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 recovered humanity.
Though still far from complete, the psychic work of reckoning, country by country, has typically taken two generations – or roughly fifty years.
Never mind, for now, about the countries with the most obvious burdens of guilt: Germany, and then (in no particular order) Romania, Hungary, Austria, Croatia, Slovakia, and France, all of which Judt inspects. France famously developed its ‘Vichy syndrome’ (amnesia and evasion), but as Judt says, every Nazi-occupied country ‘developed its own “Vichy syndrome” ’ – including Holland and, yes, Sweden (only Denmark escaped the taint of collaboration). All the occupied countries, and all but one of the countries that remained neutral throughout; Ireland played no part in the German war effort, but the others did, Spain (supplying manganese), Portugal (tungsten), Sweden (iron ore); and as for Switzerland…
We remember that during the occupation of France ‘Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime played Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes’ (as Judt witheringly notes). But consider the supposed Little Nell of Switzerland:
1) Not until 1994 did the Swiss government concede that it had petitioned Berlin (in 1938) ‘for the letter “J” to be stamped on the passports of all German Jews – the better to keep them out…’
2) ‘In 1941 and 1942, 60 per cent of Switzerland’s munitions industry, 50 per cent of its optical industry and 40 per cent of its engineering output was producing for Germany, remunerated in gold’ – and it ‘was still selling rapid-fire guns to the Wehrmacht in April 1945’.
3) Over the war years ‘the German Reichsbank deposited the gold equivalent of 1,638,000,000 Swiss francs in Switzerland’ – for channelling and laundering.
4) ‘Swiss banks and insurance companies knowingly pocketed indecently large sums of money belonging to Jewish account holders or to the claimants of insurance policies on murdered relatives.’
5) ‘In a secret post-war agreement…Bern even offered to assign the bank accounts of dead Polish Jews to the new authorities in Warsaw in return for indemnity payments to Swiss banks and businesses expropriated after the Communists’ takeover.’ (And the Poles ‘happily agreed’.)
All this surfaced in the 1990s, and Switzerland’s ‘burnished reputation’, writes Judt, ‘came apart’. The piecemeal disclosures racked the country for a decade.
By the end of the twentieth century, it is fair to say, the murder of Europe’s Jews was a Western idée fixe. Every population affected by the Nazis was thinking and talking about the murder of Europe’s Jews. Every population except that of Israel.
‘It’s like a family tragedy that you don’t discuss,’ said Michael C. ‘It’s taught in schools and it’s publicly commemorated. But privately you don’t talk about it.’
‘The Shoah? It just never comes up,’ you get quite cheerfully told again and again. This fact, and it is a fact, seems to me fathomable but psychologically very ominous. If you’re not talking about it then you’re not actively thinking about it. We can deduce from this that the subconscious of Israel is in a state of acute and chronic turmoil.
‘The denial of the Palestinian disaster’, writes Shavit (using ‘denial’ as a psychiatrist might), ‘is not the only denial the Israeli miracle of the 1950s is based upon. Young Israel also denies the great Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century.’
Holocaust denial, here, means Holocaust inertia. Not out of the bitter disgust expressed by a Bellow character – ‘First those people murdered you, then they forced you to brood on their crimes. It suffocated me to do this.’ It was, rather, an effort of cultural will. The two calamities – the Palestinian, the Jewish – have been consigned to the storage unit of the unarticulated inner life.
In response to the Palestinian disaster, the Israelis subvocalise as follows: What’s 700,000 displaced compared to 6 million displaced for the purpose of execution? In response to the Jewish disaster, the Israelis tell themselves, in Shavit’s words, ‘The Holocaust is only the low point from which the Zionist revival rose. The Israeli continuum rejects trauma and defeat and pain and harrowing memories.’ Here, the ‘survivors are expected not to tell their stories’.
‘It is highly likely that this multilevel denial was essential,’ Shavit goes on. ‘Without it, it would have been impossible to function, to build, to live…Denial was a life-or-death imperative for the nine-year-old nation into which I was born.’
—————
In Washington a month later Christopher said,
‘How am I? Well at the moment I’m being filleted by people offering advice. Fly today to Kyoto and consult Dr…Eat only wild fartleberries and raw kale until you…My aunt had cancer of the G-spot but as soon as she…
‘I did get quite a funny note from a Native American friend. Whoff fucking Native American friend? She’s Cheyenne-Arapaho and a fine comrade. And she wrote to say that everybody who’s taken a tribal cure died almost instantly.
‘Oh, and I did go to the palatial clinic of one celebrated quack, who leadenly told me what I already knew and then, as I was paying, gifted me a bugbite that doubled the size of my left hand. But fuck all that. How was Tel Aviv-Jaffa?’
This happened as October became November in 2010. The Wyoming, in the District of Columbia, late afternoon, under a cover of cloud. I said,
‘Jaffa…For days on end it’s like any Mediterranean city. You know, sun, sea – lunch with the children under a canopy on the beach. You have your delicious seafood salad and your lovely glass of white wine. Then on the way back Erin, that’s Michael’s very nice wife, points to the hulk of the uh, the Dolphinarium Disco.’
‘I remember. Suicide bombed in when?’
‘Around 2000. The Second
