Henryk Grynberg
Res Publica Nowa, August 2002

I Blame Europe

"If we erased faith from the European heritage, and love and the Christian sensitivity of conscience, there would be no Europe at all" -- said Cardinal Lustiger (interview for "Biuletyn Prasowy KAl" 51). Both he and I have lived through the Holocaust as children and Christians but I have converted and do not believe in that heritage. I had lived (lost) half of my life in Europe and seen very little faith and still less of love, and the least of all of conscience which, to be noted, is of Jewish ancestry. Why does the Archbishop of Paris believe in Europe so strongly? Sholom Aleichem would bring up the parable of a worm living in horseradish and convinced that there is nothing sweeter in the world.

I, too, was close to remain a Christian, also not merely out of fear, and also was seen as a future priest.
But I am glad to have returned to the Jews, to those who had been murdered, in Europe, by the Europeans. The Christians protest, in their view the murderers could not have been "true Christians", but they were certainly children of Christianity. Then "by the European culture", says Aron Appelfeld, a miraculously saved Jewish child of the same age as Lustiger. At a gathering of children of the Holocaust, somebody said that any nation is capable of such crime. Yes, and no. Certain conditions are indispensable there, and a certain culture - such as European culture.

My mother brought me, from Israel, a geometrical perfection, an elegantly carved in gold Jewish star. That was her last gift to me, and I kept it on my neck. In America hardly anyone cared to cast a glance. Except once, in a diplomatic corps club where the Embassy of the Polish People's Republic was showing Zaklete rewiry (or "Charmed Tables"), a good movie made of a good, pre-war book, which I was sent by the Voice of America to see. It was hot that afternoon in Washington and I went there with my shirt unbuttoned. I expected a usual projection in a darkened room, but found myself in a bright hall with crystal chandeliers, champagne and diplomats from all over the Soviet bloc. Some smirked slightly. The Asians even tried to strike a conversation, asking, what is this sign. Only the cultural counselor of the Polish Embassy, the host of the event, upon seeing me would skitter to the other end of the room, chased by ironic glances of his colleagues and rivals. What's more, going from the champagne to the projection room, one had to wait quite a while for the elevator, and then the ride was long and slow, face to face with the counselor, who kept craning his neck this way and that, the better to avoid staring at my star. It was the same with the passengers at the Milan airport where I landed after 15 years of Americanization and had forgotten to button up my shirt, and where the border police officer examining my passport gave me a freezing stare. The same at a crowded airport in Brussels, where I alighted with two hundred young Jews from America. Some wearing embroidered yarmulkes, some, like me, little stars, we closely followed each other not to get lost in the crowd, among a long receiving line of unfriendly glances, amazed, at best fearful glances. Charter buses took us from there to Cologne, where we whiled away the night in a secluded hangar under the automatic weapons of German guards, should anything bad happen to us, until finally, in the morning, an Israeli plane took us away. That was many years ago and I no longer wear my beautiful Jewish star when flying to Europe. And I am more and more amazed that Jews still live there. 

In the Jewish school I was taught to be proud that I am a Jew. This seemed illogical to me. What am I supposed to be proud of? The hostility, the contempt? Now I know that it is a good thing when the rabble holds us in contempt, and that it would be bad if they adored us. And I am proud that I had not deserted like Lustiger. Like the Catholic saint Edith Stein, who abandoned her people in need and joined those who had set them up for the Holocaust, and shared her Jewish fate not for reasons of her own. I am calling her a deserter but cannot blame her. I don't blame anybody in Europe who is afraid and does not want to be a Jew. I, too, was afraid and did not want to. I am blaming Europe.

Her Christian ethics come from the Jewish ethics but there are certain essential differences there. Christians pray for God to forgive their enemies; the Jews, especially after the Holocaust, for the opposite. The Christians' prayer is admirable; the Jewish prayer is sincere. The Jews and, following them, the Christians believe they are the chosen, but the Jews have never declared that all the others are doomed. This is why I don't regret my return to the Jews.

The European school carefully avoids Jewish heritage. It studies every little word on every little Greek or Roman shell, every medieval stone, but ignores hundreds of thousands of Hebrew words whence came almost everything that is called the Christian values. That is why the children of Europe have learned so little. That is why her wars - the world war, the civil wars, the local wars - are so barbaric; as are her systems and methods of power. To me, the European heritage that cannot be erased consists of the Inquisition, the secret police, Hitler, Stalin (a Moczar here and there) and fire. The screams of the burned at the stakes, the Hebrew parchments burning on a pyre in the center of Paris, the long millennium of collective crime, crowned with the biggest pyre in history. The uniqueness of the European barbarism lies in a thousand years of destruction of not only the most defenseless ethnic/religious group but also of an ancient culture to which the world owes the most, and which was almost totally destroyed. The vandals of the Taliban deprived the world of two stone statues that lasted one and a half thousand years, but the European vandals -- of several million priceless monuments of blood and bones that had survived for thousands of years. 

