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"There
is No Remedy Against the Language of Truth"
A Lesson from the
Holocaust for Us All
By ROBERT FISK The Independent
At a second-hand book stall in the Rue
Monsieur le Prince in Paris a few days ago, I came across the
second volume of Victor Klemperer's diaries. The first volume,
recounting his relentless, horrifying degradation as a German
Jew in the first eight years of Hitler's rule--from 1933 to 1941--I
had bought in Pakistan just before America's 2001 bombardment
of Afghanistan.
It was a strange experience--while
sipping tea amid the relics of the Raj, roses struggling across
the lawn beside me, an old British military cemetery at the end
of the road--to read of Klemperer's efforts to survive in Dresden
with his wife Eva as the Nazis closed in on his Jewish neighbours.
Even more intriguing was to find that the infinitely heroic Klemperer,
a cousin of the great conductor, showed great compassion for
the Palestinian Arabs of the 1930s who feared that they would
lose their homeland to a Jewish state.
"I cannot help myself,"
Klemperer writes on 2 November 1933, nine months after Hitler
became Chancellor of Germany. "I sympathise with the Arabs
who are in revolt (in Palestine), whose land is being 'bought'.
A Red Indian fate, says Eva."
Even more devastating is Klemperer's
critique of Zionism--which he does not ameliorate even after
Hitler's Holocaust of the Jews of Europe begins. "To me,"
he writes in June of 1934, "the Zionists, who want to go
back to the Jewish state of AD70 ... are just as offensive as
the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient 'cultural
roots', their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the
world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists..."
Yet Klemperer's day-by-day
account of the Holocaust, the cruelty of the local Dresden Gestapo,
the suicide of Jews as they are ordered to join the transports
east, his early knowledge of Auschwitz--Klemperer got word of
this most infamous of extermination camps as early as March 1942,
although he did not realise the scale of the mass murders there
until the closing months of the war--fill one with rage that
anyone could still deny the reality of the Jewish genocide.
Reading these diaries as the
RER train takes me out to Charles de Gaulle airport--through
the 1930s art deco architecture of Drancy station where French
Jews were taken by their own police force before transportation
to Auschwitz--I wish President Ahmadinejad of Iran could travel
with me.
For Ahmadinejad it was who
called the Jewish Holocaust a "myth", who ostentatiously
called for a conference--in Tehran, of course--to find out the
truth about the genocide of six million Jews, which any sane
historian acknowledges to be one of the terrible realities of
the 20th century, along, of course, with the Holocaust of one
and a half million Armenians in 1915.
The best reply to Ahmadinejad's
childish nonsense came from ex-president Khatami of Iran, the
only honourable Middle East leader of our time, whose refusal
to countenance violence by his own supporters inevitably and
sadly led to the demise of his "civil society" at the
hands of more ruthless clerical opponents. "The death of
even one Jew is a crime," Khatami said, thus destroying
in one sentence the lie that his successor was trying to propagate.
Indeed, his words symbolised
something more important: that the importance and the evil of
the Holocaust do not depend on the Jewish identity of the victims.
The awesome, wickedness of the Holocaust lies in the fact that
the victims were human beings--just like you and me.
How do we then persuade the
Muslims of the Middle East of this simple truth? I thought that
the letter which the head of the Iranian Jewish Committee, Haroun
Yashayaie, wrote to Ahmadinejad provided part of the answer.
"The Holocaust is not a myth any more than the genocide
imposed by Saddam (Hussein) on Halabja or the massacre by (Ariel)
Sharon of Palestinians and Lebanese in the camps of Sabra and
Chatila," Yashayaie--who represents Iran's 25,000 Jews--said.
Note here how there is no attempt
to enumerate the comparisons. Six million murdered Jews is a
numerically far greater crime than the thousands of Kurds gassed
at Halabja or the 1,700 Palestinians murdered by Israel's Lebanese
Phalangist allies at Sabra and Chatila in 1982. But Yashayaie's
letter was drawing a different kind of parallel: the pain that
the denial of history causes to the survivors.
I have heard Israelis deny
their army's involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres--despite
Israel's own official enquiry which proved that Ariel Sharon
sent the murderers into the camps--and I remember how the CIA
initially urged US embassies o blame Iran for the gassings at
Halabja.
Indeed, it is easy to find
examples of one of the most egregious lies uttered against the
750,000 Palestinians who fled their land in 1948: that they were
ordered by Arab radio stations to flee their homes until the
Jews had been "driven into the sea"--when they would
return to take back their property. Israeli academic researchers
have themselves proved that no such radio broadcasts were ever
made, that the Palestinians fled--victims of what we would today
call ethnic cleansing--after a series of massacres by Israeli
forces, especially in the village of Deir Yassin, just outside
Jerusalem.
So what is there to learn from
the second volume of Klemperer's diaries? Just after he received
word from the Gestapo that he and Eva were to be transported
east to their deaths, the RAF raided Dresden and, amid the tens
of thousands of civilians which the February 1945 firestorm consumed,
the Gestapo archives also went up in flames. All record of the
Klemperers' existence was turned to ash, like the Jews who preceded
them to Auschwitz. So the couple took off their Jewish stars
and wandered Germany as refugees without papers until they found
salvation after the Nazi surrender.
Just before their rescue, they
showed compassion to three distraught German soldiers who were
lost in the forests of their homeland. And even during their
worst ordeals, as they waited for the doorbell to ring and the
Gestapo to arrive to search their Dresden home and notify them
of their fate, Klemperer was able to write in his diary a sentence
which every journalist and historian should learn by heart: "There
is no remedy against the truth of language."
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