“A million children massacred” I shall never understand. People tend to think that a murderer weakens when facing a child. The child reawakens the killer’s lost humanity. The killer can no longer kill the child before him, the child inside him.  Not this time. With us, it happened differently. Our Jewish children had no effect upon the killers. Nor upon the world. Nor upon God.

No, I do not understand. And if I write, it is to warn the reader that he will not understand either. You will not understand, you will never understand. You, who never lived under a sky of blood, will never know what it was like. Even if you read all the books ever written, even if you listen to all the testimonies ever given, you will remain on this side of the wall.”

Elie Wiesel

The Holocaust, the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of an entire people-men, women, children and suckling infants- solely because of the identity and belief of their grandparents, defies explanation. The facts may be recounted, but can never be fully understood. Questions may be posed, but answers should not be expected-responses, perhaps, but not answers.

As I have studied the events we call the Holocaust, I gradually realized that my first duty, and that of all students of the Holocaust, is to write down what happened, as clearly and completely as possible. There is no subject more important to me than this. Though there exist tens of thousands of books on the subject in English and many other languages, there has never been a comprehensive book about the Holocaust in Farsi, which is spoken daily by well over one hundred million people worldwide. Hence the reason for writing this book.

When I began my research on this topic fifteen years ago, I wanted to know why and how the Jews of Europe were destroyed - and why and how the world allowed it to happen. As my mentor, Raul Hilberg, has eloquently stated, “The how of the event is a way of gaining insight into perpetrators, victims, collaborators and bystanders.”2

“In a poignant moment during a conference on the Holocaust, Professor Hilberg admitted that after a lifetime of research there was one question for which he could not receive the trace of an answer.  The question was, why? This is a question that cannot rest.”3

“What is it in human nature and institutions that made the Holocaust possible?

“What was the source of the moral immunity felt by the Nazi killers?                                                                 

“What enabled SS men to murder children, the old, and the sick with a sense of justification?

“What was the reason for the senseless indifference of the world?”3

What sets the Holocaust apart from other crimes committed by Nazis, or by others, against many millions of other people, was neither the number of victims, nor the way of their murder, nor the proportion of the murdered compared to the total number of the targeted victims. After all, many more Russians were murdered by the Nazis than Jews. There have been cases in which a much higher proportion of the targeted community was annihilated than the nearly 50% of the Jewish people that died in the Holocaust. And, while most of the victims of the gas chambers were Jews, some were not; Gypsies, Soviet POWs and others also perished there.

The Holocaust was different from the other instances of mass murder because:

“A whole people identified by the faith of their birth were selected to die.

The Jews had to do nothing to give offense; it was sufficient simply to be.

The Jews suffered only because they were. 

To the Nazi regime the Jewish crime was their existence and their refusal to die and while not all the victims were the Jews, all the Jews were victims. The Jews were the central target of the Nazi regime. Nazi Germany considered the elimination of Jews the prescription for national salvation.                   

The Nazi regime decided that the whole people of “a race” should die- a power no one or no government should have.”3, 4, 5

And yet, in a sense, the Holocaust does not belong to the Jews. As Elie Wiesel points out, “The moral imagination has no sectarian allegiance. The Holocaust is a human catastrophe. Whatever happened to the world between 1933 and 1945 had to do with madness. It is not politics alone, not strategy alone, not war alone. It was madness, total madness. Of those who knew what was happening, for those who did not want to know, for those who kept silent, for the churches, the media, the statesmen, the armies, the ideologues.”5

“During the Holocaust the mankind was divided into just and unjust with no neutrality because the neutral ones were guilty as accomplices - especially in the free world like America and Switzerland and Sweden or the Vatican. Surely they were guilty by not helping, by not taking sides, by their willful blindness, indifference or waiting. You must remember that, what you don’t say carries weight.”5

“You cannot kill a million children and believe that the world goes on as it did before.”5 Therefore the story of the Holocaust must be told. The question before us is, how does this story instruct the future?

