer in his single-family home, even if he is exposed to the pressure of the mass media. The ghetto dweller had physically become one with the mass, at the same time that he was battling senselessly and desperately against the other cells of this mass of flesh. The ghetto was a malignant tumor of humanity. Every single one of those crammed into it understood it as such and felt himself to be the sick cell of an organism, which, objectively, he really was. Therefore, he could love himself as little as he could the next person. For one another—and here again I am speaking from my own camp experience, which may legitimately be applied to the ghetto—we were nothing but disgust. Self-disgust then emerged of necessity, since everyone sensed that for his fellow sufferer he was merely someone who was eating the bread that could have been his, taking the air he needed to breathe, the space for moving about. But where self-love and loving communication with one’s fellow man were blocked, there could hardly emerge the so urgently needed, total, unconditional hate for the antiman, hate that was ready to employ violence, ready for revenge. Nothing remained except, again and again, the already mentioned solidarity of suffering, a solidarity that was incapable of love and joy projected outward, or of resistance—which in common colloquial language can more or less be reduced to the formula: “You’re a poor dog just like me!” A poor dog, certainly, but a dog. Throughout times of relative freedom also, this mentality of self-disgust had accompanied the Jew, who, coming from the historical ghetto, after the all too brief historical period of emancipation was thrown back into the Nazi-German ghetto, the inhospitable Waiting Room of Death. One is familiar with the profound “e’soi” joke, which no less a writer than Arthur Schnitzler included in his great novel on the Jewish Question, The Road to the Open. An Orthodox Jew is sitting in a train compartment opposite a properly dressed gentleman, whom he takes to be a Christian. He decorously draws in his legs, scarcely dares to clear his throat. Suddenly the proper gentleman takes a Hebrew newspaper from his pocket and begins to read. Whereupon the Orthodox Jew breathes a sigh of relief: “E’soi” (Aha!)—and stretches his legs out onto the opposite seat . . . The poor dog in European disguise sitting across from the Orthodox Jew deserved no better treatment. In the Nazi-German ghetto, where, to boot, the bodily crowding-together of the Jews excluded mutual respect, this mentality became paroxysmal.
On such a social foundation, or, better yet, in the true sense of the word, asocial foundation, there now arose in the ghetto, as there did by the way in the concentration camp also, an economic structure that was nothing other than the capitalistic economic system raised to the degree of self-nullification, self-caricature, and absurdity. It was the triumph of a capitalistic Social Darwinism, which was joined—to a lesser extent in the ghetto than in the concentration camp, but still visibly enough—by the law of the physically strongest. Among the very weakest of this earth, he was strong who possessed money, who knew how to get hold of it, if need be, by exerting superior physical strength. A hierarchy arose, whereas what should have mattered most was that no poor dog be more and better than the next, so that together they could become a wolf pack of full equals.
Concealed in this hierarchy lay something extremely enigmatic: hope amidst hopelessness. Everyone hoped that the great broom that was cleaning up might pass him by. No one really believed in this hope. “The whole truth is,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “that if the Jewish people [not only in the ghetto but in all of Nazi-occupied territory] had really been without a leader, there would have been chaos and victims and much misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” That has been contested by the most authoritative sources, and it appears rather absurd to me also. But one thing is certain: the “leaders” of this people, in the ghetto above all the Jewish Council and the Jewish police, would have done better not to cling to that unbelieved-in and hopeless hope, but from the start to entrust their cause and that of their charges to nothing and no one. In this case, that means to expect nothing but their own death, which had to come in any event, and to prepare for the avenging use of violence.
What prevented them from acting in this way was apparently the habit of suffering in silence, fixed for two millennia, or, as it has been formulated here, the fear-and-flight reaction, which had become a character constituent. In this context, the answer that Martin Buber once gave in a letter to Gandhi after “Kristallnacht” seems inferior. The latter had tried to convince Buber that the German Jews would do better to sacrifice their lives on the altar of passive resistance in order thereby to awaken world conscience. Hereupon Buber replied to the Mahatma that such a voluntary martyrdom was senseless, especially since Judaism did not “teach death but rather life.” This argument, which is quite ridiculous in view of the genuine religion of death in the Nazi-German ghetto, later was put forth in connection with the controversy over Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann book. If I am not mistaken and have not falsely interpreted my own concentration camp experiences, it was by no means the Jewish “precept of life” that paradoxically permitted the masses of Jews to go to their death without resistance; rather, it was the fear-and-flight reaction, which had become a collective basic character trait, enforced, to be sure, by the humanly corrupting social structure of the ghetto. The corruption process of the Nazis has been referred to often enough, so that here just a few allusions may serve as a reminder. It was the Nazis who erected the caricature-like capitalistic system combined with the right of the strongest (although it was supported by the Jewish merchant tradition), in which the mobility of money held out the security that the native population found in house and home. It was the Nazis who constantly nourished hopes that they destroyed at the next moment, only to fan them again a moment later. In the ghetto and concentration camp one could cherish the illusion that one could survive by working one’s way up (at the cost of self-surrender) into the ranks of the ghetto or camp notables.
