Survivors and historians recall the years of the Holocaust
The best now, after so much has been set forth, is, perhaps, to be silent; not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate, to the unspeakable.
—George Steiner, Language and Silence
A special poignance clings to the critic's plea, so reasonable only 16 years ago. Today the option of silence is lost in the collision of melodrama and documentary. The Holocaust has been the subject of a top-rated TV miniseries, of William Styron's bestseller Sophie's Choice, Lina Wertmuller's film Seven Beauties and Arthur Miller's melodrama Playing for Time, of countless paperbacks tastefully decorated with barbed-wire designs. Funds are currently being solicited for the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust project in Los Angeles: "This multiscreen, multichannel sound, audiovisual experience of the Holocaust will utilize a 40-ft.-wide and 23-ft.-high screen in the configuration of an arch, three 16-mm film projectors, eighteen 35-mm slide projectors and pentaphonic sound, all linked to a central computer which will control all functions simultaneously. It will be a definitive educational medium on the subject."
"Definitive," remarks Commentary Editor Robert Alter, "except for the omission of a computerized convector-current olfactory unit to waft about in seven pre-sequenced patterns the odor of rotten bread, potato peels and scorched flesh."
Given this surfeit, can there be room for yet another word on the unspeakable, yet another theory about the incomprehensible? The answer, as always, depends upon the speaker. In The Terrible Secret (Little, Brown; 262 pages; $12.95) the man in the witness stand is necessary and impeccable. At the beginning of his phosphorescent volume, Historian Walter Laqueur quotes a war correspondent in 1945: "It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That something was the archipelago of Europe's death camps, where Nazi virulence reached its terminals: the medical experiment, the gas chamber and the crematorium.
When the correspondent and his colleagues recorded inhuman sights —mounds of hair and gold teeth, rooms of crutches, emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood, ovens used for children—the world stared in disbelief. Today it seems difficult to understand the incredulity. For if more than 6 million Jews, gypsies and other "undesirables" perished in the camps, how was it possible to keep the Final Solution a secret from their neighbors, from soldiers and intelligence agents and the foreign press? In part, says Laqueur, with a screen of euphemisms and evasions. Even in Germany, Jews were not executed, they were officially "resettled," "removed," given "special treatment." Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister for Propaganda, told loyal journalists how to respond to investigations of the Final Solution: Cite British atrocities in India.