Holocaust Remembrance

On Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2014 I had the honor of speaking to a group of US military, at the Army National Guard Readiness Center in Arlington, VA. I share the text of that speech here (with minor editorial tweaks), and send wishes and prayers for better days ahead. An earlier version had been posted in Times of Israel, April 2015.

Confronting the Holocaust

April 17, 2014

When I was a boy of about 10, we lived in Queens, NY, and my family subscribed to a

newspaper that was delivered daily, thrown to our front stoop by a kid on a bike

with a big basket. It was called the Long Island Press, and not surprisingly it doesn’t

exist any more, at least as a real newspaper. In my home it was a needed

supplement to that other paper we always read, the New York Times. The Times, of

course, modestly claimed to contain “all the news fit to print,” but the Press,

essentially, printed all the rest of the news that fit...along with many items of rather

more local interest.

In the funnies section of the Sunday paper the Press once ran a kind of contest, an

early version of a lottery actually, which enticed readers to enter 7 digits into the

blank circles of a rotary dial phone – young folks here today who don’t know what

that is should see me later – clip it out, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on the

envelope, and mail it in (again, my sympathies to those of you who seem puzzled

about such arcane terms as stamps, envelopes, and the US Mail), and take their

chance to win a big prize: maybe a lifetime subscription to the Long Island Press, or

better yet a new rotary dial phone. Anyway, I don’t remember the details of what

one could actually win; it’s been more than 50 years.

But I do remember my father’s entry. He carefully wrote, in his best European

penmanship, 4-1-1-1-9-4-5.

He showed me his entry before putting it in the envelope and carefully addressing it

to the Press office in Jamaica. As he sealed the envelope I detected something

special in his eyes, a glint suggesting perhaps his sense of irony knowing that the

odds of winning were infinitesimal (he was a wise man who knew something about

probability) but suggesting also that somehow he deserved to win because of what

that number meant. I was impressed, and curious.

“Dad, how’d you come up with those numbers? Isn’t 4-1-1 the number for

information? I would have put 1-0-4-1-9-5-2, my birthday.”

“Funny you mention that,” said Dad. “I actually did put in my birthday. Sort of.”

Now I was really puzzled, because I knew Dad’s birthday was November 2 (by the

way, the date of the Balfour Declaration, one of the main legal foundations for the

establishment of the State of Israel).

He explained: April 11, 1945 was essentially his second birth. On that day

American troops came to Buchenwald, the concentration camp just up the road from

the lovely town of Weimar, where Otto Feuer had been an inmate for the previous 4

years.

The title for my talk this morning, “Confronting the Holocaust,” is therefore not new

to me. In a way I have been confronting the Holocaust for most of my life. But let

me be more precise, right from the start: I never really confronted the Holocaust

itself. Yes, I confronted memories, images, literature, personal stories – interspersed

in a quite normal and happy middle class Queens childhood – but never the real

thing. That’s perhaps obvious, the fact that having been born in New York, 7 years

after the camps of Europe were liberated, I never experienced barbed wire,

quarries, or teenagers trampled by SS jackboots. Still, it’s worth noting the

distinction – between confronting the Holocaust and confronting knowledge about

it. It’s a reminder that the blurring of truth, even when unintended or innocent,

risks blaspheming or trivializing memory rather than honoring it.

Worse yet, the blurring of truth can sometimes be the most painful to the very

people who deserve most to be remembered truthfully and respectfully. Here’s an

example of what I mean.

One of the more controversial topics of post-war psychology, associated

ignominiously with a distinguished professor named Bruno Bettelheim, was so-called

“survivor syndrome,” a somewhat vague concept that attributed various

personality problems like moodiness or depression to one’s prior experiences in

concentration camp. As intuitively appealing as this sort of model was – after all,

how could the trauma of deprivation, torture, starvation, and constant fear of death

not affect one’s personality? – it was fundamentally flawed and to a large extent

debunked. Most of the stresses of everyday life are quite evenly distributed among

survivors and non-survivors and, if anything, some survivors may actually have

developed especially good coping skills. (They would have gladly been spared the

training program.) I don’t have the data, but my hunch is that substance abuse and

alcoholism, for example, are markedly lower among survivors than in the general

population. If survivors were so disproportionately disabled, as the “syndrome”

literature suggested, now that most of them are dying of old age one would expect to

observe a noticeable dip in the incidence of depression and other problems. For

what it’s worth, it doesn’t seem that sales of Prozac are suffering...

In any case, my point is simply this: survivors who so courageously rebuilt their

lives shouldn’t have to endure silly and insulting suggestions that they are somehow

unable to manage or are having trouble adapting to normal life. They did need help

with shelter, employment, and education; but suggesting that they were, in general,

psychologically damaged goods, caused substantial hurt and in a way gave Hitler a

small posthumous victory.

From survivor-syndrome, a myth perpetuated in movies like The Pawnbroker,

starring the great Rod Steiger, it didn’t take long for the predictable sequel: there

emerged in the 1970s a related and similarly half-baked theory, namely “child-of-

survivor syndrome.” Again, the intuition was appealing: kids who grew up in

homes with parents who had survived – and who were therefore psychologically

traumatized and maladaptive – must be more prone to various psychological and

social ills than other kids. It was tempting, I must admit, to blame Hitler for my

mischief-making in elementary school, my awkwardness with girls in high school,

my devotion and attachment to my family, my on-again off-again religious

observance, and my anxieties about writing a dissertation in graduate school.

Except that most of my friends who had similar issues couldn’t use my convenient

excuse.

