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EmailNureberg, Kristallnacht and the Lessons of the Holocaust
Rosalie Silberman Abella
Justice, Court of Appeal for Ontario
Toronto, Canada
Keynote Address at Sharing the Past: Celebrating Life
International Child Survivors and Second Generation Conference
(http://www.wfjcsh.org.)
October 13, 2002
Toronto, Ontario
To the Child Survivors:
Our parents are the generation that experienced the horror of the Holocaust. I am from the generation that struggles to learn its lessons, not only the lessons that explain the horror, but the lessons that can prevent future ones. My perspective on those issues is offered today by dividing this address into three parts based on the theme of this conference: Sharing the Past - Celebrating Life.
The first part comes from the lawyer in me, to see what we can learn about justice from the Holocaust. This led me to think about the Nuremberg trials, a topic not just of historical interest, given the current possibility of an International Criminal Court to deal with war crimes and genocide. The second part of my talk comes from the Jew in me, and it focuses on Kristallnacht, whose anniversary we will be marking in a couple of weeks. And the third part, as we head into Holocaust Education Week, is personal, about how as a child of holocaust Survivors, I feel the indelible marks of my parents’ experiences.
The Holocaust was the defining event of this century, and human rights in our lifetime cannot be understood without appreciating its conceptual proximity to the concentration camps of Europe. Because of the brutal offence to tolerance and human dignity the Holocaust represented, people who carried that genocidal picture in their souls as moral inspiration, set to work creating a just Rule of Law.
One of the results was Nuremberg, which, far from fading in relevance, has, it seems to me, become an increasingly illuminating moral vision. But where once it represented majestic idealism and miraculous regeneration, today it wistfully represents the distances not yet traveled.
Elie Wiesel said: “Nuremberg is the story of those who did the killing … Nuremberg is also the story of those who did nothing.” It is quite a story. A story about inhumanity, about immorality, about indifference. A story with many lessons to teach. But the past almost 60 years have shown how few of them the world has wanted to learn.
The lawyer in me, the judge in me, the child in me, the mother in me, the Jew in me - each part of me reacted differently to different parts of the Nuremberg story.
To me, the issue was about justice itself. And in the end, thinking about this talk, what troubled me most, was how little justice there had been. The lawyer in me was offended and so was the judge. But no part of me resonated more as I learned the Nuremberg story, no part despaired more, than the Jew in me.
I am the child of Survivors. It is just over 50 years since the end of the Nuremberg trials. It is exactly 60 years next week since my father’s parents, his three younger brothers, and my parents’ 2-1/2 year-old son were rounded up from their town in Poland and sent to Treblinka.
My father was the only person in his family to survive the war. He was 35 when the war ended; my mother was 28. As I reached each of these ages, I tried to imagine how they felt when they faced an unknown future as Survivors of an unimaginable past. And as each of my two sons reached the age my brother had been when he was killed, I tried to imagine my parents’ pain at losing a 2-1/2 year-old child. I couldn’t.
My father, who died a month before I finished law school, was a lawyer, and worked with the Americans setting up the system of legal services for Displaced Persons in southwest Germany after the war. I was born in July 1946 in Stuttgart, Germany and came to Canada with my parents and sister and grandmother a few months after the Nuremberg trials ended. I was born at the beginning of Nuremberg, was surrounded by the Survivors for whom it was created, was nurtured by parents who had somehow escaped the final Nazi verdict, and watched a father try to create a system of justice for people who didn’t know such a thing could exist in Germany for Jews. All before I was five years old. I grew up with a passion for justice, but I have also, now that I have grown up, developed a sadness for what has become of it, despite Nuremberg.
I never asked my parents if they took any comfort from the Nuremberg trials which were going on for four of the five years they were in Germany. I have no idea if they got any consolation from the conviction of dozens of the worst offenders. But of this I am very sure - they would have preferred by far, that the sense of outrage that inspired the Allies to establish the Military Tribunal of Nuremberg had been aroused many years earlier, before the events that led to Nuremberg ever took place. They would have preferred, I’m sure, that the world reaction to the 1933 Reichstag Fire decree suspending whole portions of the Weimar constitution; to the expulsion of Jewish lawyers and judges from their professions that same year; to the 1935 Nuremberg laws prohibiting social contact with Jews; or to the brutal rampage of Kristallnacht in 1938 - they would have preferred that world reaction to any one of these events, let alone all of them, would have been, at the very least, public censure. But there was no such world reaction. By the time World War II started on September 3, 1939, the very day my parents got married, it was too late.
There should never have had to be a Nuremberg Tribunal. There should never have to be any war crimes tribunal. But there was, there is, and unless we re-think what we’re doing to each other as an international community, there always will be.
