A Daughter Remembers a Father: A French Jew and the Scars of Holocaust

"You might come back, because you're young, but I'll not come back." The father calmly prophesied to his 15 year old daughter as they waited in a transit camp at Drancy, near Paris, to be sent on trains that would take them to the heart of Europe and into a blackhole that would engulf the lives of 6 million Jews, amongst others. The daughter, as the father told, came back and as an octogenarian writer penned a memoir in the form of a letter to the father who "did not come back".

Marceline Loridan-Ivens' tender memoir "But you did not come back" is not just another tale of holocaust and Auschwitz but a very moving portrait that tells in brief prose of a very dark era and how families were not just torn asunder in the moment but carried the scars, if they survived, for all their lives.

France, then and now, remains a hot bed anti-semitism. Marceline is one of the "160 still alive out of the 2,500 who came back-76,500 French Jews were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau". The collaborationist Vichy regime in France tapped into the anti-Semitism that prevailed and shipped tens of thousands of Jews to the ovens of Auschwitz.

Marlene's father, Schloime Rozenberg, a Polish Jew settled in France, bought an imposing chateau which he thought was a symbol of his having achieved a dream. French law prohibited him, as a Jew, from being the legal owner though. The chateau was registered in the name of his son. Marceline asks, "did you think that by becoming the owners of a chateu we would no longer be Jews in their eyes?" Rosenberg had originally thought of migrating to America but instead stopped in France. Marceline surmises that he was perhaps convinced by Emile Zola's J'Accuse and told himself "nothing could happen to us here" ('"J'Accuse" - I accuse- was a letter written by Emile Zola in defense of the anti-semitic prosecution of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus on trumped up charges. Theodor Herzl, who went on to become the founding father of Zionism, witnessed the humiliation of Dreyfus and in that moment was born the Zionist movement).

The cruelty of the French laws persists even in the death certificate awarded to Rozenberg. Since he was not a French citizen at the time of deportation his death certificate would become official only five years after the date on which the government stated he was probably dead. Marceline writes "You'd made many requests before the war to get the citizenship you dreamed of. In vain. You loved this country, I'm not sure it was mutual". "You were a foreign Jews, that was your only official title, according to the state". Even in a memorial that the township constructed to commemorate the war dead the city was loathe to mention that Rozenberg died in Auschwitz.

It could be argued if only the Nazis focused on the war and not in killing they might have won the war. The industrial scale of Holocaust is of biblical proportions. Millions were ferried from a vast theater of war that spread across the European continent. Nothing illustrates this more than the journeys taken by Marceline and her father. They both are sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau first. Later Marceline is sent to Bergen Belsen and from there to a ghetto in Czechoslovakia. All that while the allies were racing towards Berlin in a pincer movement and the Reich was being reduced to a rubble. Think about that for a moment. Auschwitz-Birkenau is at the heart of Poland. From Auschwitz, near Krakow, to Bergen-Belsen, in Northern Germany, is 800 KMs. From Bergen-Belsen to Thereseienstadt in The German-Czech border is 466 KM and one has to cross Leipzig and Dresden. Conveying and obsessively accounting for prisoners in war time is no joke. Thousands perished in the box cars. Rozenberg was moved from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in Austria and then to Gross-Rosen in Poland. A roundtrip journey in and out of Poland.

Marceline Loridan-Ivens

Gross-Rosen was liberated by the Red Army in February 1945. Official records that Marceline distrusts puts Rosenberg's possible death at Gross-Rosen. She imagines how her father might've died, "you looked just like all the corpses I saw scattered along the road as I returned","arms outspread, your eyes wide open. A body who'd seen death and then watched himself die".

Auschwitz and Birkenau are now referred collectively as a hyphenated word but to the prisoners a world separated them both. Marceline was at Birkenau while her father was at Auschwitz. While they were marched up and down to their slave jobs they could see each other but could not walk over and get a hug. Once Marceline and Rozenberg do break that rule and they were severely beaten for that. Amidst the melee the father slips a tomato to his daughter. "His lunch". The haunting theme of the book is a letter that the father manages to slip to the daughter. Try as she might Marceline is unable to recall the contents of the letter. She remembers wondering how he got paper to scratch a note, because she can barely find material to wipe after defecating.

Two depictions in this memoir brought to my mind similarities with the slavery experience of Blacks that Colson Whitehead portrayed in his gut wrenching narration "Underground Rail Road".

Prisoners, of all kinds, always yearn for freedom. Concentration camp prisoners and slaves knew that attempts to escape would, if failed, lead to gruesome death. Choosing the manner of death was the last act of defiance that many could have. An escapee from Birkenau slashes her wrists and cheats the gallows even as she was dragged to one.

Whether it was the slave girl in South Carolina or a Jewish girl in Auschwitz they suffer ignominies that are uniquely inflicted on women in any conflict. Nudity was never by choice and more often clinical and equally often it was asexual and as such sex and nudity loose their interconnectedness. After a tender teenage girl whose womanhood is blossoming is made to stand naked, in her emaciated condition, along with tens of others to be examined by Dr. Mengele it is natural for the girl to never look at her naked self ever again in the erotic sense. Remember that the girl also later learns what a grotesque and sick monster Mengele was. One can only imagine what that must mean to the girl who was clinically examined by that monster while being naked.

When Marceline is eventually rescued and reacher her home, her mom and others, except the father, had all been free for a year. She is a misfit. The home is fractured and Marceline tells her father that in his absence there's too much screaming and too little listening to one another. Her brother commits suicide, her mom remarries and Marceline drift away from her family but clings to the sisterhood of survivors who meet on a regular basis.

While at the camp Marceline desires to be alive but as survivor the guilt of survival, as Levi Strauss wrote of it, weighs on her, like remembering her unwitting and reluctant part in the death of a girl at the camp, feeling guilty about sleeping on a soft mattress and more.

Even after such an event as Holocaust the soul of France remains stained by anti-Semitism. Marceline hides her Jewishness by adopting the French surnames of the men she married consecutively. Witnessing 9/11 and the victims jumping from the towers of the World Trade Center Marceline's memories of the horrors she suffered and never could leave behind, well up within herself and she realizes that "up until that day, I'd been avoiding the fact that being Jewish is the strongest thing about me".

