The War Against the Jews 1933-1945
Halperin, Irving
REVIEWS The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 Irving Halperin THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS 1933-1945 BY LUCY S. DAWIDOW1CZ Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. 460pp. ,$15. While he was being taken...
...This quotation points directly to Mrs...
...Surely such a moment has its own truth and is as "reliable" material for an understanding of the Holocaust as impartially sifted historical evidence...
...Precisely because it is so informative and persuasive, The War Against the Jews ought to encourage those who wish "to rePhoto/Jo* I Abromson member" to read survivor eyewitness accounts, personal narratives, memoirs, autobiographical fiction and other modes of imaginative literature on the Holocaust...
...In witnessing their struggle to resist the Nazis' efforts to break them as a community, Chaim Kaplan, the Warsaw educator and diarist, was moved to praise his fellow Jews...
...I suppose that meanwhile the then resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany is now choking in their throats...
...Mrs...
...Jews speak out...
...The most compelling pages in this section of the book describe the efforts of Jews to remain human in the face of the inhuman...
...To take one example of the kind of material that I have in mind: the scene in Wiesel's Night when a young boy "with the face of an angel" is being hung on the gallows at Auschwitz...
...Jews write...
...it is a matter of cleanliness...
...The War Against the Jews is one of the most important historical narratives in the voluminous body of literature on the Holocaust...
...Dawid-owicz's convincing answer is that in his war against the Jews, he spoke for Germans, whose moral sensibility had deteriorated from the effects of generations of venomous anti-Semitism...
...By the mid-thirties anti-Semitism was so established a fact of life that on one occasion Him-mler could cavalierly say to a squad of E insatzkommandos (soldiers who were assigned to mass murder Jews and other "enemies" of the Third Reich): "Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing...
...Hitler said this before the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, a prophecy which turned out to be two-thirds accurate...
...Readily apparent are the years of Irving Halperin, Professor of English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, is the author of MESSENGERS FROM THE DEAD: LITERATURE OF THE HOLOCAUST...
...In 1942 and 1943, trains carrying Jews for "resettlement" were kept running to the death camps instead of to the Eastern battle-front, where they were urgently needed by the Germany army...
...Bilge on the Jew as Devil, parasite, profiteer, corrupter, defiler, vermin, the deadly enemy of the German people, was to be commonly heard not only in the beer hall, at public meetings and on sports fields but on the campus as well...
...To iberlebyn (survive), to hold on and holdout, was for them a kind of religious obligation...
...their suffering, he felt, had made them the "possessors of noble virtues...
...In dry, spare and lucid prose, it first tells the story of why and how Hitler and his National Socialists rose to power and then describes the tragic fate of European Jewry in the Final Solution...
...The level of scholarship and the immense scope of this study— its documentation comes from an overwhelming number of sources in many languages — are remarkable...
...Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology...
...But noble virtues were not enough to save the ghetto populace...
...While he was being taken off by ox-cart to the crematoria, the great Jewish historian, Simon Dubnow, is said to have cried out: "Jews remember...
...Being so light," Eliezer, the narrator, says, the boy struggled for more than a half hour, "dying in slow agony...
...It became more important for this grotesque to gas and burn Jews than to win the war...
...I have often been a prophet in my life and was generally laughed at...
...meticulous investigation, interviewing and synthesizing that went into this authoritative study...
...Dawidowicz's study is, of course, primarily concerned with historical evidence...
...He declaimed on Lebensraum, but what obsessively fed his psychopathology was the notion of a Europe, if not a world, which was Judenrein...
...Being so light . . ." These words tear into the reader's insides like a bayonet...
...As he wrote in Mein Kampf, the final objective of anti-Semitism must be "the removal [Entfernung] of the Jews altogether...
...The voices that are heard in such well-known works as Elie Wiesel's novels and essays, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, Donat's The Holocaust Kingdom, Anne Langfus' The Whole Land Brimstone, and Leon Wells' The Janowska Road...
...and the forthcoming TAKING THE RADICAL RISK...
...Particularly instructive is her examination of some representative material from the tens of thousands of anti-Jewish books, essays and pamphlets which began appearing in Germany from the 1880's on...
...it could not hold out against the enemy's tanks, howitzers, flame throwers, field artillery...
...Lucy S. Dawidowicz, professor of history at Yeshiva University, is one of those who remembers and writes...
...And one more thing 1 would like now to state on this day remarkable perhaps not only for us Germans...
...And elsewhere in his diaries he entered a report about a child who went mad and screamed: "I want to steal, I want to rob, 1 want to eat, I want to be a German .'' Having masterfully elucidated, in what may be the distinctive contribution of The War Against the Jews to the literature on the Holocaust, the Final Solution's historical and intellectual origins, Mrs...
...HERE I AM: A JEW IN TODAY'S GERMANY...
...Not long after Himmler made this hideous statement his SS were involved in the killing of two million Jews in Poland and Russia...
...that vast body of literature which resonates with the voices, the sentiments and passions of individuals imprisoned in the ghettos and concentration camps...
...Thirty years later, Mrs...
...Other Jews were herded into closed ghettos, like the one in Warsaw where the historian Emanuel Ringelblum observed that "the most fearful sight is that of freezing children . . . dumbly weeping in the street with bare feet, bare knees, and torn clothing...
...Dawidowicz examines some responses to the Final Solution by those who were trapped in the closed ghettos...
...Indeed, the presence of such poignantly rendered specification in survivor literature deepens and makes more concrete the reader's sense of loss over the destruction of European Jewry...
...During my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my prophecies that 1 would someday assume the leadership of the state and thereby of the entire Volk and then, among other things, achieve a solution of the Jewish problem...
...Today I will be a prophet again: If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bol-shevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe...
...How was it possible that such a deranged man was chosen by the German people, with its history of towering achievements in culture and civilization, to lead them...
...the Final Solution had top priority...
...Despite their daily fare of fear, hunger and exhaustion, they organized self-aid groups, operated soup kitchens, provided food, drugs, clothing and medical aid for the needy, educated their children in underground schools, tenaciously worked at anything they could to stay alive...
...And The War Against the Jews ends with the destruction of the thousand-year-old rich and uniquely creative culture of East European Jewry...
...Dawidowicz's thesis: for Hitler, war against the Allies and the annihilation of European Jewry were one and the same...
...They came to believe that brotherhood, community solidarity, is what makes men human...
Vol. 1 • September 1975 • No. 3