For me, Nuremberg represents the failure of decent, well-meaning western democratic nations to respond when they should have and could have, to a virulent, horrifying strain of anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930’s. Millions of lives were lost because no one was sufficiently offended by the systematic destruction of every conceivable right for Jews, that they felt the need for any form of response.
And so, the vitriolic language and venal rights abuses, unrestrained by anyone’s conscience anywhere, in or out of Germany, turned into the ultimate rights abuse: genocide.
I do not for one moment want to suggest that the Nuremberg trials were not important. They were crucial, if for no more than to provide juridical catharsis. But more than that, they were an heroic attempt to hold the unimaginably guilty to judicial account, and showed the world the banality of evil and the evil of indifference. At Nuremberg, victims bore public witness to horror, and history thereby committed to memory the unspeakable indignities so cruelly imposed.
But although Nuremberg represented a sincere commitment to justice, it was a commitment all too fleeting. Not for long did the prosecution of war crimes remain a magnetic national preoccupation for the Western Allies who created it in the intimidating shadow of the Holocaust. By 1948, Britain issued a communiqué to the Commonwealth countries putting an end to the attempt to prosecute Nazi War Crimes, as a response to recent tripartite talks about political developments in Germany. “We are convinced”, the British communiqué said, “that it is now necessary to dispose of the past.” The crises in Berlin with Russia thereby turned Germany from an enemy to be restrained into a prospective ally to be recruited.
By 1949 it was all over. No more Nuremberg trials, no more Nazi war crimes prosecutions anywhere in the western world for over two decades, and the early release of many convicted war criminals who had been sentenced at Nuremberg. The past was tucked away, and the moral comfort of the Nuremberg trials gave way to the amoral expedient of the Cold War.
Worse, as the passion for justice faded into the passion for reconstruction, the world once again lost its compass and yielded to the seductive temptations of intolerance. Even before the decade was over, the decade that had seen the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, Nazis were being welcomed in the west as immigrants to help design the military - industrial strategy against the new villain: communism. The Jewish victims of the old villain, fascism, on the other hand, were welcomed nowhere. In addition, Senator Joseph McCarthy revived the odour of anti-Semitism in the United States; Canadian universities still had quotas on Jewish students; Canadian courts upheld restrictive covenants preventing Jews from buying property; and there were signs on Canadian benches saying “No Jews or dogs allowed”. With stunning alacrity, the world abandoned what proved to be its momentary pursuit of tolerance at Nuremberg, and reconstituted itself within five years as if neither Nuremberg nor the Holocaust had ever happened. It was a collective form of repressed memory.
But Jews did not forget. The world’s repression was the Jew’s obsession. For the Jew, it was not enough that the truth had emerged at Nuremberg. For Jews, the people who had been the victims of this truth, who had been forced daily to live with the demonization and dehumanization, it would not be enough until justice, not just truth, emerged.
Some justice did in fact emerge in the aftermath of Nuremberg, and there are many connective dots of history leading to the present of which we can be proud. The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention in 1948; the Covenants in 1966 on Civil and Political Rights and on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights; the reformulation of the word “discrimination” and the new concept of “human rights” to confront violations of group rights; the establishment of domestic and international bodies like the International Criminal Court to enforce the new legal norms: all these and more are tributes to the justice lessons learned from the Holocaust. We have made remarkable progress and we are immeasurably ahead of where we were 50 years ago in many, many ways.
But we have still not learned the most important lesson of all - to try to prevent the abuses in the first place. We have not finished connecting history’s dots. All over the world, in the name of religion, domestic sovereignty, national interest, cultural relativism, economic exigency, or sheer arrogance, men, women and children are being slaughtered, abused, imprisoned, terrorized and exploited. With impunity.
We have no international mechanism to prevent the ongoing slaughter of children and other innocent civilians, and no overriding sense of moral responsibility that informs us and helps develop a consensus for when responsive military action is required to protect human rights. We have, in fact, no consensus on what our international more responsibilities are period, and that is why we are so desperately lacking in enforcement mechanisms, legal and otherwise.
More than 50 years after Nuremberg, we still have not developed an international moral culture which will not tolerate intolerance. The gap between the values the international community articulates and the values it enforces is so wide, that almost any country that wants to, can - and does - push its abuses through it. No national abuser seems to worry whether there will be a “Nuremberg” trial later, because usually there isn’t, and in any event, by the time there is, all the damage that was sought to be done, has been done, with or without the backdrop of war.