The Nazi caused the poor dog-of-a-Jew to hope; and he hoped as a hoping person, even if he never trusted his hope. The Nazis gave every Jew the chance to become a scoundrel, writes Jean-François Steiner. To be sure, and it is important for me to repeat this, the concept of scoundrel hardly retained any meaning in the ghetto. Every answer to the Nazi’s crushing of the Jews’ humanity was legitimate in the ghetto—also the answer that, in the usual sense, was most base. Only thoughtlessness, brazen arrogance, and complete ignorance of the situation can condemn the “collaborationist Jew” like some Quisling in occupied Europe! Certainly, the Nazi had seen to it that, if you wish, too many Jews took advantage of the chance to become a scoundrel; but in the excess of terror that he had organized he brought it about, very much against his will, that even the lowest Jewish villain was no longer a villain. In a very definite sense, he had forever elevated a people that he wanted not only to destroy physically but to turn morally and historically into an antipeople. (It does not help the Neo-Nazis a bit when they say that the Jews want to blackmail the world with their millions of victims! For a long time to come, the world will have to submit to this pressure, which is anything but shabby coercion.)
Here, a further point must be included in the discussion, which we want to direct against all those people who in our judgment understand the phenomenology of the ghetto as little as they do its psychology and sociology. In some places the attempt was made to understand and explain the ghetto against the background of the very general phenomenon of “totalitarianism,” more or less as though it had been nothing but the apotheosis of totalitarian rule. Anyone inclined to espouse such an interpretation is referred, to begin with, to Erwin Leiser’s magnificent film Mein Kampf, which presents montages of original film photography from the Warsaw Ghetto. In the ghetto, unlike in the totalitarian state, no one could save his life by submis-siveness. What threatened him was not the arbitrariness of the police state that characterizes the “ordinary” totalitarian regime. Oh yes, Hitler, Himmler, and their accomplices had made choices according to their will, but all too simply and all too ruthlessly and generally for the concept of arbitrariness in its everyday usage to have any meaning. The conceptual world of politics as well as of morality had been invalidated by an excess of injustice. The triumph of radical evil (not “so-called” evil, which could be traced back to historical ethnic factors, and also not “banal” evil, in whose existence I can no longer believe) had permitted a world to arise in the ghetto that was not beyond, but certainly below, good and evil. This world had precious little to do with totalitarianism or dictatorship, or, in general, any historically known form of social community. It was very simply the contradictory reality of an antiworld or, if you wish, a world of death. Death had already invaded its waiting room. The Jewish “precept of life” was entirely powerless against it. Where it attempted to assert itself in the form of a false hope of survival, it only disclaimed itself; and the chance survival of this or that individual had nothing to do with the fundamental negation of life and ultimately of all morality in the service of life.
The dialectical paradox lay in the fact that whoever wished to preserve the principle of life in the ghetto had to accept death; that whoever was to restore morality at all had to include the obviously evil, that is, revenge, in his system. Accept death, I say. By that, I naturally do not mean a sacrificial death, death suffered passively at the hand of the other, but death that the ghetto dweller took voluntarily into his own hands, that he inflicted on himself by bringing it to the enemy. The ghetto was an inverted world, or a world of inversions: whoever wanted to survive in it had to be prepared, and willing, to perish. The Nazi himself had established this world of negations. “Members of the intellectual professions, step forward! We need clerks, bookkeepers, chemists,” is the way it went in the camp that I knew in those days. The “intellectuals” made haste, stepped forward in double time, stood at attention. Then they were assigned to work details charged with especially hard physical labor. The Nazi negated himself through the lie that he was constantly telling; he negated the other, whom he subjugated to the lie and tossed to the dead while he was still living.
