With God in Hell
Riemer, Jack
WITH GOD IN HELL Eliezer Berkowitz Sanhedrin Press, Hebrew Pub., Co., $8.95, 166 pp. Jack Riemer SOME RECENT BOOKS about the Holocaust blame the victims - as if we could sit in judgment on them...
...it comprehends all the glory of a man...
...The young pietists who prayed even there were thinking of life, of nothing but life, of the very essence of their lives...
...She did not even.sacrifice.it - she affirmed it...
...But he does mean that we should leam never to tolerate evil, not only when it is done to others, but also when it is done to ourselves...
...How different Jewish thought and Western thought may be can be seen, says Dr...
...The essence of one's being does not wait...
...Centuries later, Longinus in his "On the Sublime" comments: "This is the true attitude of an Ajax...
...They were alive, and they were themselves, as they had never been before...
...He does not pray for life, for such a petition would ill beseem a hero, "fhe hero does not pray for life nor does he fear death, because the battle itself is the cause...
...For him a duel or a defeat in battle is not something noble or romantic...
...Would that instead of psychoanalyzing and second-guessing their choices we directed our questions at the human beings-if that is what they were-who forced them to these choices...
...The Jew who asked to be put on the list in order to accompany his brother to the camp was not throwing away his life, he was protecting it...
...Berkowitz has brought together an impressive col-fection of testimonies by people who even there held on, if not to life, then at least to those things that make life human...
...To walk together with his brother - that was him, that was his life...
...It cannot be postponed until tomorrow...
...We could not grasp that the most civilized state in the world could become a cannibal...
...They were choosing not between physical- survival and physical death-alas, that option was not often given them-but between living till they died and dying before their physical death...
...It is a sin...
...Berkowitz is saying that these people, trapped into such a cruel corner, were yet choosing...
...He does not mean that we should now cultivate a pagan conception of heroism, or sink to the level of our enemies, or that Ajax should replace Rabbi Akiva as our guide...
...And then he writes: "Did she foolishly throw away her life...
...The answer, of course, is that both options were impossible...
...He tries to understand them, not from the perspective of Western secular civilization, as most of the books about the Holocaust that are written here do, but instead from the perspective of their own religious tradition, the one in which they lived...
...Eliezer Berkowitz has written a book about the Holocaust that is different from most of the others...
...Now we must somehow hold on to the ancient Jewish conviction of the supremacy of the spirit and the sacredness of life, and yet at the same time incorporate into our value system a resolve to resist evil in every way we can...
...It is hard to believe in God after the Holocaust, and harder still to believe in man...
...Physically, mentally, and morally we could not begin to comprehend what was happening or how to react...
...Those teachers who went on the last walk with their students lived the preciousness, the sanctity, of all human life...
...Her deed is not to be seen as an act of sacrifice but one of living with the greatest intensity, as an act of supreme self-realization...
...I find it hard to understand why there are very few books about the Holocaust that blame the Nazis or the spectators who sat on the sidelines and were neutral...
...Berkowitz believes that, after the Holocaust, we are in a new spiritual situation, one in which Jews must never again tempt their enemies by being vulnerable, and must never again allow Jewish blood to be shed with impunity...
...It is a story that we need to hear and think about and learn from- Jews and Christians both.d Christians both...
...Contrast that with the Jew who is not at all impressed by a glorious death but who prays wholeheartedly for life...
...Berkowitz, by considering Ajax, who is perhaps the prototype of the hero in Western civilization...
...For example, there is a debate that goes on within the literature nowadays about whether they should have "died with dignity'' or submitted in order to survive...
...What he has tried to do is probe the minds and spirits of those who went through it...
...Ajax prays to Zeus that he may send light so that the battle may continue, even if the light should bring him defeat and death...
...To stand up to the Nazis by insisting on their rights was sure death but surviving at any cost meant giving up all human values and that, too, was a kind of death...
...The winner in a duel is a murderer, according to Jewish law, and even the loser is not free from guilt for having placed his life in jeopardy and for having attempted to kill another human being...
...Jack Riemer SOME RECENT BOOKS about the Holocaust blame the victims - as if we could sit in judgment on them from here...
...For if we do not, then we become its accomplices and its victims...
...Now we know better...
...The mother who did not let her child go alone to face German barbarism was living her motherhood more deeply than ever before...
...But choose they did, and we can only have reverence for those who chose either path...
...Some books about the Holocaust blame God - although it is strange that we who sat in comfort and in safety here could lose our faith while those who lived in Hell did not...
...We were unprepared for the Holocaust...
...But if they could do it there, then we can do no less here...
...He tells the story, not only of how some Jews survived, but of how their Judaism did too...
...He tells of a woman who slapped a Nazi's face and died for it, of a rabbi who pushed away foul hands and died...
...Berkowitz documents the stories of people who chose to go to the fires with a brother, or who died holding on to a child...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 8
