being a communist or a Jew.
PASTOR MARTIN NIEMÖLLER, March 1946
6
COLLABORATION ACROSS EUROPE
It takes a lot of imagination to find something new. In fact, after the expro priation of real estate, after the deportations and assassinations—all the rest becomes grotesque.… Sometimes there is something diabolic in anti-Semitism, but now, when we don’t swim in blood, we are splashing through muddy, petty theft.
Journal of Mihail Sebastian , Bucharest, 12 November 1941
Hitler, keep your dirty hands
off our dirty Jews!
Wartime graffiti in Amsterdam
The immediate factors favourable to Jewish rescue during the Holocaust must be placed in the context of the customs and traditions of individual countries. The most pertinent tradition, of course, is the existence or absence of anti-Semitism. For many reasons, modern Italy lacked an anti-Semitic tradition.
SUSAN ZUCCOTTI, The Italians and the Holocaust (1987)
7
BRITAIN, AMERICA, AND THE HOLOCAUST
Let my death be an energetic cry of protest against the indifference of the world which witnesses the extermination of the Jewish people without taking any steps to prevent it.
SHMUEL ZYGELBOYM, Bundist deputy to the exiled Polish National Council in London, shortly before his suicide on 12 May 1943
[The guilt] lies with the Nazis.… But can we escape blame if, having it in our power to do something to save the victims, we fail to take the necessary action, and take it swiftly? … If the British and American Governments were determined to achieve a programme of rescue in some way commensurate with the vastness of the need, they could do it.
GEORGE BELL, BISHOP OF CHICHESTER, 18 May 1943
What have you done to us, you freedom-loving peoples, guardians of justice, defenders of the high principles of democracy and the brotherhood of man? What have you allowed to be perpetrated against a defenseless people while you stood aside and let them bleed to death? … If instead of Jews, thousands of English, American, or Russian women, children, and the aged had been tortured every day, burnt to death, asphyxiated in gas chambers—would you have acted in the same way?
DAVID BEN-GURION, speech on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, 10 July 1944
8
MODERNITY AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE
Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
PAUL CELAN, “Death Fugue”
Here in this carload
I am Eve
With my son Abel
If you see my older boy
Cain son of Adam
Tell him that I
DAN PAGIS (written in pencil in a sealed freight car)
In no other place and time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never were so many human lives extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism and cruelty.
PRIMO LEVI, The Drowned and the Saved (1989)
A BOUT THE A UTHOR
Robert Wistrich is Neuberger Professor of modern European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He previously held the Chair for Jewish Studies at University College, London, as well as guest professorships at Harvard, Brandeis, and Oxford Universities, and at the Institute of Advanced Study in the Netherlands (NIAS). An editor of East European Jewish Affairs and a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement , Professor Wistrich is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of modern Jewry and anti-Semitism. He is the author of many highly regarded books, including the award-winning Socialism and the Jew, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, Trotsky: Fate of a Revolutionary, Who’s Who in Germany, Hitler’s Apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi Legacy, Between Redemption and Perdition: Antisemitism and Jewish Identity , and Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich. He also scripted, edited, and presented several acclaimed documentary films for British television, including The
PASTOR MARTIN NIEMÖLLER, March 1946
6
COLLABORATION ACROSS EUROPE
It takes a lot of imagination to find something new. In fact, after the expro priation of real estate, after the deportations and assassinations—all the rest becomes grotesque.… Sometimes there is something diabolic in anti-Semitism, but now, when we don’t swim in blood, we are splashing through muddy, petty theft.
Journal of Mihail Sebastian , Bucharest, 12 November 1941
Hitler, keep your dirty hands
off our dirty Jews!
Wartime graffiti in Amsterdam
The immediate factors favourable to Jewish rescue during the Holocaust must be placed in the context of the customs and traditions of individual countries. The most pertinent tradition, of course, is the existence or absence of anti-Semitism. For many reasons, modern Italy lacked an anti-Semitic tradition.
SUSAN ZUCCOTTI, The Italians and the Holocaust (1987)
7
BRITAIN, AMERICA, AND THE HOLOCAUST
Let my death be an energetic cry of protest against the indifference of the world which witnesses the extermination of the Jewish people without taking any steps to prevent it.
SHMUEL ZYGELBOYM, Bundist deputy to the exiled Polish National Council in London, shortly before his suicide on 12 May 1943
[The guilt] lies with the Nazis.… But can we escape blame if, having it in our power to do something to save the victims, we fail to take the necessary action, and take it swiftly? … If the British and American Governments were determined to achieve a programme of rescue in some way commensurate with the vastness of the need, they could do it.
GEORGE BELL, BISHOP OF CHICHESTER, 18 May 1943
What have you done to us, you freedom-loving peoples, guardians of justice, defenders of the high principles of democracy and the brotherhood of man? What have you allowed to be perpetrated against a defenseless people while you stood aside and let them bleed to death? … If instead of Jews, thousands of English, American, or Russian women, children, and the aged had been tortured every day, burnt to death, asphyxiated in gas chambers—would you have acted in the same way?
DAVID BEN-GURION, speech on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, 10 July 1944
8
MODERNITY AND THE NAZI GENOCIDE
Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
PAUL CELAN, “Death Fugue”
Here in this carload
I am Eve
With my son Abel
If you see my older boy
Cain son of Adam
Tell him that I
DAN PAGIS (written in pencil in a sealed freight car)
In no other place and time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never were so many human lives extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism and cruelty.
PRIMO LEVI, The Drowned and the Saved (1989)
A BOUT THE A UTHOR
Robert Wistrich is Neuberger Professor of modern European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He previously held the Chair for Jewish Studies at University College, London, as well as guest professorships at Harvard, Brandeis, and Oxford Universities, and at the Institute of Advanced Study in the Netherlands (NIAS). An editor of East European Jewish Affairs and a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement , Professor Wistrich is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of modern Jewry and anti-Semitism. He is the author of many highly regarded books, including the award-winning Socialism and the Jew, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, Trotsky: Fate of a Revolutionary, Who’s Who in Germany, Hitler’s Apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi Legacy, Between Redemption and Perdition: Antisemitism and Jewish Identity , and Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich. He also scripted, edited, and presented several acclaimed documentary films for British television, including The
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