I learn the Holocaust from textbooks, but to David, the Holocaust is not history: she lives it every day in her memory. This is not an event; this is her life. I cannot imagine.
I’ve been talking to Holocaust survivors in the hopes of coming to an understanding of how we should relate to that tragedy today, especially in light of recent developments in the pursuit of justice for the Nazis.
The trial of John Damjanjuk, a man accused of forcing more than 27,000 Jews to their deaths as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp, began Nov. 30 and will most likely be the last high-profile trial of a former Nazi official.
It is tempting, with the last of the Nazis being prosecuted and most of the survivors vanishing, to regard the Holocaust as finished, to close the book on history and pronounce the case settled. Justice has been distributed; we can forget now.
The Rwandan genocide — only 15 years old — proves otherwise. Over 800,000 Tutsis — 70 percent the pre-genocide population — were murdered in the course of 100 days, bringing into serious doubt the credibility of the post-WWII refrain ‘Never Again.’
The pursuit of justice in Rwanda is similarly winding down as the last of the gacacas (traditional community-level tribunals now adapted to try the “génocidaires”) will be judged in the coming months. And so some questions arise.
Asked if she could forgive the killers from World War II, David was unequivocal.
“Forgiveness? No, I don’t believe in forgiveness. And first of all, one has to ask for forgiveness. The Nazis didn’t ask for forgiveness.” Even in the Nuremberg Trials, she explained, their defense was still that they were “just following orders.”
“I don’t forgive,” she paused. “Forgiveness, you have to come and ask me for forgiveness, which means you regret your deeds. Then it’s my obligation to forgive you.
“But if I am not asked…. Nobody came to ask me for forgiveness. My father was the age of 37. He was shot like a dog because he was a Jew. This was the only reason. And why were my mother and I put in a ghetto? Because we were Jews. Were we any different from a German?”
Survivor Sylvia Blasberg expanded that idea, drawing the line between forgiving a people generally and forgiving those who harmed her personally.
The only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, Blasberg commented, “In general, I cannot hate every Pole… but if it’s somebody that helped to kill or helped to hurt my family, it’s something different…
“But to forgive a person, somebody who murdered personally, like if somebody took my child and they told me they were throwing from the balconies the small babies and they were shooting them, I do not know how you can forgive.…
“Not with the nation, not with the people. But with individuals, if I would know them. Forgive? I don’t know,” she said.
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the court system was destroyed, rendering justice after it nearly impossible. Almost the only thing the génocidaires left intact were the prisons.
By 1997, 125,000 génocidaires were incarcerated (only an eighth of the total participants, the government estimates) and, due to a lack of resources, nobody was put to trial for two and a half years.
Even if the court system was up and running, true justice would have been impossible. Putting all the génocidaires through the courts would have taken 200 years.
Three years later President Paul Kagame proposed a revolutionary answer to the crisis of justice: using the traditional forum of gacaca to try the accused killers.
(Higher scale genocidaires are being tried in Rwandan national courts and by the U.N. administered International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania.)
Beginning in 2001, more than one million cases were tried in more than 12,000 gacacas. Killers confessed to dozens of murders and asked for forgiveness while survivors watched on, often as witnesses.
The “quest for justice,” quickly became a “quest for repentance,” and punishment was largely voided in favor of a confession, writes Philip Gourevitch in his award-winning book, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.”
Génocidaires are let off for little more than time served on the basis of an often-partial confession, and the genocide is pronounced resolved.
For Rwandan survivors, however, the solution is unsatisfying. Gourevitch writes that survivor Laurencie Nyirabeza watched 15 years ago as the man who killed her family returned to the community and asked her for forgiveness.
“This man who is responsible for his acts lives now with all his family and gets his property back, while I remain alone, without a child, without a husband…”
She scoffed at his request for pardon, “If he can bring back my children whom he killed and rebuild my house, maybe…. I wait only for justice.”
Nyirabeza is unimpressed with the gacaca system: “[I]t’s theatre…. If ever the occasion arose, if there was an opportunity, they would kill again. Because I think they’re all killers. They only asked pardon because of gacaca. Why didn’t they ask forgiveness before gacaca?”
Gacaca institutionalizes forgiveness, asking Tutsi survivors across Rwanda to learn to live with former killers because, well, there is no other option.
As I delved deeper and deeper into the stories of survivors — both in Rwanda and Milwaukee — I just kept wondering: after such an atrocity, is forgiveness even possible?
But apart from seeking justice, is there some other possible response to this genocide? Is there something that we, with the Holocaust still in our people’s history, should do? There has to be something.
Raye David responded to this question: “How can you stop hatred? Tell me, how can you stop hatred?”
“Love,” I suggested — it seemed the logical opposite.
“It’s tolerance,” she responded later in the conversation. “You cannot say love. You cannot love everyone…. But at least there has to be justice. But compassion? Forgiveness? No.”
But, she warned, “If hate overwhelms you so much, it takes over your life, that you cannot think of anything else. You start hating yourself, and that’s the worst part. What answers can I give you, I don’t have any other answers.”
On Nov. 8, 2009, the Nathan and Esther Peltz Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Coalition for Jewish Learning hosted a commemoration in honor of the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Many survivors spoke about where they were and what they were doing on that fateful day 71 years ago, publicly reliving their experiences in a way not dissimilar from gacaca.
Survivor after survivor stood in front of the community to tell their stories and condemn the indifference, intolerance and hate that allowed such a massacre to take place.
I read a poem about a survivor I had met on the March of the Living a little over a year ago [read the poem at www.jewishchronicle.org]. The ceremony was inspiring but something about it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Only 15 years ago, the international community watched in silence as one million Rwandans were killed. Were our inspiring words just that: words?
General Dallaire, head of the U.N. force during the genocide, said, in a September 1997 interview on Canadian television: “Because, fundamentally, to be very candid and soldierly, who … cared about Rwanda? I mean, face it. Essentially, how many people still remember the genocide in Rwanda?
“We know the genocide of the Second World War because the whole outfit was involved. But who really is involved in the Rwandan genocide? … Who is grieving for Rwanda and really living with the consequences?… The international community kept watching.”
Were the speeches only empty words designed to satisfy troubled consciences? Do we only relive the Holocaust because it was our people that was killed?
Gourevitch writes, “…for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”
Ultimately, we must decide how far our responsibility extends to fight hate and evil. To our family? Our neighbors? Our people?
Is it just in what happened to us that we are similar? Or is it in the sanctity of human life, the dignity of existence, that we truly find common ground.
Raye David put it best: “All of us are made in the image of G-d. You and I look similar—we’re human beings. And we have to respect every human being.”
Keith Lewis is a senior at Nicolet High School.
Andy
A poem by Keith Lewis
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