The Holocaust holds a fascination for many people. I am one
of them. Up until recently this has manifested as an interest in the technical
aspects, and in the grisly details, of killing somewhere between 11 and 17
million people; also in the details of life in a concentration camp. These interests
are satisfied most fully by Primo Levi’s If
This Is A Man and The Truce, and
in the testimonials of the members of the Sonderkommando
or ‘Special Unit’ – the Jews who were forced to run the gas chambers and crematoria.
In the last week I’ve been reading Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark and this has drawn my
attention to an aspect of the Holocaust I’d previously been only peripherally
aware of. Previously I had thought of the attempted genocide as something
secret, as something a minority of people were aware was occurring, but this is
not the case. As early as 1941 the Allies were aware of mass killings of
European Jewry. In 1943 there was a meeting between the UK
and US to discuss what to do about the extermination camps which aerial
photography had revealed. The lack of action from this meeting led Szmul
Zygielbojm, leader of the Polish government in exile, to commit suicide in
protest.
For the German people though, the holocaust must been an
open secret. Estimates put the number of Germans directly involved in the
Holocaust at 300,000. The SS had around 900,000 members, all of whom would have
been aware of what was happening. Add to this the 1.2 million people working on
the railways who would have seen the cattle-cars filled with prisoners rolling
past, the thousands of civil servants who would have gained an idea through
their day to day work of what was occurring, and finally the average citizen
who would have seen Jews rounded up, beaten, often shot as they were deported
to ‘the East.’
Add to this the level of knowledge and collaboration in
neighbouring states: the Balkans, Romania ,
Poland , Hungary
etc. We are left with a picture of a large percentage of Western Europe rife
with anti-Semitism, that watched on, or helped, as the Nazis carried off and
killed millions of their neighbours and fellow citizens.
What must this have been like for that generation? The men
and women now in their 80s and 90s who have been walking around with this
secret for 50 years? The fellow with the beard who you see every week at the
bus stop, what did he do? How much did he know? The woman at the pharmacy? The
man selling you your car? The others in your retirement home? When you see news
of a mass grave discovered in a Polish forest what secret communication passes
between you and the other old men at your club? Didn’t Thomas say his regiment
was stationed in that area? Did he kill as many as you did?