Holocaust: Memory And Resolve

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Anyone who has visited the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington knows the feeling of being overwhelmed, defeated, by its mass of names. There are just too many to bear.

Now imagine a hundred Vietnam Memorials arrayed on the Mall. The earth would sink beneath the weight of such sorrow. Yet it would take that many Vietnam Memorials to list the names of those killed in the Holocaust. And it would still not be enough. There would still be nearly 200,000 left uncommemorated, more than have died of AIDS in America in all the years of the plague.

The Holocaust is a malignity of such dimensions that one must resort to mental tricks to appreciate its scale and scope. Yet, one is compelled to confront its scale and scope -- and single-mindedness -- in order to understand its uniqueness.

The atrocities of ethnic conflict -- today, Bosnia -- are described in terms of death camps and genocide. But this use of terms borrowed from the Holocaust betrays a poverty of language. The Nazi achievement lay not in building barbaric prison camps or seizing villages through expulsion and terror. That is an old story, terrible but old: the story of ethnic war. The Nazi achievement lay in constructing an industry of death never before -- or since -- seen. An industry of continental size complete with railways, death camps, gas chambers and crematoria. An industry whose raw material was Jews and whose product was corpses.

In an age when victimhood carries high status, the Jews are much and grotesquely envied for having suffered the greatest crime in history. Hence the common attempt to universalize the Holocaust: "It was a war against the Jews, but it could have been against any other nation."

Well, it wasn't. Yes, the Germans considered the Poles an inferior race. They invaded, abused, violated and socially decapitated the Poles. But they did not issue a death sentence and track down for gassing every child of Polish descent. That treatment was reserved for the Jews.

Why is this important? For the lessons one draws from the Holocaust. With the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the air is full of lessons: lessons about man's capacity for evil, about the dangers of intolerance, about the redemptive power of democracy.

These lessons are important, but in the shadow of the Holocaust rather banal. They do not require the authority of Auschwitz. They follow easily enough from Soweto and Howard Beach, from Sarajevo and Nagorno-Karabakh.

To approach Auschwitz, one must begin by understanding its uniqueness. All the easy universalisms bow before this particular fact: Auschwitz was the apex of a campaign by one people, the Germans, to exterminate another, the Jews. They almost succeeded. They killed 6 million, 2 out of every 3. They annihilated a civilization more than a thousand years old. They even managed to murder a language. Soon Yiddish will go the way of Latin and Greek.

A crime of such particularity creates particular moral obligations. One (to borrow from philosopher Emil Fackenheim) above all: Hitler must be allowed no posthumous victories. Hitler's singular project -- the destruction of the Jewish people -- must not be permitted its final success.