They're Called Germans -- Not Nazis

Sixty years ago today Allied forces liberated the German death camp called Auschwitz - Birkenau. So ended the most important event in my life, the Shoah. It is not just the unspeakable German depravity that will always haunt me, but also its proximity to my--our--existance. In America, my own mother was a little girl playing in her back yard while, in Germany, soldiers were ripping other children from their mothers' arms, separating them forever. While my father was studying for his Bar Mitzvah, Germans were murdering learned Rabbis, defiling our sacred texts and burning our synagogues. And while our American economy sought more efficient mass production of automobiles and radios, Germans sought to perfect the industrialized mass murder of an ancient and peaceful people. All of these, while other Germans watched.

To be sure, there were also other Germans who resisted--and fiercely. But, relative to their complicit countrymen, their numbers were so depressingly small as to be insignificant. And so it is that I insist we call these offenders by name; it was not the Nazis or their political party or even their military officers who loosed this sickening depravity upon the world. It was the German people themselves--their society, their institutions, their collective soul--which nourished a Jewish blood lust which knew no bounds. Not a single truckload of Jewish families could have been herded to their death trains by dark of night without the corrupt complicity of neighbors peering with feigned powerlessness through their intact windows. Children screaming, women crying, bewildered men powerless to save their families. Show me one German who shielded a Jewish child with her life and I'll show you hundreds of thousands more who found stature in Jewish suffering.

Some people have asked, "Where was God"? How dare they? God was everywhere. In the books, in the wind, in the eyes of every person smacked by the butt of a gun into cattle cars. It was the Germans who hungered viciously to deny God's presence. Better to ask instead where was humanity. That is the question sadly, angrily left unanswered.

I wish I knew how to live with the mistrust I will always feel for my fellow humans. Which casual acquaintance would, in another context, have shot my grandmother for refusing to board a railcar, leaving her to die in a muddy street? Which would have seen the act and done nothing? Which would have fought with me to the last breath, delivering guns and bread to me in the Warsaw ghetto, dying as we all must, but proudly and with honor. Perhaps thankfully, these questions are unanswerable.

It was the Germans. They did it. They created the Nazis, voted for them, allowed them, followed them, fought for them, killed for them, and looked the other way for them. They cannot now blame them; they were them. And that is the point. Just as a fire cannot burn without oxygen, Nazis could not have hijacked a society if their countrymen had resisted. This must be the lesson from this dark time. To the question "could it ever happen again", the answer can be "no"--but only if people follow their better consciences and resist.

Peace.