Hilberg presented a dour façade and lectured at a very slow and effective pace, in a sepulchral voice. He looked like a sad man to whom life was being unjust, although, after initial controversies, he was widely recognized and respected as the preeminent historian of the Holocaust. Something of his persona transpired in his autobiography, The Politics of Memory.
This being said, for many years to come Hilberg’s Destruction became the necessary and unsurpassed history of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, the essential reference for any historian of the subject. A few other attempts at presenting a historical synthesis of the events as such had preceded (Léon Poliakov, Gerald Reitlinger, Joseph Billig, Wolfgang Scheffler), but none included the massive documentation and followed the rigorous analytic framework offered by Hilberg. Not that Hilberg’s work had been vied for by publishers or acclaimed by a wide readership: it was brought out after many failed attempts by a small Chicago publisher and barely reached a limited and specialized group. It was published in German in 1983, twenty-two years after its initial English edition came out.
Hilberg’s volume was not without its deficiences and inner contradictions, of course. While the first few pages listed various anti-Jewish measures taken by the Catholic Church and indicated their similarity to some of the Nazi measures, thus establishing a deep ideological link between centuries-long Christian anti-Judaism and Hitler’s anti-Semitic crusade, ideology then disappeared from his study, to be replaced by the quasi-autonomous dynamics of four related bureaucracies (State, Party, Army, Economy) that supposedly determined the fate of European Jews from their initial definition as Jews to their ultimate extermination. Moreover, Hilberg excoriated the leadership of Jewish communities in the Reich and throughout occupied Europe for what he considered as their collaboration with the Nazis, their atavistic subservience, and, all in all, for going along with the passivity of Jewish masses in the face of persecution and death.
In contrast to Hilberg, Poliakov had a sunny personality; he was mostly smiling, friendly, knowledgeable, and generous with information. He was a self-taught historian who, during the war, lived in hiding in France, the country to which he had emigrated from Russia, and who, after the war, worked with the French prosecutor in Nuremberg.
Poliakov’s history of the Shoah came out some ten years before Hilberg’s magnum opus under the original French title Le bréviaire de la haine (Harvest of Hate). It encompassed none of Hilberg’s massive documentation and was an early attempt at summarizing events that — let us recall — were not central, nor even systematically summarized at the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals. Later, Poliakov published his multivolume history of anti-Semitism from its early Christian beginnings to the 1930s; it remains his enduring work.
I liked Poliakov and we got along well, as we also shared the same ideas about Pius XII. An article of his awoke my interest in that strangest of SS men, Kurt Gerstein, whose story was related to the Vatican issue, albeit tangentially. Poliakov helped me get access to the Gerstein archive in Westphalia and thus to the material necessary for a short biography. I wrote it in 1965–66.
Kurt Gerstein was a devout Protestant who volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1940 and was posted to its hygiene section. There, in charge of disinfection, he dealt with lethal materials, including Zyklon B pellets, which, in gaseous form, could exterminate human beings in an enclosed space. In July 1942, ordered to deliver Zyklon to Lublin, Gerstein was invited to witness the extermination of a transport of Dutch Jews. From that day on, while he continued to deliver Zyklon to camps, he attempted to inform the world of what was happening.
On the nightly train ride that brought him back from Warsaw to Berlin, after the Lublin mission and the visit to Belsec, Gerstein gave a detailed description of what he had seen to the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, a fellow passenger. Von Otter sent a report to Stockholm; it remained under wraps until the end of the war. Gerstein attempted to be heard at the Vatican legation and at the Swiss consulate but was refused access to either place. His friends in the Evangelical Church did not dare to publicize what he told them.
Shortly before the end of the war Gerstein surrendered to the Americans and wrote four essentially identical reports about what he knew and what he had witnessed. These reports were to become significant evidence at the Nuremberg trial. In the meantime, Gerstein was handed over to the French authorities and jailed in Paris as a war criminal. In July 1945, he hanged himself in his cell. The loneliness of Gerstein’s action contributed to its failure, deepened his despair, and ultimately led to his suicide.
4
Over the years, I returned at times to the issue of Pius XII, particularly in Nazi Germany and the Jews. In 2011, however, I decided to add a full-length afterword to the French and German republications, as significant new material had become available that confirmed the thesis presented in 1964. The same arguments became even more convincing after the publication of David Kertzer’s path-breaking study on the role played by Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII), then secretary of state, in the relations between Pius XI, Italian fascism, and Nazi Germany.