Trials are important, but they are too late, and they are no alternative to the prevention of the destruction of life or liberty in the first place. Trials are a response, not a solution. We cannot simply sit back and watch the horrors occur, knowing our indignation will be mollified by subsequent judicial reckoning. Where injustice is preventable, it should be prevented when first identified, not permitted first to create its human devastation before being held to account.
How can we teach people to respect the rule of law when the law only rears its retributive head after the acts of inhumanity it has been in the audience watching, have already been committed, or when, as in Nazi Germany, it is the law itself that promotes the abuses? How can we teach people to value morality when there is no reward for compliance and no punishment for its violation? How can we teach people to deliver and expect justice when there are no predictable consequences in the international community for its absence? Why hasn’t the Holocaust, the single most outrageous crime in civilized history, created a desperate, unquenchable thirst for enforceable international norms that make human rights abuses intolerable anytime and anywhere they occur?
How then do we create an international consensus of moral outrage? How do we create an international conscience that will not tolerate cruelty? How do we, in short, create a climate of justice, keep it, and protect it?
For a start, we can try the old way: by protecting people’s dignity, humanity, and freedoms. Edmund Burke said “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win this world is for enough good men to do nothing.” I have now read enough about the unconscionable acquiescence of the academic, legal and judicial professions in Nazi Germany to know that we cannot put our faith exclusively in the people and institutions from whom we normally expect justice leadership - laws, courts and intellectual elites. The Holocaust was not illegal under German law - the Rule of Law can be immoral. What we need is a collaborative public consensus, nationally and internationally, that we will not tolerate a world order which tolerates injustice. We need to find a way to immunize ourselves from complacency, moral lethargy, self-serving rationalization, and stubborn self-denial.
We must lay siege to the culture of indifference in which we have permitted ourselves to indulge, and replace it with a culture of commitment. We must regain the moral high ground we temporarily occupied at Nuremberg, and remind ourselves that genocidal human rights violations are history lessons we must commit to permanent memory. In the absence of other remedies, episodic responses like trials to episodes of preventable injustice, are unconscionably inadequate and disrespectful to the victims, to their families, and to the cherished concept of a civilized future. What was Nuremberg for, if not to signal to potential violators that justice must prevail.
And what are the lessons of Kristallnacht, which started when one 17 year-old Jewish boy, Hershel Grynszpan, an ordinary youth living in extraordinary times, felt such profound outrage at the treatment he and his family were subjected to by the Nazis that he shot Ernst Vom Rath, the Third Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris. He did not know Vom Rath, but he knew of Nazi persecution. He knew that thousands of Jews like his family were dislocated, impoverished, imprisoned and repressed. His rage was matched only by his frustration.
“I acted”, he said when he was interrogated, “because of love for my parents and for my people who were subjected unjustly to outrageous treatment . . . . It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have a right to live. My people have a right to exist on this earth.” I am not a dog. Can we possibly understand the outrage of a human being who is reduced to having to say “I am not a dog”. Can we possibly understand what it meant to have to beg for the right to exist because we are Jewish. But beg we did. To no avail.
The response to Grynszpan’s outrage was Kristallnacht - the organized, systematic destruction of Jewish homes, schools, stores, cemeteries and synagogues in Germany and Austria on November 9. Grynszpan was not the cause of this atrocity that left so many dead and thousands incarcerated. He was the excuse. He offered the tangible rationale for accelerating a Nazi programme of destruction - the destruction of an entire people for no reason other than that they were Jewish. The shattered glass from the riots of the German mobs gave Kristallnacht its name; the shattered Jewish lives gave Kristallnacht its notoriety; and the shattered morality of civilization gave Kristallnacht its unforgettable place in history.
The Jews of Europe begged the world to be released from their horrible victimization, begged for entry to be released from their dehumanization, and begged for refuge to be released from destruction. We now know the world’s answer - it was an echo of neglect that reverberated throughout history, a dispassionate litany of rules, regulations, and priorities whose message was clear: victims you have been, victims you are, victims you will remain.
The Holocaust is the legacy of this neglect. Six million innocent people, who happened to be Jewish, no longer laugh, weep, love, think or create. The world lost, and lost cruelly, not only the minds and hearts of millions who died in utter despair at the inconceivable indifference that permitted their loss, it lost the right ever to expect a single Jewish person to stand silently at the sight of an injustice.
This, I think, is the real lesson of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. Our experience that night, and in the unspeakable years that followed, left a searing imprint in our collective consciences. How can we be expected ever to forget the sheer horror of being denied the very right to exist. Of course it was arbitrary, of course it was immoral, and of course it was uncivilized. But it was also unforgivable, and we ought not to waste the tiniest ounce of energy on persuading anyone of the need to remember, with tenacity and vigour, this cornerstone of our history this century.
