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A personal moment of silence By Anshel Pfeffer Tags: Saul Friedlander Saul Friedlander is not a big fan of Holocaust Remembrance Day. In a telephone interview conducted in the wake of the announcement last month that he was being awarded the Pulitzer Prize - and on the eve of Yom Hashoah in Israel - he told Haaretz, "I'm quite skeptical about a deliberate construction of national memory and all the planned ceremonies. I would prefer a personal moment of silence." Friedlander, 75, will be awarded the prestigious prize later this month for best nonfiction book of 2008 in the United States for his book "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945" (HarperCollins). Not only does Holocaust Day not speak to him, Friedlander - himself a survivor, who only after the war learned he had lost both his parents in Auschwitz - is also not a big fan of monuments and museums. In his opinion, "We should prefer everything knowledge-related to ritual commemoration. I understand that we cannot do without it, but 12th graders who travel to Poland and to Auschwitz, that's not something I support. It mixes memory with misplaced ideological dimensions." For the past decade the Prague-born Friedlander has been living in Los Angeles and teaching at the University of California campus there. But the Israeli experience is still important to him. He immigrated to Israel on the "Altalena" in 1948, served as an assistant to Shimon Peres when the latter was deputy defense minister, and in the 1980s was active in Peace Now. Today he says, "There is no need to mix the Holocaust with the Zionist narrative. I was opposed in the first place to this narrative of Holocaust and heroism, and there is not much basis to the idea that the Holocaust led to the state. After all, the Yishuv [the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine] did not exactly welcome the Holocaust survivors with open arms, and its attitude toward the situation of European Jewry during the war was problematic." Advertisement Friedlander's most recent book is a continuation to his 1997 work, "Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939," about the rise of the Nazi regime and the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II. The unique aspect of the two volumes of "Nazi Germany and the Jews" lies in his integration of three points of view that are usually treated separately - those of the German perpetrators, of the Jewish victims and of those who stood on the sidelines, especially among the Christian establishment. The latter subject is close to Friedlander's heart: His parents arranged for him to be hidden in a Catholic monastery in France and he was raised as a Christian for five years. That is how he survived the Holocaust. How do you explain the fact that over the years not only is interest in the Holocaust not waning, but on the contrary, is only growing? Friedlander: "That really is paradoxical, because we usually tend to blur issues that weigh so heavily on our conscience. I think that the destruction of the Jews is so central to Western- Christian civilization because it is an unsolved historical fact, like a wound that does not heal and you keep touching it because the wound is open. Last year, when I was awarded the Peace Prize [of the German Book Trade] at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was asked, in an interview with Der Spiegel, whether I think that with the disappearance of the generation that experienced the war, interest in the Holocaust will gradually disappear. I replied that suddenly from nowhere comes a young writer and writes a novel in French about the Holocaust [the reference is to Jonathan Littell, the author of the 2006 best-seller "Les Bienveillantes," (The Kindly Ones)], which sold 600,000 copies and has picked up all kinds of prizes. If people had no interest in the events he describes, they wouldn't read it. "It shows that we are not talking only about genocide, but about the destruction of an entire world by the most progressive country in the Western world in the political conditions of the 20th century. So a person asks himself, what can be the influence of civilization and progress on the destructive powers within every society? Where was the spiritual leadership at the time? And many other questions that were central to Western Christian society, questions that clearly will continue to disturb us, this sense that we failed so badly. In Holland people ask themselves how it happened that the percentage of Jews from their country who were sent to their destruction is greater than the percentage among the Jews of France and Belgium, countries that are ostensibly much more anti-Semitic." Gypsies vs. Jews In the early 1990s, with the opening of Soviet archives that had been closed to researchers since the war, a revolution was expected in the study of the Holocaust. Today, after most of what became available has been revealed, Friedlander sees the main importance of the new sources as being in the availability of previously unknown details and the deepening of knowledge. In his opinion, the most important new development was the discovery of the diary of Hitler's deputy, Heinrich Himmler, and in particular the short sentence he wrote after a meeting with the Fuehrer on December 17, 1941: "The Jewish problem - to treat them like partisans." Friedlander and other scholars find the clearest proof here of a direct order from Hitler to carry out the Final Solution: total destruction of the Jews. The comparison to the partisans reflects the view that the Jews were also seen as the internal enemy of the Reich and thus needed to be exterminated. After so many years of research, is there anything left to discover about the Holocaust? "There are people who continue to search for new German documents in the Soviet archives. I of course get excited about every new document, but that is walking down