Marceline records her perspective on Israel too. "You dreamed of Israel, it exists." "Wars normally end, but not this one, for the Jewish state has never been accepted by the Arab countries that surround it; its borders are never fixed, ever-changing, violent. And the longer this goes on, the more suspect Israel becomes, in the opinion of Europeans as well."

Anti-Semitism, Marceline thinks, is here to stay. "Anti-semitism is an eternal given." "Anti-Semitism will never disappear. It is too deeply rooted in the world"

While filming the movie "Birch-Tree Meadow" ('Birkenau' means Birch tree) Marceline asks an actress to lie down on a cot, stretch out her hand and say, as Marceline would say to her father if he was there, "I loved you so much that I was happy to have been deported with you".

The most interesting omission in the book is the mention of the most famous victim of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the camps where Marceline was interned, Anne Frank. Anne Frank died, aged 15, along with her sister at Bergen-Belsen a few months before the camp was liberated by British forces. As always, being the father of a child, now 11, such tales give a gut punch to even contemplate how the children, separated from parents learn to survive until they truly survive or succumb to the pestilence of disease that often swept such camps. The human instinct for survival is amazing even in children. Let us hug our children a little tighter and teach them that fighting injustice and hatred is a moral duty of all. Stories like that of Marceline tell us once more of our moral duty in opposing hatred however small and whoever it is aimed at.

References:

Some book Reviews.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/09/but-you-did-not-come-back-marceline-loridan-ivens-review

2. http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21692841-haunting-memoir-young-holocaust-survivor-dear-father

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/books/a-french-deportee-life-at-auschwitz-and-history-repeating.html?_r=0 (NYT's feature of the author has some parallels to incidents I've cited and my choices of excerpts).

Holocaust and the Israeli/Jewish psyche

Hollywood found a convenient story in Rwanda and romanticized the story of Tutsi persecution by Hutu's. 'Hotel Rwanda' did not delve into the complex history of the conflict, a history in which Hutus and Tutsis killed each other in turns culminating in a horrific genocide that saw a million Tutsis butchered. Paul Kagame, leader of Tutsi rebels, won a military victory and took office. Kagame later went to war with Congo for purely imperialistic purposes and presided over retributions killings of Hutu's in Rwanda. Yet the world only speaks of the Tutsi dead. Rwanda is not lectured to about learning from its past. If Rwanda was Israel American college campuses would gleefully scold about their inhumanities.

Last year Afro-American mayor and fellow Afro-American legislator of the city of Washington D.C. let loose a racist rant against Asian shopkeepers and Asians in DC. If one did not know the speaker was an Afro-American and listened to the remarks, given the history of USA, one would mistake it for a rant by a white racist. Al Sharpton and Malcolm X were established anti-semites. One protest organized (related to an unfortunate car accident caused by a Jewish driver) by Al Sharpton targeting Jews in Manhattan resulted in the death of a Jew. The Crown Heights riot tore apart Manhattan. Afro-Americans and Latinos (most of who are illegal immigrants) share a testy tenuous relationship in cities like L.A simply because Latino, since most are illegal, lack access to elected office unlike blacks.

Gandhi's India, Putin's Russia, De Gaulle's France, China and more countries indulge in naked imperialistic aggression against neighbors. Yet those countries are not the most scolded in UN. That dubious honor is reserved for Israel.

Do Israeli's and the Jews in general suffer from perpetual victimhood? Is holocaust a convenient 'victim card' that Israel plays? No and No. Never. Ask those questions to the small child who was killed in southern French town of Toulose by a jihadist because the child was Jewish. Ask those questions to the innocent Jews, including both parents of a toddler, who were mowed down in a Chabad in Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists because they were Jews.

For those bleeding heart liberals who say "we condemn those acts but Palestine..." I say 'shame on you'. Not even Indians knew that Jews lived in Mumbai. That were targeted by Pakistani terrorists speaks of how hatred had hijacked a religion. If those same Jews in Mumbai injured any Muslim as retribution for Palestinian intifada would any sane minded person accept that as rationale. We would condemn it unequivocally.

The Jewish people, given their history of being persecuted over 2000 years, have long memories. Scattered around the globe and living amidst hatred they nurtured hope for living in Jerusalem saying 'Next year, in Jerusalem'. The holocaust gave rise to another slogan, 'never forget'. How can they forget? Can Israel afford not to be a hawk? Can Israel depend on international bodies in times of need? No and No.

When Israel pleaded to be left alone after the UN partition the Grand Mufti croaked 'we will push you into the Red sea'. No country, not even US, guaranteed Israel its right to exist. UN abandoned Israel after the partition vote. Having lost 6 million, with no cash coffers of friendly governments, nobody to buy ammunition from legally, surrounded by enemies Israel defended itself in a drama unparalleled in human history. As soon as the British left, as they always do, it was chaos. Armies from Syria, Jordan, Lebabon and Egypt descended on Israel from all sides barring the Red sea side. Golda Meir landed in New York with nothing but a handbag. Ms Meir told the Jews of New York "it is not your choice to decide whether or not we fight. It is ours and we will fight. But it is your choice whether we live or die because we need money without which we will die".

The war of 1967 is looked at as the most pivotal moment in Arab-Israeli history. Israel humiliated Egypt and Syria in a swift and decisive campaign that altered the maps and left a searing wound in the Arab psyche. Egypt and Syria were baying for Israel's blood and Israel lived under the scepter of war and total annihilation. Again, this was a campaign that US did not support or wish to happen. A Syrian paper published a cartoon of mountain of Jewish skulls leaving no doubt as to what would happen to a defeated Israel.

 Photo Courtesy : "The Six Day War" Michael Oren

                                                                                                

Then in 1970 came 'Black September'. Yasser Arafat unleashed naked terrorism against Israeli athletes who were in Munich for the Olympics. It was terrorism on live relay. Jews were once again threatened on the soil of Germany. While the world ignored this heinous act Israel once again found itself alone battling for the lives of its beloved citizens. No one, not even the US, came to the rescue of those Israelite athletes. In a botched rescue attempt the athletes were killed and the Olympics proceeded on schedule without so much as a pause. Till today in no Olympics are those athletes mourned. If only they had been from any other country.

