The Story That Never Tires of the Telling

The Jewish Press (link) recently published an essay by Christopher Buckley, son of the late conservative thinker William F. Buckley, on his visit to Auschwitz. The essay was written in 2001 but not published until now, when the author admirably went public in response to Bishop Richard Williamson's brazen Holocaust denial (no one was gassed in Auschwitz, yeah right). I must have read literally hundreds of such accounts, but every time the story feels fresh. Most of these pieces are written by and from the point of view of survivors, sometimes their childen or grandchildren. I remember hearing Lt. Col. Walter Fellenz, a non-Jew, tell of his experiences liberating a camp. And every time I ask myself what every Israeli boy (I was born and raised here in the U.S.A.) who lived through the Eichmann trial asked his parents: How could you possibly let this happen? Why in heaven's name didn't you fight? I heard all the answers. Nothing like the Holocaust had ever happened in human history and people didn't believe what they were hearing. They were so isolated that they simply didn't know until it was too late, especially with the Germans being careful to disguise the reality. They thought they were going to take a shower until the doors shut. They were systematically starved and decimated by disease, so that they were physically incapable of resistance. They remembered the Germans of World War I as fairly decent people who brought civilization and actually liberated them from Eastern European anti-Semites. This wasn't the first time Jews were persecuted; the madness will end like the Cossack massacres and the Crusades did. The Jews who did put up a fight did so with superhuman valor; the Warsaw ghetto held out in 1943 longer than all of Poland did in 1939. Above all, 2000 years of exile sapped our will to fight or, to paraphrase Nietzsche, turned our men into women. I've heard it all and nothing satisfies. And so, reading about it for the umpteenth time, but this time written by a Gentile named Buckley, I asked myself again: Could the Nazis have murdered [Buckley uses the word murder, not exterminate; one exterminates cockroaches and rats] six million Irish? The question is tragically laughable. Irishmen would have torn the S.S. limb from limb. They don't call them the Fighting Irish for nothing. So I finished reading and I cried. Then I went downstairs and lifted weights.

Any wonder then that when people talk of the magnificent Torah life of pre-war Eastern Europe, I am filled with unrelieved disgust. I have absolutely no desire to resurrect a culture and a way of life that perished - literally went up in smoke - because we were too weak to defend it. Give me the Torah of Tanakh, the Torah of Joshua, Samson, King David and the rest (ever noticed how Tanakh is played down in the haredi yeshiva world?), normal Jews living normal lives in a normal country. Or give me nothing at all.