The European school, allegedly rationalistic, was never bothered by any absurdity regarding the Jews. The people who created God, served Him for thousands of years, died with His name, literally, on their lips, the people who have not abandoned their faith, but were being betrayed in every generation in all of Europe until the present time by the Christians, by the communists, by the liberals -- were being depicted as God-killers and traitors and God Himself was presented as an anti-Semite -- although in the basic Christian mystery Jesus is a Jew and Judas is a Christian. Who, in this horrible universal mystery play, is the real Judas? A rhetorical question. 

Europe's conscience holds more crimes than all the rest of the world and its twentieth century set the records for all times. It's Europe that gave birth to Hitler. Only in a Europe raised on the anti-Jewish myth the consciences could have been so depraved; only in Europe where the Jew who had discovered conscience, stood against Hellenism, invented a panacea for the oppressed called the Christian faith, and established the Church that cursed him as the Devil. 

In a conciliatory document titled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" the Church expressed regrets over Christians' conduct toward Jews "in every age", declared the Shoah "a major fact of the history" of the 20th century and named it a "salutary warning".

At the same time, however, the Church tried, as a tender mother, to mollify the infractions of her children through euphemistic posing of rhetorical questions: "whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts?"; "whether anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians make them less sensitive, or even indifferent, to the persecution launched against the Jews?"; "whether the Christians gave every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted Jews?". And with great reticence the Church admitted that there were those who "took advantage of the situation", and those who "were moved by envy". Not, God forbid, by hate.

A Jew who survived the Shoah has a response to those questions: the Nazi persecution was not "made easier" but made possible; not by "prejudices" but by hate; not "in some Christians" but in the majority. The anti-Jewish sentiments made the Christians not "less sensitive, or even indifferent" but eager participants in crime. The Jews did not require "every possible assistance" -- just not being denounced would have sufficed. It is not that the Christians "were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest", it's that they betrayed by whisper. Many Jews were able to take care of themselves on the Aryan side of the wall, helping each other, or buying help -- ten times as many would have survived if they weren't betrayed, or if they were betrayed for material gain only, and not out of hate or belief that denouncing a Jew was a Christian duty. It is not relevant "how many Christians in countries occupied or ruled by the Nazi powers or their allies were horrified", but how many of them united against the Jews (Austria, Vichy, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and priest Tiso's Slovakia). The Vatican commission used this opportunity to take a shot at yet another, and rather brazen attempt at universalization of the Holocaust, asserting that the "final solution" was "aimed against all humanity."* It also seems suspect that to the horrible genocides of Armenians, Gypsies, genocides in Africa, Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, and the Balkans they hitched "the drama of the Middle East". The Holocaust made the Church begin admitting its sins against Jews. What more is needed to make it bold enough to be sincere?

In his famous essay "Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto" (1987), Jan Blonski wrote of the guilt of neglecting the human obligation to the Jews as a certain kind of collective guilt.

Which, according to Jaspers, burdens not only participants in crime but also those who do not oppose it, or oppose it not strongly enough, or even who live among the evil. Yet Jaspers overlooked the acceptance of crime in one's own house, a guilt more grave than the other three, which also results in a greater punishment because there cannot be joy in such a house. The moral rot of post-Holocaust Europe was best depicted by Friedrich Dürrenmatt in The Visit, the most European drama. The "visit" lingered on and will last until Europe settles her accounts with the "visitor" and to cleans her house. Which may never happen because the great lie that brought the great crime has not ended. To the contrary, the jarring truth is being erased, smudged over, watered down, universalized: - not only the Jews perished; eleven million did, including six million Jews; six million perished, "mostly" Jews. Hence monuments to "the residents", "the citizens", "the victims of fascism"; hence the Auschwitz crosses, and the saints. Sure, one can negate and evict the Jews from the Holocaust as, one time, from the Church. If it worked once, it may work again. It's sufficient to repeat, for a few centuries, that the Holocaust was "aimed against all humanity."

