CONFRONTING THE BEAST
Guardian Unlimited
Saturday September 15, 2007
UK
David Grossman grew up in Israel in the 1950s, a place of whispers,
silences and people screaming in their sleep. From the moment he
decided to be an author, he knew he had to write about the Holocaust
Despite the close relationship between Israel and Germany today –
and between Israelis and Germans, between Jews and Germans – even
now there is a place in one’s mind and in one’s heart where certain
statements must be filtered through the prisms of time and memory,
where they are refracted into the entire spectrum of colours and
shades. I was born and raised in Jerusalem, in a neighbourhood and
in a family in which people could not even utter the word "Germany".
They found it difficult to say "Holocaust", too, and spoke only of
"what happened over there".
It is interesting to note that in Hebrew, Yiddish and every other
language they speak, when Jewish people refer to the Holocaust they
tend to speak of what happened "over there", whereas non-Jews usually
speak in terms of "what happened then". There is a vast difference
between there and then. "Then" means in the past; "then" enfolds within
it something that happened and ended, and is no longer. "There",
conversely, suggests that somewhere out there, in the distance, the
thing that happened is still occurring, constantly growing stronger
alongside our daily lives, and that it may re-erupt. It is not
decisively over. Certainly not for us, the Jews.
As a child, I often heard the term "the Nazi beast", and when I asked
the adults who this beast was, they refused to tell me, and said
there were things a child should not know. Years later, I wrote in
See Under: Love about Momik, the son of Holocaust survivors who never
tell him what really happened to them "over there". The frightened
Momik imagines the Nazi beast as a monster that controlled a land
called "over there", where it tortured the people Momik loves, and
did things to them that hurt them forever and denied them the ability
to live a full life.
When I was four or five, I heard for the first time of Simon
Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter. I felt a great sense of relief: finally,
I thought, there is someone courageous enough to fight the beast,
even willing to hunt it down! Had I known how to write at the time,
I might have written Wiesenthal a letter full of the detailed and
practical questions that were preoccupying me, because I imagined
that this hunter probably knew everything about his prey.
My generation, the children of the early 1950s in Israel, lived in
a thick and densely populated silence. In my neighbourhood, people
screamed every night from their nightmares. More than once, when we
walked into a room where adults were telling stories of the war,
the conversation would stop at once. We did pick up an occasional
sentence fragment: "The last time I saw him was on Himmelstrasse in
Treblinka", or "She lost both her children in the first Aktion".
Every day, at 20 minutes past one, there was a 10-minute programme on
the radio in which a female announcer with a glum and rhythmic voice
read the names of people searching for relatives lost during the war
and in the Holocaust: Rachel, daughter of Perla and Abraham Seligson
from Przemysl, is looking for her little sister Leah’leh, who lived
in Warsaw between the years … Eliyahu Frumkin, son of Yocheved
and Hershl Frumkin from Stry, is looking for his wife Elisheva,
nee Eichel, and his two sons, Yaakov and Meir … And so on and so
forth. Every lunch of my childhood was spent listening to the sounds
of this quiet lament.
When I was seven, the Eichmann trial was held in Jerusalem, and then we
listened to the radio during dinner when they broadcast descriptions
of the horrors. You could say that my generation lost its appetite,
but there was another loss, too. It was the loss of something deeper,
which we did not understand at the time and which is still being
deciphered throughout the course of our lives. Perhaps what we lost
was the illusion of our parents’ power to protect us from the terrors
of life. Or perhaps we lost our faith in the possibility that we,
the Jews, would ever live a complete, secure life. And perhaps, above
all, we felt the loss of the natural, childlike faith – faith in man,
in his kindness, in his compassion.
About two decades ago, when my oldest son was three, his pre-school
commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day as it did every year. My son did
not understand much of what he was told, and he came home confused
and frightened. "Dad, what are Nazis? What did they do?
Why did they do it?" And I did not want to tell him.
I, who had grown up amid the silence and fragmented whispers that
had filled me with so many fears and nightmares, who had written a
book about a boy who almost loses his mind because of his parents’
silence, suddenly understood my parents and my friends’ parents who
chose to be mute.
I felt that if I told him, if I even so much as cautiously alluded
to what had happened over there, something in the purity of my
three-year-old son would be polluted; that from the moment such
possibilities of cruelty were formulated in his childlike, innocent
consciousness, he would never again be the same child.
