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Last update - 18:52 21/05/2008 Holocaust studies The dead will not stop living By Ada Pagis Tags: Ada Pagis, Nazi Germany  The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 , by Saul Friedlaender HarperCollins, 870 pages, $40 The importance of this volume, the second part of Saul Friedlaender's magnum opus "Nazi Germany and the Jews," does not rest solely on its comprehensive overview or on the plethora of sources and the thorough analysis. In fact, it principally derives from the ability of Friedlaender, the Czech-born Israeli scholar and longtime professor of history at the Hebrew University and UCLA, to convey the feeling of the individual in the Holocaust -- groping in the dark with a complete lack of knowledge about what awaits him, or forcing himself to believe in an illusion and trying to survive, or knowing what the end will be but trying to give it special significance. The author conveys this through testimonies and diaries -- some of them well known, others less so -- which he integrates into the context of the time and place being described. More than 600 pages of the tome are devoted to a chronological review of "the years of extermination," from the occupation of Poland, in September 1939, until the victory over Nazi Germany in May 1945, while the period between the two world wars serves as the background. (The first volume of "Nazi Germany and the Jews," subtitled "The Years of Persecution," from 1997, covers the period 1933 to 1939.) Not all those who wrote the letters or the diaries cited here were blessed with the same sensitivity and talent for writing as Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum (both of whom also appear in the volume). But even the less well known contribute a great deal to the understanding of the cruel, and sometimes bizarre, world into which they were thrown. Typical of this are the diaries of David Sierakowiak, a high-school pupil from Lodz, who came from a traditional family but who was a most committed Marxist, and 12-year-old David Rubinowicz, from a small town near Kielce. From among the diaries of adults who documented the Warsaw Ghetto, that of Judenrat head Adam Czerniakow stands out in its descriptions of daily life, with all its hardships. His diary ends on the second day of the big Aktzia, in July 1942, when he was ordered to hand over thousands of children to the Nazis. He chose death instead, and swallowed a dose of cyanide. Other diaries that stand out are those of Chaim A. Kaplan, a Hebrew teacher and school principal, who kept a constant record of events beginning with the outbreak of war; that of Avraham Lewin, a teacher at the Hebrew Gymnasium for girls (who wrote a "Diary of the Great Expulsion") and the writings of Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian among the writers, who in his own works and in the vast "Oneg Shabbat" collection of documentation he assembled and hid away for posterity, saw his mission in the self-appointed task of documenting the history of this most tragic and heroic of the ghettos. The book also contains quite a bit of documentation, including diaries, written by Nazi soldiers and officers of different ranks. From the lowest of the Wehrmacht soldiers stationed somewhere in Poland, who wrote home in November 1940: "Wherever you look, there is filth. The Jews themselves are covered in filth ... When you look at these people, you get the impression that in truth they have no justification for living on God's earth." And in the summer of 1942, another German soldier who was stationed in Galicia wrote: "When I was waiting at the railroad station, a train arrived carrying Jews in 33 cattle cars. I asked one of the policemen where they were from and he said from Lvov ... And where are they being sent to? I asked. He said, to Belzec. To the gas? I asked. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, I think they first will shoot them." Alongside the notes of the common soldiers from the Wehrmacht, one can read the diary of Josef Goebbels, the German minister of propaganda, who wrote a few days before the invasion of Russia, in 1941: "That which we have fought all our lives we can now destroy, I tell this to the Fuehrer and he agrees with me completely." The map of horror stretches from Poland and the conquered areas of Russia, which turned into the major arena of supposedly spontaneous acts of massacre as well as of well-organized extermination in the death camps, to as far off as the Jewish communities of Thessaloniki, Greece, which was totally destroyed almost without the victims being aware of what was taking place, as well as to the Jews of Denmark, most of whom were saved, thanks to both political conditions there and the goodwill of many of the Danes. Together with the descriptions of the events and the analyses, against the backdrop of masses of murderers, murdered and apathetic persons, certain figures known to the reader from other contexts are sometimes illuminated. One of these is the historian Shimon Dubnow, author of the "History of the Jewish People." After the conquest of Riga in 1941, Dubnow, 81, was due to be executed with a group of Jews in a forest outside the city. When he was too slow in climbing onto the truck carrying them away, Dubnow was shot in the back by a policemen on the scene. From the beginning, Hitler's conquests were accompanied by terror and sporadic murders, and had a clearly defined aim, namely the attainment of more lebensraum, with one of the central objectives being the extermination of the Jews. Along with the terror and sporadic murders, the campaigns were accompanied by Goebbels' anti-Jewish propaganda, as it appears in his speeches, films and diaries. The flow of venom The amount of venom and madness of this propaganda was fluid, and as the fall of Germany drew nearer, it grew in strength, but two contradictory motifs could be found in it throughout the years: On the one hand, the description of the Jew as a revolting creature, as an abhorrent sub-human, and on the other hand, the Jew as someone who rules the world and has the power to bring about the ruin of the Aryan race. The book describes the gradual isolation of the Jews of Poland up until the formation of the ghettos in the cities and towns. We read of the hunger, the illnesses and, in contrast to all of this, the attempts to survive by creating frameworks of "independent Jewish aid," and the various types of cultural activities -- the classes, the theater and the underground press, all of which helped to keep up the spirits of those confined to the ghettos until their expulsion to the death camps. Conditions in the conquered countries of Western Europe were different from those in the states that became satellites of Germany, and the situation of the Jews was affected by these different circumstances. The local population treated them in a manner that varied from region to region and from period to period. That is how things were in the two regions of France, as well as in Holland, where, at the beginning of the occupation, the citizens showed solidarity with the Jews, but where, as time passed, some assisted in persecuting the Jews, and in their expulsion to the camps. There were individuals in every country ?