Robbing and murdering Jews through the ages, Europe was in need of a psychological antidote. Such as accusing the Jews of ritual murder. Yet another big paradox because -- as Anna Sobolewska stressed in her review of my "Memorbuch" -- it was the Jews who were, repeatedly throughout the centuries, the victims of ritual murders. The infamous blood libel made the best alibi for degenerate child killers, and one can easily guess what has really happened to the thousands of children allegedly killed by the Jews. On the same principle, Hitlerite and Stalinist plotters accused the Jews of conspiracy against the world, as the Islamic plotters accuse them now. Also the torturers and informers of the former Communist empire of evil, who number ten times over the Jews on earth, use this canard as a soap to wash their own dirty hands. The optimists assert that calm periods did occur, that the accusations were not being cast incessantly. But they were - in church services, in literature, in art -- always hanging over Jewish heads. A painting in a Sandomierz church depicts Jews as they drain blood from a Christian child. The painting is still hanging there -- as an object of art, a relic, a "heritage."

Never have "Jewish crimes" been as indispensable for Europe as after the Holocaust. That is why she eagerly follows every move of the Israeli army and screams "massacre", "genocide". And even begins to call for sanctions -- for the first time since the Third Reich -- and for compensation for her buildings in Palestine. The Israeli commander, in whose sector the Christian militants committed a mass murder of Moslems, is being wall-postered together with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. The sanctions fell through because the Germans objected; they did not have the courage, not yet. The compensations did not pass either, as the accounts for Jewish buildings in Europe have not been settled yet.

Unable to find the "Jewish crimes" in the physical world, they search in the metaphysical. During the siege of the Bethlehem Nativity Church, a prestigious European newspaper printed a drawing of little Jesus in the manger with a caption: - "Are you going to kill me again?" How much lie can be propagated by one short sentence? How much hypocrisy and shamelessness is needed, after the crucifixion of millions of believers in one God, together with their children, to show them as God-killers and child-killers? And to present the bloody-handed ones, those who, running from the arm of justice, forced their way into the church aware that Jews will not violate this site considered holy by Christians, present them as what? The defenders of holiness, of the innocence of the Child? That single cartoon and the caption said more than a thousand words about the kind of mind-set that has stayed on for two thousand years and through the Holocaust and has not changed at all.

Europe commiserates with the Jews on every anniversary of the Holocaust but not as current events do occur. In June 1967, when the Arab armies outfitted by east-European anti-Semites, approached the Jewish oasis and when her fate seemed sealed, the international forces gave a wide berth, calmly expecting a new slaughter, and only the Jewish victory raised general apprehension. A similar situation was in October 1973.

Why is Europe concerned not with the Jews' fate in "the drama of the Middle East" but with the fate of their enemies? Why is she protesting when the Jews are killing Death but she keeps silent when -- as during the Holocaust -- death enters Jewish homes? It is not only for petroleum that European "pacifists" smother Arafat with kisses, defend Saddam Hussein and heckle America for taking the Jewish side.

While focusing on the Jews, Europe overlooks the knife on her own neck. As in the 1930's. As in ancient Greek tragedy, she carries her fate in her character. The Jews, too, keep repeating their mistakes, despite ages of experience. As the collaborators in Judenraten, they refuse to face the truth. They still cannot reconcile themselves with the realization that their enemies would rather kill than cooperate.

For a half of the century, thousands of SS-men from various countries of Europe have been receiving pensions "for loyal service". Half a century after the Holocaust, the Germans became a power again and refuse to remain "prisoners of history" -- as if that were too much of a punishment. And the most liberal Free Democrats claim their right to be anti-Semitic - for freedom is freedom. What if they demand even more? Much depends, indeed, on what kind of "liberals" and "pacifists" we deal with, and where they come from.

"Destruction of the Zionist enemy is the most important goal in the world" -- declared, in the court of law, a German convert to Islam who failed in his terrorist attempt in Israel. A new generation has risen. Again, the beaters on the one side and murderers on the other. It is 1938 again and synagogues are burning. And like then, the cowardly Europe wishes to throw the Jews to the wolves hoping they let her be; the same Europe that regrets so solemnly that she had not done "everything possible" then. 

Europe has never really accepted the emancipation of Jews. That is why she tries to shove the Jewish state down into defense, back to the status of a petitioner, pariah, a Jew - who is no more, whom she had murdered. After a millennium of killing Jews with impunity, she finds it hard to accept that they no longer allow it. After ages of contempt, she cannot forgive them their chivalrous ways of war that contrast so much with ignominies and cruelties of her own wars. A Jewish sovereignty, and in the holiest places to boot, is an insufferable psychological sliver for Europe, where power came traditionally from God, from inherent privileges, and signified dignity. Thus foam at the mouth the Church hierarchs of Jerusalem. They would rather have Jerusalem in the hands of Arabs, Ottomans, Mamelouks, just not the Jews who, contrary to the former, have done nothing
wrong to them. For there is no logic in what the Church euphemistically calls "aversion".
There is, instead, a deep psychological complex, because of which, even on the brink of a world war with the Muslims, Europe prefers them to the Jews.