He would no longer be a child at all.
When I published See Under: Love in Israel, some critics wrote that
I belonged to the "second generation", and that I was the son of
"Holocaust survivors". I am not. My father emigrated to Palestine
from Poland as a child, in 1936. My mother was born in Palestine,
before the state of Israel was established.
And yet I am. I am the son of "Holocaust survivors" because in my
home, too, as in so many Israeli homes, a thread of deep anxiety
was stretched out, and with almost every move you made, you touched
it. Even if you were very careful, even if you hardly made any
unnecessary movements, you still felt that constant quiver of a
profound lack of confidence in the possibility of existence. A
suspicion towards man and what might erupt from him at any moment.
In our home, too, at every celebration, with every purchase of
a new piece of furniture, every time a new child was born in the
neighbourhood, there was a feeling that each such event was one more
word, one more sentence, in the intensely conducted dialogue with
over there. That every presence echoed an absence, and that life,
the simplest of daily routines, the most trivial oscillations over
"Should the child be allowed to go on the school trip?" or "Is it
worth renovating the apartment?" somehow echoed what happened over
there: all those things that managed to survive the there, and all
those that did not; and the life lessons, the acute knowledge that
had been burned in our memory.
This became all the more pertinent when greater decisions were at
stake: which profession should we choose? Should we vote rightwing or
leftwing? Marry or stay single? Have another child, or is one enough?
Should we even bring a child into this world? All these decisions and
acts, small and large, amounted to a huge, practically superhuman
effort to weave the thin fabric of everydayness over the horrors
beneath.
An effort to convince ourselves that, despite everything we know,
despite everything engraved on our bodies and souls, we have the
capacity to live on, and to keep choosing life, and human existence.
Because for people like myself, born in Israel in the years after the
Holocaust, the primary feeling – about which we could not talk at all,
and for which we may not have had the words at the time – was that
for us, for Jews, death was the immediate interlocutor. That life,
even when it was full of the energies and hopes and fruitfulness of a
newly revived young country, still comprised an enormous and constant
effort to escape the dread of death.
You may say, with good reason, that this is the basic human
condition. It is so, but for us it had daily and pressing reminders,
open wounds and fresh scars, and representatives who were living and
tangible, their bodies and souls crushed.
In Israel of the 1950s and 60s, and not only during times of extreme
despair, but precisely at those moments when the great commotion of
"nation-building" waned, in the moments when we tired a little, just
for an instant, of being a miracle of renewal and re-creation, in
those moments of the twilight of the soul, both private and national,
we could immediately feel, in the most intimate way, the band of
frost that suddenly tightens around our hearts and says quietly but
firmly: how quickly life fades. How fragile it all is. The body,
the family. Death is true, all else is an illusion.
Ever since I knew I would be an author, I knew I would write about
the Holocaust. I think these two convictions came to me at the same
time. Perhaps also because, from a very young age, I had the feeling
that all the many books I had read about the Holocaust had left
unanswered a few simple but essential questions.
I had to ask these questions of myself, and I had to reply in my
own words.
As I grew up, I became increasingly aware that I could not truly
understand my life in Israel, as a man, as a father, as a writer,
as an Israeli, as a Jew, until I wrote about my unlived life, over
there, in the Holocaust. And about what would have happened to me
had I been over there as a victim, and as one of the murderers.
I wanted to know both these things. One was not enough.
Namely: if I had been a Jew under the Nazi regime, a Jew in a
concentration camp or a death camp, what could I have done to save
something of myself, of my selfhood, in a reality in which people
were stripped not only of their clothes, but also of their names, so
that they became – to others -numbers tattooed on an arm. A reality in
which people’s previous lives were taken away from them – their family,
their friends, their profession, their loves, their talents. A reality
in which millions of people were relegated, by other human beings,
to the lowest rung of existence: to being nothing more than flesh
and blood intended for destruction with the utmost efficiency.
What was the thing inside me that I could hold up against this attempt
at erasure? What was the thing that could preserve the human spark
within me, in a reality entirely aimed at extinguishing it?