At the beginning of his career, while he was nuncio in Warsaw after the First World War, Achille Ratti (the future Pius XI) brandished the usual anti-Jewish accusations and slogans of the most conservative Catholicism. Once elected pope, he didn’t abandon the ultra-right-wing policies that led to the historic concordat between the Holy See and Mussolini’s fascist state in 1929. The appointment of Pacelli as secretary of state helped in keeping that same line; it resulted in a concordat with Nazi Germany in 1933. Within a short time, however, the pope began to perceive the nature of Nazism and his attitude increasingly distanced itself from the outright appeasement policy of his secretary of state. Pacelli helped to formulate the first encyclical that mildly criticized Nazism, without naming it, in 1937. From then on, however, Pius XI’s and Pacelli’s attitudes toward Hitler’s Reich clearly differed. While Pacelli maintained his avoidance of confrontation with Nazi Germany, the pope, increasingly frail, decided to attack Nazi racial anti-Semitism in a special encyclical that would be entitled Humani generis unitas, prepared by three Jesuits. It was shown to the pope as he lay dying. Pacelli, once elected pope, suppressed the message that could have encouraged European Catholics to offer some assistance to the hounded Jews. The text of the encyclical was found decades after the events, and published in English in 1997 as The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI.
A few exceptional circumstances also brought up the topic over the years. In 1997, I was awarded an honorary doctorate by the German university of Witten-Herdecke. To my utter amazement, a short time before the ceremony, the cardinal archbishop of Paris and converted Jew, Jean-Marie Lustiger, arrived, privately and with no indication of his status, except for the scarcely visible red ecclesiastical collar of a cardinal. He had come to make the festive introduction of the honoree. Needless to say, I remained speechless when I saw him and understood why he came.
A short time thereafter, the president of Tel Aviv University and I invited the cardinal to a conference on the church and the Jews during the war. The debates were interesting, without adding anything to the theme of Pius XII. The memorable moment came at the end of the conference, when our guest addressed an assembly of some seven hundred students (while outside the hall, Orthodox students were yelling insults). He introduced himself: “My name is Aaron Lustiger [he used the German/Yiddish pronunciation of his name] and I am also called Jean-Marie Lustiger [French pronunciation].” His theme: the compatibility of both identities.
The belief in such compatibility was a guiding principle of Lustiger’s life; it did not endear him to some Catholics, nor did it seem acceptable to part of the Jewish religious establishment. The cardinal never wavered on this issue; in 2004, three years before his death, he wrote his own epitaph, the first lines of which read as follows:
I was born Jewish.
I received the name
Of my paternal grandfather, Aaron.
<
br /> Having become Christian
By Faith and by Baptism,
I have remained Jewish
As did the Apostles.
Paul Flamand was un grand monsieur. Was Blanche Knopf, my American publisher, une grande dame? I met her in Flamand’s office sometime in the course of 1964; she saw the manuscript of Pius XII and bought the rights for the American publication under Knopf’s Borzoi Books imprint. The sums involved were very modest but, as a beginner, I was happy to have been accepted by such a prestigious publisher. Incidentally, this was, I think, the beginning of my cooperation with Georges Borchardt, the literary agent who represented Seuil in the United States, a cooperation that became a friendship and remains so to this day.
Some time after the American edition was published, Blanche Knopf phoned from Paris: she was staying at the Ritz; could I come for lunch the next day? In order to make it and return in time for my seminar, I had to fly from Geneva to Paris and back, quite an expense for me. I imagined that she wished to discuss my next project or suggest a theme worth pursuing; in other words, I had great expectations. On the following day at noon, I was at the Ritz.
Blanche Knopf duly came down and we moved to the restaurant for a very light lunch, as my host, then about seventy, did not eat heavily at noon, nor did she drink anything but water. We spoke of Thomas Mann, Sartre, and Camus, all of whom she knew well and had published. Then we moved on to Freud, Ilya Ehrenburg, André Gide (all of whom she had also published), and others. After an hour or so, she told me how delighted she was to have talked to me.
A few minutes later, I was on my way back to the airport.
5
Sometime during the summer of 1966, we all returned for a brief visit to Tel Aviv. Israel was in the doldrums. The economy was faltering; the young generation was accused of having lost all ideals: it was mired in the everyday, lounged in cafés and bars; it was dubbed the espresso generation. Many Israelis attributed the decline to a weakness in political leadership, to the supposedly inept “old guard” of Mapai who had seized the reins of power from the hands of Ben-Gurion, once he resigned in 1964 to set up his own party: Rafi. Levi Eshkol took over as prime minister and defense minister.
Eshkol, naturally fluent in Hebrew, seemed on occasion to prefer the folksy expressions of his native Yiddish to the pathos of Biblical prose. He was a man of compromise and of peace who had inherited a difficult internal situation and would soon be faced with an external crisis of formidable proportions. In the meantime, the general mood was such that the number of emigrants from Israel was larger than that of immigrants. A popular joke summed it all up: a large sign at Lod (today Ben-Gurion) Airport asked the last person to leave to please turn off the light.
I paid a visit to Shimon, who now occupied a nondescript office on some equally nondescript Tel Aviv street. As secretary general of Rafi, he didn’t display the upbeat mood of his former days. He was bitter about the lack of commitment (and work) of his comrade-in-arms Moshe Dayan, who, according to him, hardly concerned himself with the fledgling party. In fact, Rafi would soon rejoin the fold and become part of a center-left coalition dominated by the old Mapai. For Ben-Gurion, there was no political comeback; for Dayan there would be a glorious aftermath, followed by a tragic one. Peres’s political life went on with ups and downs: he was a true political survivor — possibly too much so. As I am writing, he is the president of Israel, just about to celebrate his ninetieth birthday.
