The Holocaust

The first is testimony, and its authority is that the people giving it were there.

What it describes is not only cruelty. It is the deliberate removal of a person: the shaving, the number tattooed on the arm, the name replaced by it. Primo Levi's number was one seven four five one seven.

And it refuses to make itself comfortable. Levi wrote at length about what he called the grey zone, where staying alive required complicity, where prisoners were made to burn other prisoners, where a man might take bread from someone who was dying.

His own verdict on his own book was that the survivors are not the true witnesses. The complete witnesses, he wrote, are the ones who did not come back.

Elie Wiesel arrived at Birkenau from Romania in May nineteen forty four, aged fifteen. His mother Sarah and his younger sister Tzipora were killed on arrival. His father died at Buchenwald in January nineteen forty five. In nineteen eighty six he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with an instruction.

The second account reads the crime through its paperwork, and it is the reason we know as much as we do.

In nineteen sixty one Adolf Eichmann sat in a bulletproof glass booth in a courtroom in Jerusalem, a thin bald man in a grey suit, and answered for the deportation of millions. He spoke almost entirely in the passive voice. He cited regulations. He described himself as a transportation specialist.

Hannah Arendt covered that trial and took from it the phrase the banality of evil, and she was precise about it. Not that Eichmann was ordinary. That he had replaced moral thought with administrative obedience, and that the substitution was available to very many people.

Raul Hilberg, who served in the American unit that captured the railway records, traced it as a process in four stages. Definition, who counts as Jewish. Expropriation, take the property. Concentration, into the ghettos. Then annihilation.

Thirty copies of the Wannsee minutes were made. Twenty nine were destroyed. The one that survived was found in a Foreign Office file in nineteen forty seven.

The third account is about the countries that were not doing the killing.

In July nineteen thirty eight, delegates from thirty two countries met at a hotel in Evian to discuss Jewish refugees. The Dominican Republic offered to take a hundred thousand. No other country made a comparable offer. The Australian delegate explained that his country had no racial problem and was not anxious to import one. The American quota stayed at twenty seven thousand three hundred and seventy a year.

A German newspaper summarised the conference in three words. Nobody wants them.

Then there is Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic courier for the underground, taken into the Warsaw ghetto in October nineteen forty two and, in a stolen uniform, into a transit camp where he watched people loaded into cattle cars.

He carried it to London and told the Foreign Secretary. He carried it to Washington in July nineteen forty three and told the President.

He also told a Supreme Court justice, who was himself Jewish, and who answered that he did not say Karski was lying. He said he was unable to believe him, and that there was a difference.

By December nineteen forty two the Allies had confirmed enough to issue a joint declaration condemning a bestial policy of cold blooded extermination. Nothing military followed. In nineteen forty four, requests to bomb the rail lines into Auschwitz, or the crematoria, were refused.

The fourth account is about what the survivors concluded, and what was built on it.

David Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency in December nineteen forty two, eight days before the Allied declaration, that he estimated two million Jews were already dead. The Jewish community in Palestine dropped thirty seven parachutists into occupied Europe in nineteen forty four. Seven were captured and executed.

Before the war, Zionism was one Jewish answer among several. There was the Bund, Jewish socialism, rooted in Poland. There was assimilation, strongest in Germany and Austria.

After nineteen forty five those arguments were not defeated. Their constituencies were dead. The Bund's heartland had been destroyed, and the assimilated Jews of Berlin and Vienna had been killed alongside the ones who never assimilated.

In nineteen forty six about two hundred and fifty thousand Jewish survivors were living in displaced persons camps inside occupied Germany and Austria, with no country asking for them. The case that Jews could only be safe in a state with an army became, for many of them, simply obvious.

The fifth account has the thinnest archive, and the reason it is thin is part of the account.

The Romani word for it is Porajmos. The Devouring.

Between two hundred and twenty thousand and five hundred thousand Roma and Sinti were murdered. The range is that wide because Roma were never systematically counted, many carried no papers, and after the war no government was in a hurry to find out.

The apparatus was not invented by the Nazis. Bavaria opened a Gypsy Information Service in eighteen ninety nine. The Weimar Republic fingerprinted Roma and made them carry identity cards. The regime inherited the files and expanded them.

A racial hygiene unit in Berlin classified thirty thousand Roma by racial purity. Its researcher wrote a doctoral thesis on Romani children in foster care, concluding they could not be educated. Many of those children were later sent to Auschwitz.

A family camp operated at Birkenau from February nineteen forty three. Families were kept together, not out of mercy but because they were wanted as specimens. On the night of the second of August nineteen forty four the SS liquidated it. Two thousand eight hundred and ninety seven people were gassed, and witnesses reported that the Roma fought them with improvised weapons and with their hands.