One can answer these questions, only about one’s self, in private. But
perhaps I can suggest a possible path to the answer. In the Jewish
tradition, there is a legend, or a belief, that every person has
a small bone in his body called the luz, located at the tip of the
spine, which enfolds the essence of a person’s soul. This bone cannot
be destroyed. Even if the entire human body is shattered, crushed
or burned, the luz bone does not perish. It stores a person’s spark
of uniqueness, the core of his selfhood. According to the belief,
this bone will be the source of man’s resurrection.
Once in a while, I ask people close to me what they believe their
luz is, and I have heard many varied answers. Several writers,
and artists in general, have told me that their luz is creativity,
the passion to create and the urge to produce. Religious people,
believers, have often said that their luz is the divine spark they
feel inside. One friend answered, after much thought: parenthood,
fatherhood. And another friend immediately replied that her luz was
her longing for the things and people she missed. A woman who was
roughly 90 at the time talked about the love of her life, a man who
committed suicide over 60 years ago: he was her luz
The other question I asked while writing See Under: Love is closely
related to the first, and in some ways even derives from it: I asked
myself how an ordinary person – as most Nazis and their supporters were
– becomes part of a mass-murder apparatus. In other words, what is the
thing that I must suspend within myself, that I must dull, repress,
so that I can ultimately collaborate with a mechanism of murder?
What must I kill within me to be capable of killing another person
or people, to desire the destruction of an entire people, or silently
to accept it?
Perhaps I should ask this question even more pointedly: am I myself,
consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, through
indifference or with mute acceptance, collaborating at this very
moment with some process that is destined to wreak havoc on another
human being, or on another group of people?
"The death of one man is a tragedy," Stalin said, "but the death of
millions is only statistics." How do tragedies become statistics
for us? I am not saying that we are all murderers. Of course
not. Yet it seems that most of us manage to lead a life of almost
total indifference to the suffering of entire nations, near and far,
and to the distress of hundreds of millions of human beings who are
poor and hungry and weak and sick, whether in our own countries or
in other parts of the world.
With wondrous ease we create the necessary mechanisms to separate
ourselves from the suffering of others.
Intellectually and emotionally, we manage to detach the causal
relationship between, for example, our economic affluence – in
the sated and prosperous western countries – and the poverty of
others. Between our own luxuries and the shameful working conditions
of others. Between our air-conditioned, motorised quality of life
and the ecological disasters it brings about.
These "others" live in such appalling conditions that they are not
usually able even to ask the questions I am asking here. After all,
it is not only genocide that can eradicate a person’s luz: hunger,
poverty, disease and refugee status can defile and slowly kill the
soul of an individual, and sometimes of a whole people.
Perhaps it is only in this global reality, where so much of our
life is lived in a mass dimension, that we can be so indifferent to
mass destruction. For it is the very same indifference that the vast
majority of the world displays time after time, whether during the
Armenian Holocaust or the Jewish Holocaust, in Rwanda or in Bosnia,
in the Congo, in Darfur, and in many other places.
And perhaps, then, this is the great question that people living in
this age must relentlessly ask themselves: in what state, at which
moment, do I become part of the faceless crowd, "the masses"?
There are a number of ways to describe the process whereby the
individual is swallowed up in the crowd, or agrees to hand over
parts of himself to mass control. I become "the masses" when I stop
formulating my own choices and the moral compromises I make. When I
stop formulating them over and over again, with fresh new words each
time, words that have not yet eroded in me, not yet congealed in me,
which I cannot ignore or defend myself against, and which force me
to face the decisions I have made, and to pay the price for them.
The masses, as we know, cannot exist without mass language – a language
that will consolidate the multitude and spur it on to act in a certain
way, formulating justifications for its acts and simplifying the
moral and emotional contradictions it may encounter. In other words,
the language of the masses is a language intended to liberate the
individual from responsibility for his actions, to temporarily sever
his private, individual judgment from his sound logic and natural
sense of justice.
To illustrate the encounter between one individual – a remarkably
exceptional one, with a uniquely personal language – and "mass
language", or between tragedy and statistics, I enlist the case of
the Polish Jewish author Bruno Schulz. I am referring to the story
of his murder during the second world war, in the ghetto of his town,
Drohobycz. It is a well-known episode, one that is probably inaccurate
and may only be a legend, a fictional anecdote, which emerged during
the years when the "Bruno Schulz myth" was being constructed by his
admirers all over the world.