We spent much time with our friends Sabi Teveth and his wife Ora. It’s there that, for the first time, I heard of the Beatles and listened to some of their music (I was late to many things). Like most Israelis to this day, Sabi and Ora regularly organized get-togethers on Friday evenings. You arrived at about ten and joined a sizable number of other guests, usually a rather homogeneous group. One ate, drank, and talked (these conversations were not only loud but often turned into simultaneous and competing monologues until, ultimately, one of the guests — or the host — managed to become the center of attention). You were not supposed to look at your watch before the early morning hours — and then the discussion went on for any length of time at the door of the apartment or by the elevator.
To say that I disliked these Friday evenings would be an understatement, though not because I thought that this verbal free-for-all was uncouth. Not in the least. The reason was much more basic: as I already mentioned, I was extremely shy. Not in a one-to-one conversation, not in the company of three to four close friends and not in structured situations such as teaching, a public lecture, or a television (or radio) interview. But put me at a dinner table of let us say eight people or more and you will hear me speak in monosyllables at best. And in the whirlwind of Israeli Friday evening debates, you wouldn’t hear me at all. I never overcame this selective shyness, never understood it really. To this day, it remains the same, except that it bothers me less. I stay silent in social gatherings or speak only to my neighbor and almost never in a general conversation. So be it.
Sabi had become one of the most respected journalists in the country and later he would turn into a very thorough Ben-Gurion biographer. As I already mentioned, he was a true insider of the defense establishment, and its elite belonged to his regular list of Friday night guests. Some members could not be invited together, mainly in later years: you had Shimon on one Friday, and Itzhak and Leah Rabin on another. Although they worked together when Labor was in power, Shimon and Itzhak were competitors for the first place in their party, in the government, and in history; they hated each other, quite openly so, probably to the end.
During one of these occasions, in 1966, Sabi asked me, “Do you know Moshe?” No, I had never met Dayan. A visit was arranged for the following Saturday, at Dayan’s home in Zahala (a posh residential area, not far from Tel Aviv, mostly built for high-ranking officers and their families). In those days, apart from being one of the three leaders of Rafi, Dayan, who for a while had been minister of agriculture in Eshkol’s government, had become head of a semigovernmental Red Sea fishing company and, quite openly, remained a collector of extramarital affairs and of valuable antiquities wherever he found them, in Israel or elsewhere (his many critics called it robbery). A dashing personality if Israel ever had one, he was known worldwide as the general with the black patch over one eye (he had lost the eye in the Second World War, in a British-led operation in Vichy-occupied Syria).
Much has been written about Dayan, yet grasping his personality remains difficult. Israel Bar’s story about the scorpion was inspired by hatred, but it may have contained a tiny grain of truth. Dayan, mostly prudent and rational, could at times be reckless and push for dangerous moves, against all reason. Mainly, he was a loner, a deeply pessimistic man, apparently indifferent to the opinion of others.
Dayan guided us through his truly impressive array of antiquities before we sat down for coffee. We touched upon many issues, but it was his view of the conflict with the Arabs that I’ve never forgotten. He saw the Palestinian issue as the core of the conflict: as long as the Palestinian problem remained unsolved, the overall conflict would find no solution. At that time (one year before the Six-Day War), the majority of Palestinians lived in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule; a further few hundred thousand lived in Israel and a similar number were dispersed in refugee camps in Gaza (which belonged to Egypt) and in Lebanon. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had just been established in 1964 but at that stage it still played a minor role.
Did Dayan believe that the Palestinian issue could be solved? He did not. His explanation was simple: “Most Palestinians have peasant roots,” he said. “We have stolen their land to set up our state. Peasants never forget and never forgive those who live on their stolen land.” Did it mean that Israel would forever live by the sword? Dayan thought so, and had previously said as much in a widely known eulogy delivered at the grave of one of his friends, Ro’i Rothberg, killed by Palestinian infiltrators near the Gaza border.
6
During the few months I spent in Montreal, I rented a room with all the amenities in one of the villas on Westmound, a kind of golden ghetto, mostly English-speaking, mostly Jewish, quite distant from the “French”-speaking Catholic population. Yet some of these Jewish families were relatively recent immigrants from North Africa, naturally the wealthier ones, who had arrived via Israel or directly from Rabat or Casablanca. They usually were fluent in both English and French.
One of those families invited me for the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) dinner and, for the first time, I experienced the warmth and the particularly colorful rites of a thoroughly Sephardic community. Flashes of that evening return to me to this day, and I recall a kind of joy that I otherwise did not feel in our celebrations, which were always a little stilted and artificial. Strangely enough, something in me has always resisted learning even the most basic religious texts and rituals. To this day, for instance, I barely know a few words of the Haggadah, the text read during the Seder, the festive dinner on the eve of Passover.
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