Today Bibi Netanyahu is reviled as a hawk. How can he not be one after losing his brother in Operation Entebbe. A plane carrying Israelis was hijacked by PLO terrorists. With 106 Israeli lives at stake Israel looked around for help and once again God's chosen people found themselves alone, all alone. In a daring rescue attempt, one for the history books, a commando operation liberated the hostages during which Yonathan Netanyahu was killed. Can Israel afford to rely on world opinion? Can Israel afford to 'forget'? Never. Not in a 1000 years must Israel forget. 

Would Sonia have signed a peace treaty with Prabhakaran? Would Putin shake hands with a Chechen leader? Would an Armenian shake hands with a Turkish leader? Yet, Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat and paid for it with his life at the hands of a murderous Israeli. 

When two sides fail to arrive at a negotiation what would they do? If they asked Yasser Arafat they would launch terrorist attacks on the other sides. The Camp David negotiations shepherded by Bill Clinton, in a desperate attempt to rescue his legacy post-Lewinsky, ended, according to most observers, only because of Arafat's intransigence. To cover up his failed talks Arafat launched the second intifada, a campaign of terror. Ehud Barak conceded more than what any Israeli had ever conceded and Arafat had almost everything he wanted at hand. Arafat who knows only to inflict terror and not to build a nation stomped out. Arafat is no Ben Gurion and both Israel and Palestine pay a price for that.

It was a rich irony for Arab states to move a motion in the UN to label Zionism as 'racism'. This by a bunch of people who run tin pot dictatorships with no semblance of human rights. Israel's ambassador to UN Chaim Herzog in a stirring speech 'hate, ignorance and evil' ripped apart the motion figuratively and literally, watch it here:

Time magazine in a shameful cover asked recently if Israel desired peace. The cover featured an Israeli lounging on a beach side. Israel has forged its destiny amidst an unprecedented sustained campaign of military assaults and terrorist attacks. That a magazine would take the picture of a man at a beach side and wonder if a nation desires peace shows the depths of depravity to which journalism plunged to. Would that same Time magazine, after 9/11, show Americans in revelry and ask "do Americans desire peace"? 

America became a staunch ally of Israel due to strategic real politick as Egypt became ensconced in the bosom of USSR. America stands by Israel for its own strategic reasons. Much is made of American aid to Israel. Pakistan practically blackmails America into giving billions in aid without which, Pakistani leaders claim, fundamentalists would run amuck and destroy America. Just last week America released $750 million to Egypt, a country which has no friendly intention toward America. But for America Saudi Arabia would have been overrun by Saddam. What America refused to do for Israel in 1948 it did for Muslims in Kosovo. 

Is it an accident that Israel has the largest number of companies listed in the Nasdaq after USA. The book 'Startup Nation' explores how Israel focused on development and human capital amidst the constant fear of death. Warren Buffet is investing in an Israelli company that is within distance of being annihilated by Hamas's rockets. Buffet reasons that he is investing in what the employees are capable of producing not in the brick and mortar that Hamas can destroy.

When Mitt Romney spoke of cultural differences in the context of how Israel and West Bank/Gaza develop the politically correct left wingers erupted in anger. Many were livid that Romney would compare Israel with strife torn, segregated, walled off West Bank. What the critics forgot was how immigrant Jews created Tel Aviv out of the swamps. Israel was nothing but swamps and vast tracts of land unused with pockets of habitation. Israel was built by hand kibbutz after kibbutz. If Palestinian leadership know nothing but terrorism is it Israel's problem?

A recent analysis of Israeli and  Palestinian textbooks found rampant stereotyping on both sides with the Palestinian textbook far outranking Israeli texts in preaching hatred. Egyptian textbooks practically inculcate a culture of hatred in children with outrageous texts. 

It is easier to find Jews in Israel who are sympathetic to Palestinian cause than to find a Palestinian who is critical of Yasser Arafat or Hamas. Many Jews in America are now increasingly critical of Israeli policies particularly on the settlements. 

All the above notwithstanding it would be in Israel's own interest to help Palestinians realize their own state. The settlement policies are human rights violations and territorial aggressions. It further messes up an already intractable problem. 

Just as Gandhi's India is militaristic and Christian West is guilty of every human rights violation on the textbook Israel too is not without blemishes. The blemishes of Israel should be seen as the blemishes of a nation and nothing more. Holding Jewish people everywhere as guilty is anti-semitism. Speaking of Israel's questionable acts as the acts of 'Jewish people' is as silly as speaking of America's militarism as the militarism of Christians. The holocaust is bigger than even the state of Israel. It has universal lessons for all.

Let us all study and learn from holocaust. I wish nothing but peace for the people of Palestine and Israel. May their God's give their leaders wisdom to achieve what has eluded generations for the past half century. 

My Pilgrimage To Auschwitz And The Tragic 'Uniqueness' of The Holocaust

I am not a religious person and therefore the idea of a pilgrimage has never appealed to me. My journey to Auschwitz should aptly be called 'pilgrimage'. It is a trite cliche to say that it is the journey that matters not the arriving. I experienced it as my flight was about to land in Krakow.

As the flight from Berlin entered the airspace of Poland I could see that it was chillier than Berlin. As we landed in Krakow I could see snow. Krakow airport looked like a suburban airport in India. I was now worried whether my light jacket would stand the cold. Then I worried if my baggage would be handled properly or would it be lost on a wintry rudimentary airport in Poland. I consoled myself that I can wear a knitted T-shirt underneath by thick cotton shirt with suede patches and top it off with my jacket to beat the cold.

I've watched so many movies and documentaries of Holocaust and read so many books. I remember how Meryl Streep, in 'Sophie's choice',  stands shivering in the cold on that notorious 'selection platform' in Auschwitz with two infants at hand. Then of course 'Schindler's list'. And then a wave of shame washed me over. Here I am, a healthy guy with credit cards and the ability to buy anything I want at any store in case of emergency. Even if my bags are lost its only an inconvenience for me. In the case of a dire necessity as American citizen I can walk into a US consulate. Millions of women, children, aged and the sick have been dragged to this city in box cars, families have been torn asunder at the whim of a Nazi thug at the platform. The victims were depersonalized, their bodies did not belong to them let alone their possessions. In that one moment I realized why a pilgrimage is a spiritual necessity. Whether one calls it a pilgrimage or a study tour the idea is that nothing, no amount of reading books or watching movies, can substitute for being in a place. Of course a study tour or pilgrimage is useless without the reading and watching prior to that. Only a mind that is pullulating with memories will find that aha moment at a place. Else one would be a mindless tourist sauntering through Auschwitz like one would stroll in a park or a museum.

