4 A further reflection on ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (Here there is no why). I have a profound admiration for Claude Lanzmann’s work, above all for Shoah, yet I disagree with him on one, centrally important, point. He has repeatedly written and spoken of his ‘war against the question “why?” in relation to the Holocaust – i.e. that it is an obscenity to attempt to explain why it happened, and that we should only ask the question how it happened. This dogmatic assertion also explains his disdain for the work of Hannah Arendt, Gitta Sereny and others who have done so much to investigate the background and mentality of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. It seems to me, in his authoritarian refusal to allow the question ‘why?’, Lanzmann places himself dangerously close to the same nihilistic position as the SS guard at Monowitz who snatches the icicle from Levi’s hand.
Chapter Sixteen: The Patience of a Hand and a Pencil
1 Information on the destruction of the Jewish communities north-east of Lodz – Zgierz, Orzoków, Łęczyca, Dąbie and – is from Martin Gilbert’s Holocaust Journey.
2 Zdzisław’s information about Mordechai Zurawski is correct. I later find out that he was a member of the last Sonderkommando at Chelmno, who escaped as the camp was being liquidated in January 1945. Altogether, between December 1941 and January 1945, there were only nine survivors of Chelmno – all from the Sonderkommandos, apart from Simon Srebnik. As well as Srebnik and Zurawski (survivors from January 1945), seven others managed to escape during winter 1941/42 – Mordechai Podchlebnik, Yakov Grojanowski, Milnak Meyer, Abraham Tauber, Abram Roj, Yitzhak Justman and Chaim Widawski. After the war, Srebnik, Podchelbnik and Zurawski testified at the Chelmno trials, and also at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Claude Lanzmann managed to locate Srebnik and Podchlebnik in Israel when he was filming Shoah, and their testimony is among the most remarkable in the film. However, Lanzmann was wrong to claim, as he does in the opening sequence of the film, that ‘only two came out alive’ from Chelmno.
3 Yakov Grojanowski’s testimony is taken from The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, Chapter 16, ‘Eye-witness to Mass Murder’. Today we know that ‘Yakov Grojanowski’ was a pseudonym, and Grojanowski was actually Szlama Ber Winer. After telling Rabbi Szulman in Grabow what was happening at Chelmno, Winer eventually got to Warsaw, where, in the ghetto, he also told his account to the historian Emanuel Ringelblum. This verbal report was then transcribed in detail and distributed in Polish and German. Later, Winer reached Zamość, but towards the end of April 1942 he was captured and deported to Belzec, where he was murdered.
4 Franz Schalling’s account – ‘Our guard post was in front of the castle …’ from Shoah.
5 Mahmens Goldmann’s account, ‘When they arrived at the Schloss they [the Jews of Kłodawa] were at first treated most politely …’ is also from The Holocaust by Gilbert. Goldmann survived by hiding in a small room (just outside the warm ‘reception room’ in the Schloss, where he and his fellow Jews had undressed). But, after twenty-four hours’ hiding, the cold became intense, he tried to leave the hiding place and was caught (on 12 January) and imprisoned along with the Sonderkommando at the Schloss. That night he told them what he’d witnessed; the following day Goldmann was taken to Rzuchów forest, along with his fellows in the Sonderkommando, but he was shot in a mass grave before the day’s work began.
6 The figure of 360,000 killed at Chelmno derives from an early post-war estimate from Judge Bednarz of the Lodz District Court, who was one of the first to examine the mass murders which had taken place at Chelmno, as part of the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. This is now considered an overestimate; however, there are still widely differing estimates of numbers killed at this site. These range from 152,000 dead (Raul Hilberg’s figure) to ‘more than 152,000’ (Christopher Browning’s estimate) to 160,000–170,000 dead (Chełmno Muzeum of Martyrdom figures) to 320,000 dead (Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide and Yad Vashem figures).
7 ‘There was a room – if I remember correctly – perhaps five times as large as this one …’ From testimony of Eichmann at his trial in 1961, quoted in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust, Chapter Seventeen. Arendt also quotes this testimony in Eichmann in Jerusalem, but with some textual differences, possibly attributable to Arendt translating directly from Eichmann’s German in court.
Book Two
Preface: To the West
1 I’ve often wondered what would have happened in 2003 if Clare Short (then Secretary of State for International Development) had resigned on the same day as Robin Cook, on 17 March 2003. Would other cabinet ministers then have followed their lead? Might this have triggered a change of mind in the Labour government about the advisability of going to war in Iraq? And if Britain hadn’t supported that disastrous and illegal war, would other countries have followed suit?
2 On the day I signed the contract for the book, in the publisher’s airy, white offices in an unfamiliar part of west London, I began a new notebook, or rather a log book, as I thought of it, a diurnal companion on this odyssey of mine. One small page for each day that passes. So, for each day I had to account to that little book, and therefore to myself, for what I’d done to get this work closer to completion. Primarily in terms of writing and editing, but also ideas, books and articles read, fragments of research carried out. This sounds as if it might have been a dour and puritanical exercise, but actually it was quite the opposite. The pages were in blocks of vivid colours, so I’d spend a month in deepest pink, followed by weeks of warm terracotta, then the zing and cool of palest green. All with their own energy. And the reassurance of knowing that all thoughts, all quotations, anything crucial, would be somewhere in these pages …
3 Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders is also the title of a book published by the pioneering, and peerless, historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg in 1992.
Chapter One: A Hand in the Desert
1 ‘Who’s not in the room?’ is a question that I first came across learning about the work of the great feminist writer and educationalist bell hooks. It goes to the heart of how, even in supposedly ‘progressive’ activist circles, there is often much unconscious bias and self-selection – and that so many people whose voices need to be heard have enormous challenges just making it ‘into the room’ where the discussion is taking place.
2 I have never before witnessed a camera used with such tenderness … But Guzmán’s tender treatment of his interviewees in Nostalgia for the Light can also be seen in his brilliant film The Pinochet Case (2001).
3 The Kissinger quote, ‘Please, spare us your political science lectures!’, I came across in Ken Loach’s searing short-film contribution to 11’09’01 September 11 – the collection of eleven short films (of eleven minutes each) addressing the anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks in America.
Chapter Two: The Use and Abuse of Words: Jan Karski and Albert Speer
The quotations in this chapter are mainly taken from Karski’s wartime memoir, Story of a Secret State, originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1944, today republished by Penguin Classics. Other quotations and material are from Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust by E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw Jankowski, and my own transcription of Karski’s interview in Shoah.