"Anecdotes are essentially faithful to the truth," writes Ernesto
Sabato, "precisely because they are fictional, invented detail by
detail, until they fit a certain person exactly." And so, even if
this particular account of Schulz’s death is untrue, what it evokes is
essentially faithful to the truth, certainly to Schulz’s own ironic,
tragic truth, and to the horror of the encounter between "individual"
and "mass". And so I will retell it the way I first heard it:
In the Drohobycz ghetto during the war, there was an SS officer who
exploited Schulz and compelled him to paint murals in his home. An
adversary of this SS officer, a Nazi commander himself, who was
involved in a dispute with him over a gambling debt, happened to
meet Schulz on the street. He drew his pistol and shot Schulz dead,
to hurt his patron. According to the rumour, he then went to his rival
and told him: "I killed your Jew." "Very well," the officer replied,
"now I will kill your Jew."
I learned of this tale soon after I had finished reading Schulz’s
stories for the first time. I remember that I closed the book, left
my house, and walked around for several hours as if in a fog. My state
was such that, quite simply, I did not wish to live. I did not wish to
live in a world where such things were possible. And such people. And
such a way of thinking. A world in which a language that enables such
monstrosities as that sentence was possible.
"I killed your Jew." "Very well, now I will kill your Jew."
I wrote See Under: Love, among other reasons, to restore my will
to live and my love of life. Perhaps also to heal from the insult
I felt on behalf of Bruno Schulz – the insult at the way his murder
was described and "explained". The inhuman, crude description, as if
human beings were interchangeable.
As if they were merely a part of some mechanical system, or an
accessory, which can be replaced with another. As if they were only
statistics.
Because, with Schulz, every sliver of reality is full of personality:
every passing cloud, every piece of furniture, every dressmaker’s
mannequin, fruit-bowl, puppy or ray of light – each and every entity,
even the most trivial, has its own personality and essence.
And on every page and in every passage of his writing, life is bursting
with content and meaning. Every line Schulz writes is in defiance
of what he calls "the fortified wall that looms over meaning",
and a protest against the terror of vapidity, banality, routine,
stereotyping, the tyranny of the simplistic, the masses.
When I finished reading Bruno Schulz’s book, I realised that he
was giving me, in his work, one of the keys to writing about the
Holocaust. To write not about the death and the destruction, but about
life, about what the Nazis destroyed in such a habitual, industrial,
mass-minded way.
I also recall that, with the arrogance of a young writer, I told myself
that I wanted to write a book that would tremble on the shelf. That
the vitality it contained would be tantamount to the blink of an
eye in one person’s life. Not "life" in inverted commas, life that
is nothing more than a languishing moment in time, but the sort of
life Schulz gives us in his writing. A life of the living. A life in
which we are not merely refraining from killing the other, but rather
giving him or her new life, revitalising a moment that has passed,
an image seen a thousand times, a word uttered a thousand times.
The world we live in today may not be as overtly and unequivocally
cruel as the one created by the Nazis, but there are certain mechanisms
at work that have similar underlying principles. Mechanisms that blur
human uniqueness and evade responsibility for the destiny of others. A
world in which fanatic, fundamentalist forces seem to increase day
by day, while others gradually despair of any hope for change.
The values and horizons of this world, the atmosphere that prevails
in it and the language that dominates it, are dictated to a great
extent by what is known as "mass media" or "mass communication". The
term was coined in the 1930s, when sociologists began to refer to
"mass society". But are we truly aware of the significance of this
term today, and of the process it has gone through? Do we consider
the fact that, to a large extent, "mass media" today is not only
media designed for the masses, but that in many ways it also turns
its consumers into the masses?
It does so with the belligerence and the cynicism that emanate from
all its manifestations; with its shallow, vulgar language; with the
over-simplification and self-righteousness with which it handles
complex political and moral problems; with the kitsch which infects
everything it touches – the kitsch of war and death, the kitsch of
love, the kitsch of intimacy.
A cursory look would indicate that these kinds of media actually focus
on particular persons, rather than on the masses. On the individual
rather than the collective. But this is a dangerous illusion: although
mass media emphasises and even sanctifies the individual, and seems to
direct the individual more and more towards himself, it is ultimately
directing him only towards himself – his own needs, his clear and
narrow interests. In an endless variety of ways, both open and hidden,
it liberates him from what he is already eager to shed: responsibility
for the consequences of his actions on others. And the moment it
anaesthetises this responsibility in him, it also dulls his political,
social and moral awareness, moulding him into conveniently submissive
raw material for its own manipulations and those of other interested
parties. In other words, it turns him into one of the masses.