When our tour guide pointed to a serene innocuous swimming pool like water and asked us "what do you think that is" most thought it was a swimming pool for the Nazis to relax. No. Auschwitz was insured by the company Allianz. As an insurance requirement, like today, Allianz stipulated that Auschwitz should have a pond like place to store water to fight any fire hazard. No book had written about that. Looking at the pond and the memory of millions who died a chill ran down my spine at the grotesque nature of human affairs.

Our tour guide made a penetrating observation that Auschwitz was not a concentration camp but an 'extermination' camp built to kill on an industrial scale. Auschwitz's central location played a key role. A map showed the places from which Jews (and others) were transported to Auschwitz from as far as Budapest.

These are insights that become readily available and would take several books to cultivate. That is why a history study tour is essential for students. Next on my agenda is to stand on Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma where Afro-Americans went on a march braving mounted police and police dogs. Several trips like that are pending.

I've often been confronted with the question of whether Holocaust is unique? Being from Tamil Nadu I am also often asked "would you not consider the killings of Sri Lankan Tamils as holocaust, is Rajapakse not Hitler". Of course a Rwandan could ask the same, so would somebody from Darfur. What about an Armenian? The massacre of a million Armenians is still not officially classified as 'genocide', let alone a holocaust. What is so 'unique' about the holocaust? Is it the numbers, a staggering 6 millions? Yes and no.

For any victim in an ethnic conflict his/her tragedy would be, in his/her perspective, the greatest tragedy to befall humanity. I've to respect how a victim feels. A Tamil mother grieving over a child blown to death or a wailing child who had lost both parents or Rwandan who was gang raped and mutilated or a Darfur native who is maimed would all be legitimate in feeling remote to a tragedy that befall a different people decades ago.

It is however the unpleasant duty of a historian to put things in perspective. Let us not forget that from Jaffna to Darfur to Rwanda the deaths and killings were part of and result of civil war with both sides being engaged in an armed conflict. That 6 million Jews were murdered like sheep without a single bullet being fired from their side is indeed unique. That they went to their deaths without a fight has been cruelly used to criticize them or even discredit the scale of the horror.

Syria is burning. UN report says that a million Syrians have crossed over to neighboring countries as refugees. However feeble maybe the efforts of the world in stopping the bloodshed it should be noted that at least the world bodies are 'trying' something and there are nations to open their doors to the refugees. A plaque at Dachau states bluntly "when the inmates at Dachau were liberated most went back to their home countries but the Jews had nowhere to go".

FDR's inaction to bomb Auschwitz is a hotly debated topic. Just last week a new book claims that if the transit lines to Auschwitz had been bombed and if the crematoriums had been bombed it still would not have saved many because allies had the ability to do those only late into the war when many had already been killed. It is 2013 and even today new evidences and new rationale is being investigated in the most complex savagery of humanity.

It is a modern shorthand to refer to any despicable ruler as 'Hitler'. Only Stalin, in reality, matched the cruelty and horrors of Hitler. It is impossible for any ruler of any country to inflict on any race the horrors that Hitler inflicted on humanity at large and at Jews in particular. Doctors, I mean doctors, non-chalantly indulged in medical experiments on Jews. Dr Mengele used to select twin children and subject them to blood curdling medical experiments. Doctors in Berlin thought it unnecessary to wonder how come so many body parts of so many children is turning up for analysis. Dr Mengele had a peaceful anonymous death and never was brought to justice.

Do concentration camps (or the modern internment camps) make up the holocaust? Historian Timothy Snyder in a book review of 4 books writes that it was 'not yet holocaust' referring to Warsaw Ghetto, the laws that prohibited Jews from practically living as human beings etc. In very penetrating analysis Snyder comments that Hitler's murderous scheme was able to take root only because Hitler, in every country he invaded, destroyed every civil institution. In Poland non-Jewish Poles had to be killed first. But in Lithuania which had already been ravaged by Stalin and lost its civil structures Hitler found willing allies in the puppet right wing regime. Close to a 150,000 jews were killed in the matter of a year with Lithuanians being eager to outdo the Nazis and prove themselves as valuable subjects of Nazi state. Death visited the jews in the form of the invader and aided by people who used to be neighbors.

The Nazi regime was an industrial killing machine that took the contours of a holocaust as it brought countries under its jackboot. Stalin had to content himself killing mostly Soviet citizens. Wholesale murder of the Czech or Poles was something even Stalin could not do. Jews were made to pay for the cost of cremating the murdered jews. Snyder writes "Nazi Germany was a special kind of state, determined not to monopolize but to mobilize violence".

Sick minds have caviled about whether it was indeed 6 million who died. Two weeks ago New York Times reported that what we thought we knew of holocaust and the camps is but a fraction of truth according to new evidence. Recent research, gruesomely detailed and verified, asserts that there were nearly 40,000 death camps. Way more than what was thought of.

Only when I planned my trip to go to concentration camps I realized a sobering fact. All the notorious camps were actually close to cities. Dachau is an hour away from Munich, Auschwitz and Birkenau are just 2 hours away from Krakow, Bergen-Belsen where Anne Frank and her sister were killed (not died) is 2 hours away from Berlin, Berlin itself had a concentration camp, Ravensbruck was 90 miles north of Berlin, Buchenwald was near Weimar. The NYT article concludes that given the number of camps it is impossible that people did not know what was going on. At Dachau I saw a photograph of stunned German citizens, dragged to the the camp by allied army liberators, looking over emaciated corpses and the ovens. Were the people of Dachau truly ignorant? I don't think so.