This general negation by the Nazi was a negation of life, of man, even of himself. Most certainly it was a negation of the spirit, of morality, of justice, of truth, of courage (for even the most courageous Jew was treated like a miserable coward). It could be opposed only by a comprehensive counternegation. Negation of the negation: if ever and anywhere this was more than dubious dialectical acrobatics, it was in the Nazi-German ghetto! The total negation of the negation could be nothing other than armed uprising against the tormentor, the revolt or “great refusal” that knows it is without a chance and still declares its loyalty to itself. With that, we have arrived once more at the problem of resistance and insurrection. As stated already, it seldom occurred. But where it did manifest itself, it was for that reason all the more admirable and, in the long run, more effective. Thanks to the insurgent Jews in some of the camps, above all in the Warsaw Ghetto, today the Jew can again look at his own human face, as a human being. Jean-François Steiner writes in his book Treblinka: “He [a camp prisoner] still did not know how he should revolt, but daily the idea filled him more and more, and thus he gradually lost his fear and his cowardice.” If it had only been a matter of overcoming physical fear of the oppressor! It was that too, no doubt, but it was by no means only that. The simple formula of the attainment of human dignity of manly honor far from suffices to tell what the uprising in the camp or ghetto was. I spoke above of the ghetto inmate’s boundless solitude, which distinguished his condition from that of the colonized or someone else who was somehow being oppressed. When the Algerians began their war against the French occupiers under the leadership of nine men, they were not alone. Not only Tunisia and Morocco, as already independent North African states of the former French colonial territory, were with them, but the moral support of the entire non-French world was assured them, including that of a young American senator named John F. Kennedy.
The negroes of the United States, even when they employ the most extreme verbal and concrete weapons in the battle for their rights and identity, have on their side the sympathy of the Third World, the communist world, as well as considerable parts of the Western world. Not so the Jew in the Nazi-German ghetto. The Pole or Ukrainian, who was likewise engaged in the partisan struggle against the Germans, did not help him. The Jew could be happy if they did not attack him directly or denounce him. Also the democratic world, which was at war against Hitler, accorded him no help. On the contrary! The allies made use of every opportunity to give their people, who were by no means free of traditional antisemitism, the binding assurance that the war was not being conducted for the Jews—who were abandoned to death. As though it would have been a disgrace to want to hinder the murder of millions with armed force!
The Jew was alone with his task of negating the negation. Whether he fulfilled his mission or not, this lends him his ontically unique dimension and his historically ineffaceable quality. He had to raise himself from the ground without an arm to support him. In the end, that is what it all came down to. The violent uprising was the negation of the ghetto condition, the eradication of two thousand years of false solidarity in suffering, the restoration not of “dignity,” but of humanity pure and simple; it was the avenging establishment of justice, the chance to create a new kingdom of man on earth.
Are all these words too lofty? Pathos, in the sense of suffering, sympathetic suffering of what was inconceivably suffered, is the sole permissible tone when one reports on the ghetto beyond mere documentation. For no matter where we may look in the vast field of history, nowhere had “la condition humaine,” as André Malraux termed it, so terribly become the condition inhumaine.
The ghetto, at least so it seems to me at this moment, was the beginning of the end of Jewish history as the story of the sufferer. Since the Nazi persecution, which culminated in the ghetto and finally in the death camp, something has been added to the existence of this people: the certainty that anything similar can no longer happen because it must not happen, has imprinted itself on the mind of every Jew, wherever he may be. Only of the Jew? I hope not. The world was traumatized in the most beneficial way by these events, as they were gradually revealed in the course of a quarter-century. Here, too, the Nazi had in the end negated himself: by having brought it about that throughout the world young people, grandchildren of the ghetto contemporaries, still today shout “Gestapo, SS!” when they want to charge repressive powers with vile behavior. The swastika, onto which the Jew had been nailed, not only dispelled the image of the Jewish deicide, but became the universal symbol of what is humanly and historically intolerable. It was the inmates of the ghetto who had paid the price so that humanity could seize the opportunity to deliver itself from evil. Every ghetto dweller, mind you, even the black-marketeers, the “collaborators,” the cowards, and also the informers. The highest price was paid, to be sure, by the most praiseworthy: by the few women and men, in the ghetto or in the extermination camp, who took death into their own hands and, though powerless and unarmed, became avengers.
The history of the ghetto has not ended. It continues, and should continue, to make itself felt. No reconciliation with the murderers who are perhaps still among us, or with the others who, ghostlike, remain before us only as horrid visual memories. That is the highest moral commandment, the only admissible historical mastery of the deeds of the antiman.
There are concepts that have gained an entirely new meaning because of the ghetto. Revenge. Irreconcilability. One must reorient, just as the ghetto dwellers were forced to experience the world in a new way. The Christian ethic is no more adequate for this purpose than the Jewish ethic. A new philosophy of history would have to be written, or rather: it is already in the making. It was the people in the ghetto who recorded its first sentences. Nothing will ever again be the way it once was. Possibly it will be said someday that the history of a more humane humanity began amidst the inhumanity of the ghetto.
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“Im Warteraum des Todes”; first published as the introduction to a volume of photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto, Menschen im Ghetto (People in the ghetto), ed. Günther Deschner (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Sachbuchverlag, 1969), pp. 11-31.
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