There is comfort in simplistic excuses: a rabbi once told my father that he survived

because God wanted him to. That sounded nice, except Dad wondered why God

didn’t also choose to help the others in the camp. I remembered this story when a

wise Italian Catholic psychiatrist challenged my excuse-making. He told me that

most of what I thought were unique problems caused by my parents’ suffering

sounded a lot like the problems he had growing up in South Philadelphia. Does that

mean that what my parents went through wasn’t special or unique? Does it mean

that I didn’t have my own issues? Certainly not. But simplistic judgments about

how and where personality is shaped, like simplistic attributions of survival to God’s

will, don’t honor the memory of the survivors (or their children) whose situations

may indeed warrant special attention and respect.

At times deviations from truth are less psychologically driven and more politically

motivated. One of the more amazing examples concerns the now almost

commonplace belief that 11 million people were victims of the Holocaust. I am

grateful to my friend and colleague, Walter Reich, for reminding us of this distortion,

during a recent visit to Temple Micah, my synagogue up in Northwest DC. Where

did that number come from? More precisely, where did the additional 5 million

come from? Maybe this little slip, too, started with good intentions. It seems that an

aide to President Jimmy Carter urged him to use the larger number in the executive

order establishing the US Holocaust Memorial Council, as a way to include non-

Jewish victims. It’s a complicated story, to be sure, and the Council deserves, after

all, our collective gratitude for the design and construction of our US Holocaust

Memorial Museum, truly one of the greatest of the genre in the world.

Still, there’s this nagging problem of the Executive Order: the number – 11 million –

apparently originated with Simon Wiesenthal – yes, the Nazi hunter — talk about

irony! — who wanted to universalize the Holocaust in order to evoke non-Jewish

sympathies and who admitted, later, to having made up the number out of thin air.

(If I were a non-Jew I would be deeply insulted by the suggestion that 6 million

Jewish dead are not enough to evoke my sympathies.) Wiesenthal had a complex

and somewhat twisted relationship with Jews and survivors, including people like

Elie Wiesel, which I won’t go into today. Nor will I speculate about President

Carter’s political motivations. But I will say emphatically that the perpetuation of

this distortion has confounded the reputation of the Council, given comfort and

ammunition to Holocaust deniers, and has caused an apparently permanent

misunderstanding in the public mind about the nature of Hitler’s war against the

Jews and about his near success in their systematic destruction.

I need to clarify what I mean here. Death is surely a universal phenomenon –

whether one dies in the line of duty or in a gas chamber doesn’t change the outcome

(to the best of our knowledge). But the cause of death does make a difference and

does matter. Remember that on September 11, 2001 roughly 3000 Americans were

killed by terror; that year 10 times as many died in automobile accidents. You see

my point, I’m sure. Similarly, as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz eloquently

summarized, “the murder of the Jews of Europe is in a class by itself – not because of

the numbers, but because of the ideology behind it, which placed the elimination of

an entire people and their culture from the earth as one of its primary goals. It was

unique because Nazi propaganda focused so intently on the Jews as an almost

supernatural cause of evil, and the German war machine remained devoted to killing

Jews up to the very last day of the war, long after it was clear that that war was lost.”

Thinking about this episode I’m reminded of a famous scene from the Seinfeld show.

Jerry is complaining to a priest that a comedian friend has converted to Judaism just

to be able to tell Jewish jokes. The priest asks if Jerry is offended by this as a Jew.

And Jerry says, “no, I’m offended as a comedian."

Fudging the data – converting 6 million to 11 million – offends Jewish victims and

offends history.

If some efforts to confront the Holocaust result in errors of commission, subtle

omissions can be as damaging. I mentioned earlier the New York Times, so I’ll come

back to it with a sad reminder: even this newspaper of record, probably still the

most reliable source of journalistic information in the world, found it difficult to

confront – and cope with – the Holocaust. As the historian Laurel Leff showed in her

2005 book, Buried by the Times, “the Times consistently placed major stories about

the Nazi treatment of European Jews on back pages ... and the story of the

Holocaust—articles that focused on the discrimination, deportation, and destruction

of the Jews—made the Times front page just 26 times [in 12 years], and only in six

of those stories were Jews identified ... as the primary victims." Would more Jews

have been saved if the Times had put more news of the camps on the front page?

Would the American government have been moved to swifter military action? We

will never know.

I began my talk with a suggestion that my own confrontation with the Holocaust has

really been second-hand. Indeed, I believe that because I live in America, the

Holocaust will ALWAYS be a matter of history, not personal memory or experience.

But other Americans – and here I’m not talking about survivors who came here and,

like my father, embraced their new home and loved the amazing “second life” it

enabled – did have direct and personal and unique experience. Maybe the editors of

the New York Times were overburdened by political and psychological baggage; not

so the brave young men and women who answered the call, put on their uniforms,

laced up their boots, packed their bags, and went to war. Many of them did have

direct contact with the first remnants of the Holocaust, and what they saw, when

they entered and then worked in the camps they liberated, has surely remained

etched in their memory forever.

If you have reason to be in Germany, I encourage you to go to Weimar, a charming

and picturesque town that was home to great humanists like Goethe and Schiller, a

favored musical center for Franz Liszt, the place where the Bauhaus architecture

movement began. You can take the #6 bus, marked “Buchenwald,” and in 20

minutes you’ll be at the entrance to the concentration camp. The iron lettering

above the main gate establishes that “work liberates.” Go to the building that has

been converted into a small museum, and watch the videos. You’ll see authentic

newsreel footage, taken by the liberating US army. And you’ll get to meet my father,

Otto Feuer, in April 1945, as he thanks the American people and the American army

for coming to save him and so many others.

On this day of remembrance I am honored to be with friends in the US military, and I

join my father, of blessed memory, in thanking you.