These forms of media – written, electronic, online, often free, highly
accessible, highly influential – have an existential need to preserve
the public’s interest, to constantly stimulate its hungry desires.
And so even when ostensibly dealing with issues of moral and
human import, and even when ostensibly assuming a role of social
responsibility, still the finger they point at hotbeds of corruption
and wrongdoing and suffering seems mechanical, automatic, with no
sincere interest in the problems they highlight. Their true purpose
– apart from generating profits for their owners – is to preserve
a constantly stimulated state of "public condemnation" or "public
exoneration" of certain individuals, who change at the speed of
light. This rapid exchange is the message of mass media. Sometimes
it seems that it is not the information itself that the media deem
essential, but merely the rate at which it shifts. The neurotic,
covetous, consumerist, seductive beat it creates. The zeitgeist:
the zapping is the message.
In this world I have described, literature has no influential
representatives in the centres of power, and I find it difficult to
believe that literature can change it. But it can offer different
ways to live in it. I know that when I read a good book, I experience
internal clarification: my sense of uniqueness as a person grows
lucid. The measured, precise voice that reaches me from the outside
animates voices within me, some of which may have been mute until
this other voice, or this particular book, came and woke them.
And even if thousands of people are reading the very same book I am
reading at the very same moment, each of us faces it alone. For each
of us, the book is a completely different kind of litmus test.
A good book – and there are not many, because literature, too, is
subject to the seductions and obst-acles of mass media – individualises
and extracts the single reader out of the masses. It gives him an
opportunity to feel how spiritual contents, memories and existential
possibilities can float up and rise from within him, from unfamiliar
places, and they are his alone. The fruits of his personality alone.
At its best, literature can bring us together with the fate of others,
distant and foreign. It can create within us, at times, a sense of
wonder at having managed, by the skin of our teeth, to escape those
strangers’ fates, or make us feel sad for not being truly close
to them. For not being able to reach out and touch them. I am not
saying that this feeling immediately motivates us to any form of
action, but certainly, without it, no act of empathy or commitment
or responsibility can be possible.
At its best, literature can be kind to us: it can slightly allay the
sense of insult at the dehumanisation that life in large, anonymous,
global societies gives us. The insult of describing ourselves in coarse
language, in cliches, in generalisations and stereotypes. The insult
of our becoming – as Herbert Marcuse said – "one-dimensional man".
Literature also gives us the feeling that there is a way to fight
the cruel arbitrariness that decrees our fate: even if at the end
of The Trial the authorities shoot Josef K "like a dog"; even if
Antigone is executed; even if Hans Castorp eventually dies in The
Magic Mountain – still we, who have seen them through their struggles,
have discovered the power of the individual to be human even in the
harshest circumstances. Reading – literature – restores our dignity and
our primal faces, our human faces, the ones that existed before they
were blurred and erased among the masses. Before we were expropriated,
nationalised and sold wholesale to the lowest bidder.
When I finished writing See Under: Love, I realised that I had
written it to say that he who destroys a man, any man, is ultimately
destroying a creation that is unique and boundless, that can never
again be reconstructed, and there will never be another like it.
For the past four years, I have been writing a novel that wishes to
say the same thing, but from a different place, and in the context of
a different reality. The protagonist of my book, an Israeli woman of
about 50, is the mother of a young soldier who goes to war. She fears
for his life, she senses catastrophe lurking, and she tries with all
her strength to fight the destiny that awaits him. This woman makes a
long and arduous journey by foot, over the land of Israel, and talks
about her son. This is her way of protecting him. This is the only
thing she can do now, to make his existence more alive and solid:
to tell the story of his life.
In the little notebook she takes on her journey, she writes, "Thousands
of moments and hours and days, millions of deeds, endless acts and
attempts and mistakes and words and thoughts, all to make one person
in the world."
Then she adds another line: "One person, who is so easy to destroy."
The secret allure and the greatness of literature, the secret that
sends us to it over and over again, with enthusiasm and a longing to
find refuge and meaning, is that literature can repeatedly redeem for
us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of the millions. The
one about whom the story is written, and the one who reads the story.
From: Baghdasarian