We in turn need ask no one to forgive us this preoccupation. It has taught us much. It has taught us that we can never value anything more than justice; that we can never put economies over dignity; that we can never appease bigotry; and that we can never sacrifice morality to expedience. We can never be indifferent.
We are the generation that saw and survived the Holocaust. We must therefore be the generation that rails most vigilantly against the intolerance that produced it. There may be risks in insisting on this expanded vision, but they are nothing compared to the risks in ignoring inhumanity. The banality of evil must never blur our capacity to see it. And having seen it, to identify it, fight it, and extinguish it. What can we leave our children if not an intense loyalty to humanity and a passionate commitment to its civilized expansion.
Our lives as individuals and particularly as Jewish individuals has been permanently shaped by World War II and we have a duty to ourselves as Jews and to the wider community never to forget who we are and where we come from. And we must constantly remind others who we are and where we come from, and to demand respect for our right to grieve forever the irretrievable losses of the Holocaust.
Which brings us to Israel, this tiny and insistent democracy under siege. Israel today finds itself on the one hand confronting destructive and irrational neighbours, and on the other hand confronting the arrogant condemnations of countries who have too quickly forgotten how their own indifference 60 years ago incubated the unspeakable injustice that transformed Israel from an idealistic aspiration to an urgent necessity. Unlike Israelis, our lives in the Diaspora are luxuriously free from daily fear and despair. That Israel endures this unimaginable burden with such dignity and determination sears our souls and breaks our hearts.
In addition to its universal lessons, Nuremberg, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust have had powerful impacts of a more private kind. For me, as a woman deeply marked by her family’s past and as one who holds her parents and other Survivors in awe for their persistence in rebuilding healthy lives, I am shaped in two fundamental ways. The first is that I feel an obligation to repay them for the efforts they made to reconstruct their lives, and to prove that it was worth their effort. Most Survivors derived the energy and sustenance to carry on from their hope of guaranteeing for their children a life free from pain.
They succeeded and we are a spoiled generation - our lives have not been horribly uprooted, nor did we have to bear witness to parents, children and spouses dying cruelly and unnaturally. But as people free from this experience, we must repay our parents’ love by drawing from it the strength to contribute our energies and talents to society generally and to the Jewish community of which we are an integral part. With strength comes a capacity for generosity and we must generously return in our various communities the investment our parents made - by insisting on vigorous regard for the rights of others, by living our lives proud of our Jewishness, and by keeping alive the memories of those who themselves never had the chance to fulfill their potential. We have the gift of Survivorship and it both enables and obliges us to live our lives to the fullest limit of our abilities. We have undoubtedly the right to live private lives, but we also have a fundamental sense that we must make, too, a public contribution in whatever ways our capacities direct us.
The second major influence I have felt is even more profoundly affecting. I cannot take anything or anyone for granted. One comes away from the history of the Holocaust with a driving urgency for life - having watched a whole generation intolerably interrupted in mid-life, one learns to appreciate intensely the fragility and temporal limitations of our own lives. There is, as a result, a compelling need to make the most of the opportunities you are given and to value, cherish and nurture the people you love. It is not an unbridled drive - it is firmly circumscribed by the values on e equally strenuously embraces.
If anything, the sense of fairness and decency rooted in Jewish tradition are heightened in those of us who feel the weight of history. We live not only for ourselves, but to honour our ancestors by living with courage, integrity and compassion. There is no competition with others; the competition is with time.
We, those who have survived, are an accident of history’s fate, but we must vindicate the accident on behalf of those millions who cannot. The memory must never die, and we, and our children, and our children’s children, must do everything in our power to keep it alive as a source of personal inspiration, of commitment to justice, and of pride in who we are.
Each of us, in our own ways, in our own fields and in our own families must face the future proudly, wearing the sadness of our past as a shield, and bearing the lessons of our history as weapons against an indifferent present. We must be proud of who and what we are, courageous in our uniqueness, and generous in our willingness to fight for what we cherish. We cannot undo history, but we can, as people humbled by its awesome power, contribute to a powerful momentum against its repetition.
Israel’s survival is our survival, and its peace is our peace. Israel needs us, not to judge her, but to love her, support her, and to pray for her. The rest she will do herself.
We are the generation that bears the historical weight of the Holocaust’s pain, the generation whose commitment to justice was shaped by the outrage of Auschwitz. How many more outrages will our generation witness before we lose the final victim: our humanity?
These lessons the world forgot for one horrible moment, and we the Survivors, in honour and memory of those who were its victims, must pledge to translate their and our loss into a fierce commitment never to let indifference overcome justice or integrity in the pages our generation donates to history.
There have already been too many victims. There must be no more victims.