Postwar

oppressive heritage. Today the pertinent European reference is not baptism. It is extermination.

Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket. In 2004 President Kwasniewski of Poland —seeking to close a painful chapter in his nation’s past and bring Poland into line with its EU partners—officially acknowledged the wartime sufferings of Polish Jews, including their victimization at the hands of Poles themselves. Even Romania’s outgoing President Iliescu, in a concession to his country’s ambition to join the European Union, was constrained the following year to concede what he and his colleagues had long and strenuously denied: that Romania, too, played its part in the destruction of the Jews of Europe…

To be sure, there are other criteria for full participation in the family of Europe. Turkey’s continuing refusal to acknowledge the ‘genocide’ of its Armenian population in 1915 will be an impediment to its application for EU membership, just as Serbia will continue to languish on the European doorstep until its political class takes responsibility for the mass murders and other crimes of the Yugoslav wars. But the reason crimes like these now carry such a political charge—and the reason ‘Europe’ has invested itself with the responsibility to make sure that attention is paid to them and to define ‘Europeans’ as people who do pay attention to them—is because they are partial instances (in this case before and after the fact respectively) of the crime: the attempt by one group of Europeans to exterminate every member of another group of Europeans, here on European soil, within still living memory.

Hitler’s ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’ in Europe is not only the source of crucial areas of post-war international jurisprudence—‘genocide’ or ‘crimes against humanity’. It also adjudicates the moral (and in certain European countries the legal) standing of those who pronounce upon it. To deny or belittle the Shoah—the Holocaust—is to place yourself beyond the pale of civilized public discourse. That is why mainstream politicians shun, so far as they can, the company of demagogues like Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Holocaust today is much more than just another undeniable fact about a past that Europeans can no longer choose to ignore. As Europe prepares to leave World War Two behind—as the last memorials are inaugurated, the last surviving combatants and victims honoured—the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews has become the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity. It wasn’t always so.

There was never any mystery about what had happened to Europe’s Jews. That an estimated 6 million of them were put to death during the Second World War was widely accepted within a few months of the war’s end. The handful of survivors, whether in the displaced persons’ camps or in their countries of origin, paid implicit witness to the number of dead. Of 126,000 Jews removed from Austria, 4,500 returned after the war. In the Netherlands, where there had been 140,000 Jews before the war, 110,000 were deported—of whom fewer than 5,000 returned. In France, of 76,000 (mostly foreign-born) Jews who were deported during the years 1940-44, less than 3 percent survived. Further east, the figures were even worse: of Poland’s pre-war population of over 3 million Jews, fully 97.5 percent were exterminated. In Germany itself, in May 1945, there remained just 21,450 of the country’s 600,000 Jews.

The returning remnant was not much welcomed. After years of anti-Semitic propaganda, local populations everywhere were not only disposed to blame ‘Jews’ in the abstract for their own suffering but were distinctly sorry to see the return of men and women whose jobs, possessions and apartments they had purloined. In the 4th arrondissement of Paris, on April 19th 1945, hundreds of people demonstrated in protest when a returning Jewish deportee tried to reclaim his (occupied) apartment. Before it was dispersed, the demonstration degenerated into a near-riot, the crowd screaming ‘La France aux francais!’ The venerable French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel would doubtless not have resorted to such language. But he was not embarrassed to write a few months later, in the journal Temoignage Chretien, of the ‘overweening presumption’ of ‘the Jews’ and their urge to ‘take everything over’.

Little wonder that the future French government minister Simone Weil could write, of her return from Bergen Belsen: ‘We had the feeling that our lives did not count; and yet there were so very few of us’. In France (as in Belgium) deported resisters who had survived and now returned were treated as heroes: the saviours of their nation’s honour. But Jews, deported not for their politics but on account of their race, could serve no such useful purpose. In any case De Gaulle (like Churchill) was curiously blind to the racial specificity of Hitler’s victims, understanding Nazism in the context of Prussian militarism instead. At Nurnberg, the French prosecutor Francois de Menthon was uncomfortable with the very concept of ‘crimes against humanity’—he preferred ‘crimes against peace’—and throughout the trial he made no reference to the deportation or murder of Jews.[414]