When communist jackboot replaced the Nazi boot in Eastern Europe covering Auschwitz talk of jewish victims was muted as Stalin's regime wanted to speak only of communist victims. That, after nearly 65 years since the camps were liberated, we are still learning and unearthing evidence gives us a perspective of the tragic uniqueness of holocaust. This new knowledge is not an incremental addition to the existing knowledge but it is a paradigm shift that practically enlarged the scope of what was already a too big to digest horror.

Holocaust remains a unique tragedy unparalleled before or after in history. Let us not, juts to rob the Jewish people and Israel, deny this uniqueness and nor shall we wish it upon any people for ages to come.

The one remaining question that I promised to answer was about the lessons from Holocaust that Israel learned. In another perversely unique manner no other tragedy that befall any people draws the question "did they learn from it?". No other people who have suffered are being asked "how different are you from your tormentors". Whenever I speak of holocaust to most people the invariable question is "what about the suffering of Palestine". People are more eager to hold Israel and the Jewish people accountable for todays mess all the more so because of holocaust. In this aspect too, sadly, Israel and the Jewish people are treated uniquely. I'll answer them in my next blog.

Salzburg: Mozart And 'The Sound of Music'

Happy New Year. I want to start off this new year with a pleasant blog about my travel to Salzburg the city of Mozart and 'The sound of music'.

Salzburg is an hour and half by train from Munich. I arrived on a pleasant Thursday morning. A tourist information center is situated within the train station. The center sells tickets for a hop-on, hop-off tour and a day trip ticket that can be used on any tram or bus in Salzburg. The day trip ticket is just 4.5 Euro.

My first stop was at Mozart house. The house was completely destroyed in the allied bombing raids during World War II. What stands today is reconstructed. In a city where Mozart died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave today he is celebrated in every nook and corner and his name is used to make money. In the fictional biopic the character of Mozart would protest to the emperor "I am a vulgar man your majesty but I assure you my music is not". In this museum a vivid documentation shows how vulgar Mozart can get. Mozart sent his father detailed instructions for a picture to practice shooting. The instructions and the picture are plain vulgar to recount here. I appreciate the honesty of the museum curator in show casing that too.

Musing on Mozart's prodigy Indian philosopher Radhakrishnan theorized that Mozart's genius could be the result of accumulated genius over many births. Far from it Mozart's genius was the result of very handwork as Malcolm Gladwell highlights in 'Outliers'. Mozart's father Leopold was an accomplished musician and even published well received books on music. Books arranged like pyramids were 'supposedly' read by the Mozart family. Curious items like a Abbot's diary entry about Leopold's death, portrait of Anna Maria Mozart in 'India ink', Mozart's employment contract data 17th Jan 1779 with 450 florins as salary (approx 10,350 Euro today) are all on display.

The display I liked most was Mozart's score sheet for 'Fantasy and Sonata in C minor K475 and 457'. Mozart, myth says, composed music in its entirety in his head before writing down. Not really. Mozart's use of different layout for manuscripts and how the he wrote the 1st and 3rd movements before writing the 2nd are curiosities that shed light on his style. During his Viennese years Mozart used paper imported from Italy for writing his music because it had space for improvisation.

The day I went to Salzburg was 'All Souls Day' and practically everything in the city was shutdown including other museums. So off I went on a tour of mountains of Wolfgang See along with a family from erstwhile East Germany. The tour guide was very knowledgeable about History, US politics (including Obama's pathetic performance in his first debate) and music. The guide introduced me to a music played on an instrument called 'Zither'. I showed the East German family photos I had taken at the Stasi museum. They laughed and confirmed that those were indeed horrifying days. For those looking to a holiday resort spot in Salzburg I'd recommend the 'White Horse Inn' which has a pool that opens to a lake.

Captivated by what I saw in Salzburg I went the next day too. Since I had a Eurail pass I could go any number of times to any place within Germany and Austria for 5 days. Unfortunately I went to Salzburg on Nov 2nd and Nov 3rd. All tour packages stop on Oct 31st. I just visited Salzburg museum and Salzburg cathedral. The Salzburg museum was fabulous as always with intricate arrangement of lighting to accentuate exhibits. German and Austrian museums impressed me a lot.

I've never seen a city that markets filming locations of a movie filmed there as much as Salzburg does for 'Sound of Music'. There are 3 hour tours that would take you to every spot from many famous scenes in the movie. I only walked by the river where Maria and kids run singing 'Do Re Mi'. In a memorable scene Baron Von Trapp would pull down a Nazi flag and tear it. Austria wanted to object to that scene and have it removed since they felt that it showed Austria as Nazified. The director and producers just said either the scene stays or they would show actual newsreels showing Nazi Swastika flags around Salzburg. The Austrian Anschluss, unification of Austria with Germany, was a very peaceful and enthusiastic event. Hitler paraded around Austria like a hero.

Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, studied in Austria but left Salzburg because he could not practice law owing to him being a Jew. Austria had a deeper anti-semitism than even Germany. Simon Wiesenthal, holocaust survivor who gained reputation as Nazi hunter stayed back in Austria even after the war rather than emigrate to Israel. When Wiesenthal's wife went to a school to admit their kids the official deadpanned "I thought all of you jews were killed off". It is in this city that famous music conductor Herbert Von Karajan also lived.

Food and clothes in Europe are always classier than I'd found in USA. Salzburg was no exception. Thanks to my day trip ticket I could take a tram to an outlet mall at the outskirts of the city and saunter around for some shopping.

Other possible day trip from Salzburg is a trip to 'Wolf's Lair' where Hitler stayed and worked. 'Wolf's Lair' is where an assassination attempt on Hitler was plotted and executed. Hitler survived that attack. I could not make that trip as it stopped after Oct 31st.

Very interesting town to visit. Very urbane and charming.

Jeyamohan and Holocaust: The poisonous edge of skepticism

I just returned from a history tour in Germany centered mostly around Third Reich and Holocaust. I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau concentration camps along with visits to Berlin's fabled Jewish history museum and holocaust museum. As an avid reader of Jewish history and holocaust a tour like this was long desired. Did I learn anything new beyond what I know through reading books by survivors and historians?

