The Lapse of Collective Memory
The lapse of collective memory is the chasm of far-sighted policy.
In the aftermath of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin stepped in to fill the spiritual and legal void created by the collapse of the center of Jewish life. The Sanhedrin is unique in Jewish and human history because it was a collegial body of the wisest and most respected religious scholars in the land entrusted with interpreting a divine mandate to re-establish law and order. The result was an unprecedented and astonishing exercise in pragmatism and reasoned consensus by a learned elite for the betterment and preservation of civil society.
The story goes that once every seventy years (there are differing accounts), the Sanhedrin would deliver a sentence of capital punishment for an extreme crime. Generally, Judaism puts emphasis on repentance and forgiveness, but the underlying logic was that seventy years was approximately the upper limit of a human life, and therefore the court could maintain its necessary feared and respected position in society throughout the generations with minimal bloodshed. The Destroyer Court understood the importance of bridging knowledge from one generation to the next so that it did not fall into the chasm of collective forgetfulness.
Jump forward two millennia, and confront the grotesque charade now made into law by the Polish government that criminalizes the truth. 73 years after the last train to Auschwitz, it is now a crime to in any way identify Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Indeed, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki went so far as to lay the blame squarely back on Jewish shoulders. Although the sorry tale of the Judenrat is without doubt one of the more distasteful elements of Jewish participation in its self-extermination, it is important to remember that even these unhappy accessories to murder did so out of compulsion in attempt to save themselves and their families. It was not honorable, but it was within the realm of human comprehension.
Not so the Ukrainian and Polish neighbors who unsolicited drove my grandfather and his family into the woods, murdered his parents and orphaned him and his siblings amidst a war-ravaged continent, hunted and harrowed them for two desperate years of starvation, cold and misery. My grandfather’s neighbors hunted him to the brink of extinction because of fear, greed, and centuries of indoctrinated religious intolerance. What Poland is attempting today is an insult to law, history and mankind, and it sets a dangerous precedent for others to follow.
In our incredulity for this shameless, self-serving and patently false narrative, we beg for someone to intervene and set the record straight, but the audience is watching breathlessly. As the last survivors of the Second World War are passing away, and the invaluable memory of their horrific experiences passes
with them, a new generation of vindictive opportunists salivates in the wings. But historical revisionism requires both the revisionist and scape-goat to play their roles.
To understand the delicate relationship that modern Europe has with its recent dark past, we must turn back to the year 1943. Even before the war was over, the Allies attempted to separate Germany from the rest of the Axis by announcing that all victims of Nazi aggression would have their sovereignty
restored. Since Austria was the first state to be annexed to the Third Reich, she would be the first to be liberated. Austria today frantically clings to this fiction and stubbornly asserts that modern Austrian history starts and ends with the Hapsburgs and Mozart. The wild enthusiasm of the Anschluss and
Austrian SS is scrupulously suppressed.
The history gets even more complicated with the end of the war and the descent of the Iron Curtain. In the West, the Allies cynically pardoned nearly all middle-level Nazi functionaries in their hope of creating a strong western state to oppose the Soviets. In the East, the Soviets brutally raped, arrested, deported and executed whole swaths of the population in retribution for the sins of the Eastern Front. This wholesale approach to justice opened the fiction of a de-nazified East which is carefully maintained to this day.
In 1945 we recognized our terror and sorrow, and solemnly promised never again to stand idle and helpless as malicious minds determined our fate. Now, when the opportunity arises to set the record straight and avoid the tragic errors of the past, the silence is deafening. The reason why the rest of Europe, and indeed the whole world, remains silent is because we are waiting to see if Poland will get away with blatant lies. If Poland can wash the blood off its hands, then so can anyone else.
The problem is that from the beginning, Germany alone has been made to bear the brunt of guilt for the Second World War, and they wear the mantle of shame too well. This is not to say that Germany is not responsible for the war and the Holocaust, of course they are, but they had ready and eager supporters in every country they invaded.
Therefore, it is at this dangerous nexus of the past and future, from one generation to the next, before the total lapse of collective memory, that the responsibility for setting the record straight lies with the one-time aggressor. Ideally, we would all intervene, but we are not, and therefore Germany must. From nationalist aggression to federalist leadership, Germany of today is not the Third Reich.
With America in retreat, Europe groaning at the seams and Russia growling on the fringes, it is understandable why Chancellor Merkel is wary of pointing fingers and risking a continental crisis, particularly on a topic so sensitive to Germans. However, Germans today should not continue to bear the guilt of all of Europe for the sins of their grandfathers, instead they inherit the responsibility of teaching us to avoid their mistakes. It is time for Germany to step out from the shadow of its past, without rejecting it, and force the rest of the world to confront a dark history long since justified. The alternative is well understood.