trodden paths." Are there areas where significant knowledge is missing? "Now there is a great deal of research work being concentrated on the intermediate region between Poland, Belarus and western Ukraine. We know less about that, and [Hebrew University Holocaust scholar] Yehuda Bauer believes that there is an entire world there that is yet to be revealed, the world of the shtetls, the small towns. There were very densely populated Jewish communities living there, but very little is known about them and apparently they displayed much more resistance than we knew. I don't think that there are more major discoveries, but there are still many small ones that can change our perspective." Even though he is dubious about any revolutionary finds, Friedlander does believe that it is the small towns and villages that deserve researchers' attention. He acknowledges that this "requires tremendous effort," because of the linguistic skills demanded. Friedlander points to "a German researcher, Christoph Dieckmann, who studied Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian and Polish in order to learn about the villages in Lithuania. Until now people mainly studied German thoroughly and studied the German documents for years, but there they are beginning to reach the limits of productive research." He also notes that a former student of his, Prof. Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born historian at Brown University, is now working on a study of the small town of Buczacz, the birthplace of Nobel Prize literature laureate S.Y. Agnon. Bartov, says Friedlander, "is trying to examine the social fabric before the war and during the war, and how memory was created after it. From the interaction among various groups and in various strata, we can understand the social and human dynamic in extreme situations." There have been those who have complained in recent years that focus by scholars on the Jews in the Holocaust has diverted attention from other groups. Friedlander says the question is more complicated than that: "Of course there is need for more research on the Gypsies, but there are simply not enough documents, certainly not the amount of information that there is on the Jews. The Germans related to the other groups as a nuisance, or a passive enemy. The Jews were the most important active enemy. I attribute a great deal of importance to ideology: They considered the Jews the active enemy of Aryan humanity and the fate of the Aryan world - the good world, as far as they were concerned - was dependent on the battle against this enemy. "That explains all the preoccupation with destruction and the Nazi effort, spurred on by Hitler and with the support of German society, and the decision in 1941 regarding the Final Solution. There was no such effort vis-a-vis other groups. It's true that they murdered three million Russian prisoners of war. From the Nazi point of view, they were half-animals, and it was difficult to bring food to them when the Wehrmacht soldiers did not have enough, so a decision was made that they would be allowed to die of hunger or they would be murdered. But that was an extreme instrumental Nazi decision. To invest in the destruction of the Jews when there was a total war taking place in the east and the west - that was an obsession lacking any rational basis." The Pope's silence After devoting his life to studying the Holocaust, today Friedlander has his sights set on gaining access to the invaluable Vatican archive. It's a goal that actually would bring him back to the subject of his first book, from 1966, "Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation," his most successful title in terms of sales and translated versions until the present one, which dealt with the silence of the Pope in the face of the Holocaust. "I would very much like to enter the closed archives of the Vatican. To date they have only allowed us to study what they have up to 1939, and from the period of the war we have seen only documents that they chose to publish. I would like to discover why in fact the Pope remained silent. I can guess, but I don't know for certain." Friedlander elaborates: "There is a theory that he was afraid to intervene in a situation in which Catholics were fighting on all sides, and thought that the head of the Church had to remain on the sidelines. But when such horrors begin, how can one stay on the sidelines? He was mainly a political pope, and the danger that he saw in Bolshevism was greater than any other consideration. A protest against the horrors committed by the Nazis could have weakened the wall that still impeded the progress of Bolshevism, especially after Stalingrad. On the other hand, during the war, the Pope spoke about the suffering of the Poles and wrote very urgent letters to the German bishops on the subject of the killing of the mentally ill, so one can't say that he was afraid to raise his voice in favor of certain groups. But no secret letter from the Pope to the German bishops was found urging them to speak up on the matter of the Jews. If there had been such a letter, they would have hastened to publish it back in 1946. "The question is why such a letter was not written. There is no question that there were endless internal arguments about it in the Vatican. Everything is in the Vatican archive, with additional material about Jewish-Christian relations, and that could shed an enormous amount of light on the subject." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Stronger than its ills The 60th anniversary celebrations are accompanied by a bad taste. Rise in racism Israeli Arabs say institutionalized racism has increased.   1.   We need to know 00:30  |  Sherlock Holmes 08/05/08   2.   Professor Friedlander 02:44  |  sweis Melbourne 08/05/08   3.   Nazi obsesion with Jews 03:51  |  Lev 08/05/08   4.   Trips to Poland 11:22  |  Ofer from Ofer 08/05/08

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