Crematorium Ovens at Dachau, Near Munich in Germany

Contemporary Tamil fiction writer Jeyamohan visited USA in 2009 and toured Boston for a day. He happened to visit a small holocaust memorial in Boston and in his role as public intellectual he sought to raise some questions. The 'proof' for holocaust appears to be based more on hearsay and memoirs of victims and we do not know if they were subject to historical analysis. Holocaust deniers like David Irving have not been answered decisively. Is American government promoting talk of holocaust in order to not discuss America's own nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Jeyamohan is not an anti-semite though these questions have been all posed by deeply anti-semitic haters. I'll assume he was posing as a skeptic seeking to appear as an intellectual who is disapassionately questioning deeply held ideas. I'll seek to answer Jeyamohan's question only because they give a framework.

We all think we know holocaust simply because we watched 'Schindler's List' or 'The Reader' or 'The Pianist'. A few discerning readers might add Elie Wiesel's book 'Night' or even fewer might refer Primo Levi's 'Survival in Auschwitz'. Some may have watched one or two documentaries even. All of those give only a glimpse into a horror that remains, fortunately, unparalleled in human history. Of course some also ask 'why is holocaust unique? should the word 'holocaust' be used only to refer to those killed Jews?'.

Author of the book 'German genius' points to a historical anomaly with regard to holocaust. Every historical event is usually much talked about in the immediately succeeding years and slowly fades from memory. Holocaust on the other hand was talked very little in the immediate years after the end of the war but has seen a phenomenal amount of talk in recent decades. This is an inversion of historical process. There are several reasons for this.

In the immediate years after the end of the war the world, particularly the two emergent super powers, were more intent on carving up Germany and Eastern Europe and locking themselves in a deadly ideological battle. While the Nuremberg trials progressed and several Nazi leaders were executed as punishment for war crimes many more escaped and resettled in African or Latin American countries. A vast majority of the Nazi death camps, especially the ones in Poland like Auschwitz-Birkenau etc, fell behind the iron curtain.

USSR was more keen on talking about how communists were killed by Hitler and downplaying the rest of the victims, most notably the jews. USSR, after all, was a deeply anti-semitic country that donated to the world the word 'pogrom'.

What of Israel itself? A nation for the jews did not come about for another 3 years until 1948. In those days the Jewish community did not have the time to sit and mourn its losses but had to lobby for a nation. The UN vote only promised a nation to Israel alongside Palestine. Nobody, not even the US, guaranteed a secure Israel let alone any means to survive. The grand Mufti of Jerusalem declared 'we will push you into the red sea'. Armies from Jordan, Syria and Egypt raced towards Israel to snuff it out at its very birth. In this context Israel itself hesitated to talk of holocaust and the millions  of Jews killed only because they were afraid that it would be seen as a sign of weakness and a lack of man power. Accepting that nearly 2/3rd of entire Jewish population perished without any resistance was too apalling to even accept in the face of an onslaught.

Further complications arose from talking about a little known aspect of holocaust that is not talked about much even today. The Jewish councils in the ghettos that were in charge of selecting people for trains to Auschwitz and the 'sonderkommandos' that worked in gas chambers cleaning out the dead were only barely mentioned and that too as 'collaborators'. Today they are looked at as much a victim as those who died. Memoirs by sonderkommandos detail what emotional scars such duties leave. Those memoirs, Mr Jeyamohan, are not vacuous exaggerated tales but cries of tormented hearts that have lived through an inhuman tragedy that words cannot capture.

We think seeing Amon Goeth in 'Schindler's List' shoot people at random in the midst of having sex somehow captures the horror. No. He was more evil. He was more deliberate. A documentary details the meeting of a girl who worked at Goeth's home with Goeth's own daughter in Plaszow, Poland where Goeth ran the camp. Death was not a random careless accident. It was deliberate and it stalked every inmate. Some critics have demurred that Spielberg simplified the horror by depicting Goeth as an impulsive, careless murderer.

There are parts of holocaust that Hollywood would not even dare to touch. The medical experiments on children and women by Dr Joseph Mengele are too horrendous to even recount. I visited the Medical history Museum in Berlin. There they have recounted unflinchingly how the medical community sold its soul to the devil. At Dachau there is a photo that depicts the 'high altitude experiment'. In order to find out the odds of a survival of a Luftwaffe pilot who ejects from his aircraft at high altitudes a prisoner was sent into a pressurized room and, with doctors observing, the pressure was lowered to the point where the prisoner died in front of their eyes. The photo was amongst the thousands taken by the SS themselves. Experiments were conducted to see how TB spread in human body, how human body reacted to extreme cold, lamp shades were made of human skin, twin children were killed for eugenics study.

Jeyamohan wonders if such tales were scrutinized by historians. Every museum in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany and in Auschwitz functions under the highest standards. Jews know very well that even at the slightest whiff of exaggeration there are heartless people waiting to white wash the entire horror. The letters displayed, the admission cards at Auschwitz, the train tickets, invoices for poison gas Zyklon B, remnants of gas chambers, intact crematoriums, mobile gassing vans, the death registers, population census of jews before and after the war in each neighborhood all tell a grim story.

A recent documentary by BBC tells the story of 'Kindertrains'. Jewish children were sent by the hundreds from France to Britain to escape oncoming horror. A book based on that documentary is not a he-says-she-says type but a heart rending historical document. A million jewish children died in the holocaust.

Evil holocaust deniers like David Irving have played mischief with conspiracies like 'where is Hitler's order for Final solution?'. While some were implied some orders were not. At the 'Topography of terror' museum, erected at the very spot in Berlin where the Gestapo headquarters once stood, an audio recording of the chilling words of Himmler calling for extermination is available for willing ears to listen. To cite Irving as source for intellectual skepticism is a shame. It only shows the danger of what happens when Jeyamohan wades into territories beyond his expertise. Irving's book on World War II does not even have entry for 'holocaust' in the index instead it only has an entry "Jewish Problem".

Rudolph Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz, has written his own memoirs titled 'Commandant'. If Jeyamohan thinks tales by survivors are just tales let him read that. A doctor who aided Mengele has written "Eye witness at Auschwitz". The doctor details in graphic manner of how he once saved a small girl who happened to survive inside a gas chamber. Hoss details how mothers, fully aware of what was coming, used to play with children before stepping into gas chambers. What else can they do?

