From the Heart of Jerusalem: Pitch black are the depths

And then along they all came, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew.

The words of Heinrich Himmler in a 1943 address to SS Gruppenführer. The Nazis had instilled in the Germans a livid disgust towards the Jews as a whole. And yet when it came to the individual Jew—the neighbor, the coworker—the Jew could be a friend, even a role model. He was an upstanding human deserving praise and meanwhile a repulsive animal deserving slaughter. It can’t make sense.
One day each year, the Jews across the world commemorated the Holocaust. To me, Yom Hashoa is a day to bear witness to the unbearable, to imagine the unimaginable. It is my responsibility to feel the Holocaust vividly, to be shaken into intolerable awareness. To keep the memory alive takes a lot more than words.

Each year I experience the humbling inadequacy of the human mind, utterly unable to grasp the facts of what happened. Take the most technical, unambiguous detail—six million. Who can conceive six million?

Several years ago my dad’s parents, both survivors of the Holocaust, led our family on a trip to Poland. On our visit to Auschwitz we encountered the wall where Jews stood before the firing squad. We gathered in the place where Jewish victims had stood seconds before dying, in the spot where Jewish corpses had fallen forever. And my grandfather, who had grown up alongside these same Jews, whose classmates and friends had been these same Jews, turned to me and told me he could not begin to imagine it had happened.

On Yom Hashoa this year, a survivor visited our yeshiva. He described his time in a death camp. Through three days of unmitigated torture, he watched the building with the chimneys. It piped smoke day and night. He constantly saw masses of Jews entering the building. He didn’t understand why he never saw anyone exiting. He was told that the building was for burning people. But that couldn’t be. He didn’t believe that.

He described the minutes preceding his scheduled hanging. This was before he knew the Allies would finally arrive and save his life. So he found himself staring death in the eyes. Right in front of his face, the gallows’ uncompromising structure stood tall and the thick rope swung in the frigid air. One might try to imagine the heart-pounding agony in such a moment, the sheer terror and despair. But no, he was calm, not even afraid. What was to be afraid of? He couldn’t—he didn’t— believe he was actually going to die. This senseless world was total chaos. It simply couldn’t be real.

In the afternoon we visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial. As I walked through the exhibits, it was the personal items that grabbed me over and over and over. I saw a hair comb, a toy doll, a dish inscribed with the owner’s name. These items looked real from real people. There were pots and pans and a wristwatch; these things behind the display-glass could actually exist in the world.

I saw a video of Hitler speaking to the Nazi multitude. He looked so human, and his tone bespoke sincerity, passion, and emotion. This didn’t seem real. How could this be Hitler? How could this person be Hitler?

The world of the Holocaust, the unconditional hatred, the senseless cruelty, was a twisted fairytale, an absurdity bearing no semblance to reality. In Himmler’s address, the opening of this essay, he spoke of the Nazi mind, which befriended the Jew and meanwhile lusted for his blood. These murderers—many of whom held doctorates in philosophy, literature, and history, studies in ethics and humanity—were living a paradox. The intellectual elite had become the most intellectually ludicrous of all.

How could this be? Because even, to the Nazis, such atrocities could not feel real. They could both embrace and destroy the Jew because the destruction was only a dream—it was part of his consciousness, and at the same time he knew it couldn’t be. The horror so exceeded the conceivable limits of possibility that even to the first-hand perpetrator, the one most actively involved, the one most glaringly responsible, it was a confused cloud of the surreal.

The fact is, Germans in commando units used to find it necessary to drink heavily before the massacre missions. Top Nazis could not even watch the killing system without vomiting uncontrollably and leaving promptly. In the end, the greatest evil was in these choices—to commit that which they knew they didn’t understand. Those who refused to perform the killing, a significant group, were never punished.
Himmler continued in his speech, describing the Holocaust as “a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.” History textbooks don’t care about fairytales. Records of fact don’t have time for horrendous dream worlds. And with that comes the great challenge facing my generation. It is our job to first feel the reality of a world thoroughly out of reach. And then to root in our children a story that will sound to them like a myth.

Samuel Fisher grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and graduated from Maimonides School in 2010. He is spending the year studying in Yeshivat Orayta in the Old City of Jerusalem after which he will attend Harvard College.