(and later on also organized groups?) who wanted to assist the Jews, and they succeeded in saving quite a few, but generally the majority was apathetic and held its tongue. The author finds a possible explanation for this silence in the period between the two world wars, especially the end of that period, when the idea gained ground among members of the European right that the liberal democratic countries were too weak to deal with the world economic crisis or with the spread of communism following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The author sees in this one of the reasons that during the early years of the war, anti-Nazi opposition forces did not take hold in the countries of Western Europe, and Germany was able to rely on their cooperation for its murderous intentions. Pious XII, who was pope in the decisive years of the war, sought arrangements with the heads of the Third Reich. When he expressed a protest at their actions, it was merely the killing of the mentally ill that he objected to, and he pleaded for the lives of the non-Aryan converts to Catholicism. In October 1942 also, when the giant waves of extermination swept over Europe and protests were heard in London and Washington, then too the pope spoke out against the murder of innocent people, without mentioning the Jews. Most of the Catholic and Protestant bishops acted in a similar manner. Operation Barbarossa, in June 1941, was the starting point in the policy of terror and repression against the Jews, which led to the Final Solution. The Einzatsgruppen marched in the wake of the Wehrmacht units as they conquered areas in western Russia, and with the help of the local population and sometimes also with the help of volunteers from the Wehrmacht, they murdered indiscriminately. When Himmler gave the order to kill all the Jews of Pinsk, the selective killings turned into mass murders such as took place at Babi Yar and Ponary. At the same time, the extermination camps were in operation. This was also the time of the first signs of uprising -- whether as an attempt to get organized in order to save oneself, such as the Bielski group that operated (from the beginning of 1942) in the forests of Byelorussia, or whether as an attempt to get organized so as not to go "like sheep to the slaughter," as Abba Kovner so famously put it -- and the establishment of the Jewish partisans organization in Lithuania. Rebellions broke out also in the Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. The revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto (April 1943), led by members of the Zionist youth movements, remains in the consciousness of the world as the most spectacular attempt in all of occupied Europe to fight with the use of weapons. The approaching defeat of Germany and the massive bombings of its cities did not save the Jews of Hungary. When the country was overrun by Hitler's armies in March 1944, and with the setting up of the pro-Nazi government there, the expulsion of that country's Jews began. Day after day, the trains brought thousands of Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose experienced commandant, Rudolf Hess, was appointed to personally supervise the murder operation. At the end of August, the survivors of the Lodz ghetto were also brought there, including the head of the Judenrat, Haim Rumkowski, and his family. Rumkowski had been a strong believer in the power of work to save from death. ?The tragic irony' The book is written in a matter-of-fact and restrained fashion, without any traces of polemic, even though anyone who follows the research literature on the subject cannot help but notice the challenge to researchers who see in Jewish documentation (testimonies and diaries) a kind of stereotypical writing that tends to repeat itself and who negate its validity as a reliable historical source. Only very rarely does Friedlaender allow himself to write an ironic sentence such as that which refers to the abortive assassination attempt of the German officers on Hitler's life in the summer of 1944. "The tragic irony... stems from the fact ... that many of those conservative opponents of the regime were themselves anti-Semites to various degrees." As a rule, though, the tragedies, the irony and the absurd stem directly from the situation or from the mouths of the murderers, which gives the style of the book the strength of simplicity and minimalism. Each of the book's 10 chapters begins with the description of an individual case from the period dealt with in the same chapter. Sometimes it is a passage from a diary, such as that of Victor Klemperer, who had converted to Christianity and was married to an Aryan woman, who wrote on the day war broke out: "I told Eva [his wife] that a shot of morphine, or something like that, would be the best thing for us. Our lives are over." Or the fate of the immigrants on the Struma, which in December 1941 left for Palestine with 769 Romanian Jews on board. The boat was sent from port to port but no one would allow it to dock, until it was smashed to pieces by a Russian torpedo in the Black Sea, and all its passengers, but one, drowned. Especially heart-rending is the letter written by Louise Jacobson, aged 17, who in February 1943 wrote from the Drancy transit camp to her father, who was hiding in Paris: "My dear little daddy, bad news... It's my turn to leave... Never mind... I am in excellent spirits.... This last week I have eaten very, very well... Now your package arrived exactly at the right moment... I can see your face, my dear daddy, and that's precisely why I would like you to have as much courage as I do... (As for mother, it would probably be better if she knew nothing. It's entirely unnecessary that she be worried)... We leave tomorrow... I am with my friends... I kiss you a hundred thousand times with all my strength....Be courageous and see you soon... Your daughter Louise." When her transport arrived at Auschwitz, a friend standing beside her, who was a chemical engineer, whispered in her ear: Tell them that you are a chemist. But when her turn came, Louise said that she was a student, and she was sent to the gas chambers. Excerpts from the lives, and the last moments in the lives, of people who were well known and those who were not, bring the reader closer to those who lived through the Holocaust and make their situation more concrete so that even those among us who try to maintain their distance from the horrors can feel that these are people like themselves. The dead who do not stop living. Ada Pagis' book "Days of Darkness, Moments of Grace: Israel Gutman: a Life" (in Hebrew) will be published shortly by the Kibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House and Yad Vashem. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fear of extinction The state of over 20 species of birds in Israel has worsened considerably. Taking advantage Jerusalem police probe possible gang rape of disabled woman.

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