Photos by the thousands are in archives. Every photo displayed in museums is credentialed and authenticated. At the 'Topography of terror' museum I was astounded to see a photograph picked for a unique depiction. Amongst hundreds of people giving the Hitler salute just one man would stand defiantly with folded arms. The museum had a note that the man's identity was not known for sure. Imagine sifting through thousands of photo to exhibit just that one very unique photo and what professionalism in saying that the identity is not known. The museum also had originals of Gestapo interrogation transcripts in binders for interested visitors to read and understand the regime of terror. Is this what Jeyamohan calls 'hearsay'?

While top Nazis were investigated and executed at Nuremberg notorious ones like Josef Mengele and Adolph Eichmann had escaped capture. Eichmann was later abducted by Israel is a movie like operation and arraigned at an Israeli court. Writer Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of evil' recounts that trial. Interestingly the road adjacent to where Hitlers last bunker once stood is named 'Hannah Arendt'. Mengele was never captured. Many nations who sheltered these Nazis were anti-semitic so Israel and international law never reached them.

Many lesser Nazis slipped into public lives too. In an embarrassing incident Soviet run Eastern Germany released a list of 16 judges in West Germany who were known to be Nazis. Later they were dismissed. Only after 20 years was a trial conducted in Frankfurt to bring to justice the killers at Auschwitz. Most were only awarded 5-7 years imprisonment. In a very unique display at the museum of Terror we are shown how only in 1972 just 16 officers of Reich Security officers were investigated by the prosecutor in Berlin . Of that only two were sentenced.

The fall of Soviet empire, opening up of Poland and the Nazi death camps in Poland like Auschwitz and Treblinka have spurred further scholarship in holocaust. That is why as recently as 2008 a book on holocaust, 'The years of extermination' by Saul Friedlander, was considered fresh with details that it was awarded the Pulitzer. Elie Wiesel's novel, Primo Levi's memoir, Anne Frank's diary are all not just memoirs but historical documents. At Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam there are originals of their parents admission cards to Auschwitz. At Bergen-Belsen Anne Frank met her friend who later survived  the war to corroborate the tales. Anne Frank's own father, Otto Frank, was the sole survivor in that family. 140,000 Jews lived in Netherlands before the war. Only 30,000 survived. At Lvov out of 120,000 Jews just a few less than 1000 survived the war. Prior to war Jews were nearly 5% of the population in Hungary. Nearly 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz alone bringing their survivors percentage down to 1.4%.

The Nazi regime organized death on an industrial scale using methods of industry to achieve mass killing by the thousands at an instant. Dachau alone had more than 50 sub camps. Prisoners from far off Italy and interior Russia were carted into Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a camp established for only one purpose, to exterminate, at the heart of Europe.

1.3 Million People were killed in Auschwitz. 1.1 Million were Jews.

In a letter I wrote I objected to Jeyamohan that it is a grave mistake to equate Holocaust with the bombing of Hiroshima. One is memorial to the murder of unarmed women and children by a country where they lived as citizens for no other sin than being Jews. The other was an act of war against a country that initiated war. Japan was a cruel, very cruel, imperial power that refused to end the war even after Hitler was defeated. It is good to ask questions that provoke in order to illuminate lesser known dark angles but Jeyamohan seems to ask these questions only to provoke. Skepticism towards anything that comes to be seen as 'common knowledge' is good. It is not a sin to ask "did 6 million die". An intellectual skeptic would take it further to understand and study. Just to ask a question and smugly leaving it at that only betrays an ulterior motive of seeking to appear dispassionate and intellectual. By the way why does no one ask "could it have been more". In any riot, any genocide anybody wonders 'could it have been more'. Only when it comes to holocaust do people ask "was it really that much"? Unlike Jeyamohan most of those who ask that are sheer anti-semites.

The worst part was where Jeyamohan says he has watched hundreds of movies regarding holocaust. The horrors like the medical experiments are not captured in any movie. Rudolph Hoss lived with his family just outside the Auschwitz camp. He spends time with his children and came to the camp to kill children. Educated Nazi officer would fling a child into a wall and watch the brains splatter across. A group of Nazi officers once played football with a one year child and made its mother wipe the blood of their boots. Can any art form, words or painting or movies, capture such a horror? Is there any explanation in any psychology or philosophy for any of that? Nazis would advertise why killing the disabled was good for the economy. What movie has even depicted that?

What were my ideas when I ended the tour? What is the impact of Holocaust on Israel today? What have the Jews taught the world by talking about holocaust? All that and more later.


Notes:

Interested readers can see my photographs with notes at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4007347221684.138348.1221294625&type=1&l=7447dc0bb4

History of the Jews in hungary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Hungary#Number_of_survivors
Lvov Ghetto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lvov_Ghetto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Holocaust_denial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_and_death_toll

Links from Jeyamohan:
Jemo in Boston http://www.jeyamohan.in/?p=3488

Jemo to me http://www.jeyamohan.in/?p=3547

Born-Einstein Letters: Physics and Friendship in Uncertain Times

S.Ramakrishnan, noted contemporary writer in Tamil Nadu, visited a book fair and listed the books he had bought. "Born-Einstein Letters 1916-1955:Friendship, Politics and Physics in Uncertain Times" was a very unlikely inclusion in that list. I always love to read anything by or about Einstein.

The 'letters' is an easy read but nevertheless rich one. Two great scientists living in a very politically tumultuous time exchanged letters over nearly 40 years of which for nearly 20 years they never saw each other. The letters are not just between Max Born and Einstein. Max Born's wife Hedi also corresponds with Einstein with lively exchanges.

The letters do not have any explosive content, not much that is unknown to general informed reader. However the first hand accounts of persecution, some rivalries, attitude of Governments toward science and state of scientific institutions all provide very valuable insights for the discerning reader. As I pointed out in my earlier blog Soviet Russia persecuted scientists just for teaching 'Theory of Relativity' .