Those who say “never again” speak only of the final result, the “solution”; the killing centers and the gas chambers. That comes too late for such a vow. The question is, where, at what point in the Nazi series of crimes, does the “never again” begin to apply?

The first sin was not the gas chambers, of course. The first sin came when the Germans cast out the Jews from legal and moral equality. The rights to work, to vote, to study, to speak, to travel, to love, to marry, to practice a religion, claim a theory, teach a value - all these are basic to the right to exist, and when these were cut off for Jews it was preordained that six million should eventually die. We understand that all human rights are connected, that a Holocaust is only the last stage of their loss.

The fact of the Holocaust makes a repetition more likely - a limit was broken, a control or awe is gone. Failure to confront it makes repetition all the more likely. People in general want to forget because it was too horrific, too evil, too sad and too morbid. That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any time.

Our teacher, Elie Wiesel has stated: “I am deeply convinced that if we allow the world to forget, it will be the end not only of our memory; it will be the end of the world. And that is why I write about the Holocaust. We speak for those who didn’t survive. We speak in their stead, by proxy.”5

Only through knowledge and understanding can another Holocaust be prevented. Therefore, the story of the Holocaust must be told. The world that was silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow, unless we open our eyes to someone else’s suffering. Although we have been reminded that it is impossible to write adequately about the Holocaust, yet that task must be attempted, which I have tried in these four volumes.

In Scroll of Agony, the Warsaw diary written by Chaim Kaplan, discovered after his death, Kaplan describes how shocked he was to endure a vicious beating at the hands of a stranger. “How can he hate me?” Kaplan wondered. “He doesn’t even know me.”6 A reversal of Thomas Aquinas belief, “we cannot love what we do not know.”

“If we were to hate everyone who made us suffer, we would become a people full of hate. I think this is our defiance; we cannot hate. When we answer to hate not with hate, not with love either but with affirmation of life and fight with hate, simply by shaping our own destiny, telling our tale and becoming the example. Then it creates some meaning which transcends the present, the routine. If there is going to be any hope for the future of preventing other genocides, we must learn to stop hating humans other than our “own” kind. We must stop being indifferent toward the suffering of the “other”.5

Again, the powerful words of Elie Wiesel:

“If we continue in our indifference one day mankind have to pay for Auschwitz and that punishment will be total, just as Auschwitz meant total crime. Therefore we must care for one another. We can because we should.”5

References 

1. Alvin H. Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg, eds., Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel.  (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1978).

2. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003).        

3.  Harold Kaplan, Conscience and Memory: Meditation in a Museum of the Holocaust (University of Chicago Press,Chicago, 1994).

4.  John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York, 1989).

5. Elie Wiesel and Richard Heffner, Conversation with Elie Wiesel (New York, 2001).

6. Chaim Aron Kaplan, Israel Gutman and Abraham I. Katsh, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (Indiana University Press,Bloomington, 1999).

The Holocaust: " Man's Inhumanity to Man"

• BOOK ONE speaks of: “Man’s Inhumanity to Man.” Following a short history of Germany’s Jews, it covers precedents and antecedents of the Nazi atrocities; Aryanizations and the progress of the atrocities and the process of confiscation and destruction; Kristallnacht; the struggle to leave Europe; the life in the Nazi ghettos, starvation measures, sickness and death, labor exploitation; the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the liquidation and total destruction of the Ghetto; the “Final Solution” including the expulsions, deportations, and the organization and functioning of the extermination camps; the first reports of the mass killings; why the Allies refused to bomb Auschwitz; and the Holocaust as seen by its perpetrators and bystanders. 

The Holocaust: "The World's Response to the Holocaust"

• BOOK THREE describes the moral failure and the complicity of the world’s democracies during the Holocaust, including the record of Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Poland, and the Soviet Union. This volume also considers such controversial subjects as the behavior of the German civilian populace; the persecution of the Jews in Axis satellites such as Rumania and Bulgaria; the willful blindness of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican; and the final chapter of the Holocaust, the slaughter of Hungarian Jewry.