According to the faith which, as Cardinal Lustiger asserts, constitutes an inseparable part of the European heritage, Jews are supposed to exist solely in order to suffer for their alleged guilt. In reality, however, our existence keeps Europe from forgetting the true guilt of her own. And never have we been such inconvenient witnesses and such qualm of conscience as after the Holocaust. So perhaps it's no wonder that Europe has not reformed herself, but to the contrary, her anti-Semitism is rising. A friend in Warsaw is practicing Judaism and mezuzoth are posted on all doors of her apartment but the outer door, where a mezuzah should be in the first place. Why? I asked. -- I am not crazy, she replied. Before the Holocaust, a mezuzah marked every Jewish home in Poland and in all of Europe, but is there a Jew in Europe who is not afraid to post a mezuzah today? Initially I intended to title this essay "No Change in Europe," but that would have been an obvious mistake. There is a change, and a significant one.

Today's "pacifists", together with the indispensable European intellectuals and glittering literati resemble the fools of the 1930's who were applauded by Hitler, and the "defenders of peace" who were (mis)led by Stalin, except for their ostentatious mark of anti-Semitism. They don't mind bearing that mark, even though everybody today knows that anti-Semitism is a tool of murder. And Europe that crucified us and washed her hands, and cannot forgive us for that, knows it best of all.

In the Jewish-Philistine conflict which never ends, Europe, as usual, takes the wrong side and shamelessly feigns moral authority into the bargain. This is not just petroleum pragmatism which would seem understandable in a cynical world. In the summer of 1967, just before my escape from Europe, I met an older gentleman from Interpress, a state-owned Polish Publishing House, who in private complained to me with tears in his eyes about being forced to translate into English disgusting anti-Semitic pamphlets for export. Ritual murder, conspiracy of "the Sages of Zion", Jewish money, six-pointed stars with swastikas, Israelis in Nazi uniforms, Jewish "racism" -- all that had been successfully sown in the minds of the Arabs and brings now harvests more bountiful than expected.

Europe has been spreading her anti-Jewish plague for centuries and I may, without reservation, repeat after my friend, a Jewish columnist of the post-Holocaust generation who writes under a meaningful pen-name David of Warsaw that "anti-Semitism is Europe's contribution to the storehouse of humanity." Very much like racism, which constantly sails to America's shore from Europe. But while it's subsiding here, in Europe it is rising proportionately to the number of arrivals from her former colonies. There are already more mosques in Europe than used to be synagogues, and more Muslims than there were Jews. And the Muslims don't even try to adjust and, unlike the Jews, are not afraid of her at all. You've had it so bad with the Jews? You're going to miss them.

Every day I rejoice that I wrenched myself free of Europe's claws and can look at her now from the distance of America which has been created by refugees and outcasts like myself, for whom, like for me, there was no place in Europe. America that rose from protest against Europe, has outgrown her in all respects, particularly the moral one, and pulls her out of shit every time - as in 1918, in 1944-45, in 1948 (the Marshall Plan).

Europe could not have survived the Cold War without America. She would not even drag herself out of the local Balkan genocide which has once again demonstrated the shallowness and fragility of her values - her true heritage. Just imagine that America disappeared and left Europe alone to face the invasion from the south-east that has already begun. Europe exists now only by American guarantees. No American statesman would say this, no diplomat, nor any ordinary tactful American. I don't have to behave.

The Christian Europe disavows her criminals and murderers, calling them neo-pagans, Huns, Asians. Whereas God-killers, bloodsuckers, bloodthirsty Bolsheviks, mighty nabobs are, in her language, undoubtedly the Jews. So let me reciprocate with an inverted disclaimer: There have still remained alive in Europe millions of decent people, good Christians, many of whom, defying her heritage, helped and rescued the Jews. But I do not identify them with that which I call Europe.

I am sincerely awed by Europe's old architecture, literature, music, sculpture, painting, and theater - beauty which, for me, is tainted with bitterness. I recall the warning of my remarkable professor Alexandr Sergeyevich Isachenko that Russia is not just the literature, music and ballet. I look the same way at the veneer of Europe. I am afraid, God has already given up. Luckily America remains on the watch.

Henryk Grynberg - novelist, poet, essayist and playwright. Since 1967 has lived in the United States. Published, among others, the novels: The Jewish War, The Victory, An Ideological Life, Kaddish, Memorbuch (nominated for the Nike 2000 Prize) and volumes of stories: Team of Antigone and Drohobycz, Drohobycz (nominated to the Nike 1998) which is appearing this fall in English by Penguin Books. He has recently published, with Jan Kostanski, a biographical novel Smugglers (2001).

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