 When US soldiers liberated the Nazi slave labor camp at Ebensee, Austria, they were horrified to see Jews, survivors of German brutality, disease, and starvation, who only to become walking corpsel |
I WAS NOT meant to be born. My birth was not so much an accident as a failure — the failure of a deliberate, carefully organized plan to keep me from coming into the world.
That plan had a name. It was called Endlösung der Judenfrage — the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question."
The "question" to be solved was an old one: What is to be done with the Jews? The solution devised by Adolf Hitler half a century ago was straightforward and ambitious. Drawing upon all the resources of science, industry, and manpower at his nation's command, he proposed simply to murder Europe's Jews.
He came close.
In Poland, a land where there had been a Jewish presence for nearly a thousand years, 90 percent of the Jews were annihilated. In Latvia and Lithuania, 88 percent. In Czechoslovakia, 85 percent. In the Netherlands, 73 percent.
In all, between 1938 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed two out of every three Jews in Europe.
Among the massacred were most of the related Jakubovic and Weiss families of eastern Slovakia. Their dead included Ilona Weiss, her elderly mother, and two of her daughters, Franceska and 8-year-old Alice. The younger Jakubovic brothers, Zoltan and Yrvin, died together with their father, David. The children of Frieda Weiss, along with their mother, four aunts, three uncles, and at least nine first cousins — all killed.
One member of those families survived the Final Solution. Somehow he lived through four concentration camps and a midwinter death march. Somehow he outlasted typhoid fever, dysentery, tuberculosis, and the diseases brought on by starvation savage enough to reduce a strong 19-year-old man to 75 pounds.
Most miraculous of all, somehow he survived the mutilation of the human spirit that can be be the result of 13 months in hell.
Today is the 27th day of the Hebrew month Nisan — the day designated as Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Israel, the land of survivors, it will be a day of solemnity, sorrow, and pain. In the rest of the world, it will pass largely unremarked.
But not by me.
I am 33 years old. The events of the Shoah — the extermination of 6 million European Jews — took place a decade and a half before I was born. A different era, a different place. Those events are history, yet they have gripped me, haunted me — at times obsessed me — for as long as I can remember. I think about them, and anger — hot, pulsing anger — comes. Or grief, deep and inarticulable.
If I take the Holocaust personally, it is because it took me personally. The wretched 19-year-old who lived through the death camps is my father. Those dead Jakubovices and Weisses were all my kin. Little Alice would have become my aunt, had she not been gassed to death at Auschwitz when she was eight years old.
The Final Solution was a massive and complex operation; tens of thousands of people were involved in making it work. Not just SS, but railway workers and accountants, government bureaucrats and engineers, diplomats and doctors. Impressed upon each of them was the significance of the plan's finality. The Final Solution. Jews were to be killed, yes, but it was more than that: After so many centuries of pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and expulsions, European Jewry itself was to come, once and for all, to an end.
And nothing was more essential to that goal than to ensure that no younger generation of Jews be allowed to survive.
Hence the Nazis' ghoulish interest in sterilizing fertile women and castrating potent men. Hence, their policy of automatically killing pregnant Jewish women, however healthy and otherwise fit for work. Hence the vast amounts of time and treasure the Germans and their collaborators devoted to the slaughter of a million and a half Jewish children, including Alice Jakubovic, an 8-year-old girl from eastern Slovakia.
The Final Solution: The Nazis meant me, too. And I've never been quite sure whether the fact that I was born meant that they failed . . . or that my life is merely an exception to their success.
 I am well aware that the Nazis meant me, too. |
But I do know that the only preventive, the only vaccination against another Holocaust, is memory. For in the end, nothing can shield us from the construction of a new Auschwitz except our undiminished rage and repugnance and sorrow over the old Auschwitz.
That means taking the Holocaust personally. I always do. I always will.
(Jeff Jacoby is chief editorial writer of the Boston Herald.)