Nearly three years later an editorial in Le Monde on January 11th 1948, headed ‘The survivors of the death camps’, managed to speak movingly of ‘280,000 deportees, 25,000 survivors’ without once mentioning the word ‘Jew’. Under legislation passed in 1948, the term ‘deportes’ could be applied only to French citizens or residents deported for political reasons or for resisting the occupier. No distinction was made regarding the camp to which someone was sent or their fate upon arrival. Thus Jewish children who were locked into trains and shipped to Auschwitz for gassing were described in official documents as ‘political deportees’. With mordant if unintended irony these children, most of whom were the sons and daughters of foreign-born Jews and who had been forcibly separated from their parents by French gendarmes, were then commemorated in documents and upon plaques as having ‘died for France’. [415]

In Belgium, Catholic parties in the first post-war parliament protested at the idea of any compensation being paid to ‘Jews arrested simply for a racial motive’—most of whom, it was hinted, were probably black-marketeers. Indeed, in Belgium the exclusion of Jews from any post-war benefits was taken a step further. Since 95 percent of the Jews deported from Belgium had been foreign nationals or stateless, it was determined by a post-war law that—unless they had also fought in the organized resistance movements—surviving Jews who ended up in Belgium after the war would not be eligible for any public aid. In October 1944, the Belgian authorities automatically ascribed the nationality ‘German’ to any Jewish survivor in Belgium who could not prove his or her Belgian citizenship. Theoretically this abolished all wartime ‘racial’ distinctions—but it also turned surviving Jews into de facto enemy aliens who could be interned and whose property was seized (and not returned until January 1947). Such rulings had the attendant benefit of marking these Jews for eventual return to Germany, now that they were no longer threatened by Nazi persecution.

In the Netherlands, where, according to the Dutch resistance paper Vrij Nederland , the Nazis themselves had been taken aback at the alacrity with which local citizens and civic leaders cooperated in their own humiliation, the handful of returning Jews was decidedly unwelcome. One of them, Rita Koopman, recalled being greeted thus upon her return: ‘Quite a lot of you came back. Just be happy you weren’t here—how we suffered from hunger!’ Indeed, the Dutch did suffer greatly through the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-45 and the many houses vacated by deported Jews, in Amsterdam especially, were a valuable source of wood and other supplies. But for all the enthusiastic cooperation of Dutch wartime officialdom in identifying and rounding up the country’s Jews, the post-war authorities—their own conscience clear—felt no obligation to make any particular amends to Jews. Instead, they made a rather self-congratulatory point of refusing to distinguish among Dutch citizens on racial or any other grounds and thus froze the country’s lost Jews into retrospective anonymity and invisibility. In the Fifties, the Catholic prime ministers of the Netherlands even declined to contribute to a proposed international monument at Auschwitz, dismissing it as ‘Communist propaganda’.

In eastern Europe there was of course never much question of recognizing Jewish suffering, much less compensating it. In the immediate post-war years Jews in this region were concerned above all with merely staying alive. Witold Kula, a non-Jewish Pole, wrote in August 1946 of a train journey from Lodz to Wroclaw where he witnessed the anti-Semitic mocking of a Jewish family: ‘The average Polish intellectual doesn’t realize that a Jew in Poland today cannot drive a car, doesn’t risk a train journey, dare not send his child on a school outing; he cannot go to remote localities, prefers big cities even to medium-sized ones and is ill-advised to take a walk after nightfall. You would have to be a hero to go on living in such an atmosphere after six years of torment’.

After Germany’s defeat, many Jews in eastern Europe pursued their wartime survival strategy: hiding their Jewish identity from their colleagues, their neighbours and even their children, blending as best they could into the post-war world and resuming at least the appearance of normal life. And not only in eastern Europe. In France, although new laws forbade the overt anti-Semitic rhetoric of pre-war public life, the legacy of Vichy remained. The taboos of a later generation had not yet taken hold, and behaviour that would in time be frowned upon was still acceptable. As in the Thirties, the Left was not immune. In 1948 the Communist parliamentarian Arthur Ramette