The period covered by the letters, 1916-55, is the most tortuous time in Germany spanning two World Wars and the rise of Nazism. Born and Einstein are Jews and the drama plays out in many letters. Born, writing about the lack of job prospects for Epstein, says "as a Jew and a Pole (he) will therefore be strongly rejected". Born, Einstein, Bohr, Neumann and scores of other giants of science fled Nazi Germany, mostly to USA. The University of Gottingen, home to Math geniuses like Hilbert and Courant, lost all its crown jewels due to anti-Semitism. Courant fled Gottingen to NYU in New York. Courant is credited with creating the finest math department in USA. Neumann fleeing University of Berlin comes to 'Institute of Advanced Studies" in Princeton and played a key role in the development of the atom bomb along with other emigrant scientists. Born recounts how Philipp Lenard spearheaded an attack on Einstein fueled by anti-semitic hatred. Born credits Lenard with inventing the "difference between 'German' and 'Jewish' physics". Born also indicts another scientist, Johannes Stark, as being "responsible for the removal of all Jewish scholars".

Born met Henry Goldman of Goldman Sachs. Born admires Henry whose Jewish parents had emigrated from Europe and arrived penniless to USA. Henry's grandfather was a door-to-door salesman who finally ended up owning a small bank. The rest if history. Today, in 2011, Goldman Sachs is the most hated financial firm in Wall Street. When I hear snide remarks about Jews controlling Wall Street, Hollywood and USA I recoil. How many realize that Goldman Sachs was not created in a day?

Any student who has a love of Physics would find it enjoyable to read about names that we learn of as remote geniuses. Born tells that Max Planck suffers great tragedies losing his two daughters in childbirth. The book has an introduction by Heisenberg (Uncertainty Principle). Heisenberg's work in Nazi Germany was the most controversial. Born's writes a letter in which he remarks that Heisenberg is "Nazified". However Born who added notes to the letters in the 50's retracts that as too harsh a judgment. In another letter Born states that Heisenberg did not know much about matrices in math when Heisenberg worked under him. (The concept of matrices and the non-commutativity of matrix multiplication is the root of Heisenberg's revolutionary 'Uncertainty Principle'). I found it notable that though Heisenberg wrote an introduction letters critical of him are left intact.

Born is very open in admiring younger scientists, especially his assistants Pauli and Heisenberg. He practically admires them both. Pauli, we learn, is a lazy assistant who needed to be woken up from bed. In his note to a letter from Einstein congratulating him for his belated Nobel (Born was awarded the Nobel in 1953) Born concedes that he was very wounded for not getting the Nobel in 1932 along with  Heisenberg. Very graciously he writes "I got over it, because I was conscious of Heisenberg's superiority".

It is Hedi who provides relief in this collection. She upbraids Einstein for falling prey to a publicity stunt and sternly tells him to dissociate with a publisher. In another letter Hedi insists that Einstein "must read Rabindranath Tagore's novel 'Home and the World' ". I do not know how they read Tagore, in English or German. Note that the letters were originally written in German. In fact all three did not have great felicity with English as a language. All scientific papers were written only in German those days. After her visit to India Hedi published a book of sonnets about India.

Einstein's letters are mostly short. Ronald Clark's classic biography of Einstein has a chapter titled "Stateless Person" referring to a period of Einstein's life when he really did not belong to any country, he had no valid passport of any country. Advising Born to take up a position in Gottingen Einstein adds that as a 'rootless person' he is ill qualified to advise such a step. He says he buried his father in Milan, Mother is buried Germany, children living in Switzerland and he in Germany. Einstein worries about the world, wonders if Woodrow Wilson will make the 'League of Nations' a robust institute.

Einstein is supposed to have read Kant as a schoolboy. He writes to Born that Kant's 'Prolegomena' is not as good as Hume's books. Hume, as Will Durant notes, is credited with waking up Kant from his 'dogmatic slumber'. Such intellectual pastimes, especially reading an Indian author or a British philosopher , are wonderful especially in an age when there was no internet or Amazon.com or wikipedia.

Einstein is a warm man but not an intimate person. Writing from Princeton during winter Einstein says he is hibernating like a bear and adds that he feels lonely after the loss of his 'mate'. Thats it. His wife's death is an added line to his hibernating like a bear as if he was adding a line about having cold, not even fever. Born, despite having known Einstein for 40 years, is perturbed and it is he who draws attention to this fact in his explanatory note to the letter.

One thought which came to my mind was the wonder of progress in science in Germany in those years. Indians mostly complain about beurocracy, government control, lack of funds for research, lowly salaries for academicians as reasons for lack of scientific output. Most scientific institutions in Germany were run by the government, strapped for funds during the period 1916-1955 (in fact Germany was a pauper then), politics and racial tensions all plagued the scientific establishment. Yet it was the apogee for scientific research. Notably most progress was made in theoretical science, not experimental. Born who fled to Edinburgh writes that his salary was pittance, no pension even.

Born has very interesting anecdotes of Sir C.V.Raman. Born alleges that Raman encouraged his pupils to attack Born's theory concerning structure of crystals, in the pre-eminent scientific journal 'Nature'. Raman had invited Born to IISc-Bangalore, that Raman created. After that visit they fell out. Later during a meeting at a Nobel ceremony Born says Raman just stomped out telling Hedi that Max Born had insulted him. S.Chandrasekar's (nephew of Raman) biographer Kameshwar C. Wali writes in "Chandra" that Chandrasekhar's mother told Chandra to keep away from Raman's orbit.

Another interesting anecdote narrated by Born is about a Jewish physicist in Aligarh Muslim University. Born credits that physicist with establishing a fine physics department in AMU. Born says that the new Vice Chancellor, a Muslim, kicked out all non-Muslim staff.

As the 50's rolls in both Born and Einstein have aged considerably and the turmoil of fleeing their homeland takes it toll. Born, much to Einstein's disapproval, returned to Germany. Einstein never set foot in Germany after leaving it in the 20's. Now its cold war. Courant, now at NYU, invites Born to USA. Meantime McCarthyism rages in USA. People suspected of being communist had their careers broken, lives became hell. Born wrote that since he was born on the far side of the Iron Curtain he would not get a visa.

In their final days Born and especially Einstein became pacifists. Einstein agonized over his letter to FDR that kicked off the Manhattan project became a pacifist. Born says he would not like to visit UC-Berkley was because Edward Teller the father of atom bomb was there.

The letters end in 1955. Einstein passed away in April 1955 in Princeton NJ. I recently took my dad to the street where Einstein lived. 112 Mercer Street. Its a private home now. The gate had a small board "Private Residence".