The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust

ONE

PROLOGUES: POLITICS, ART AND THE PLUNDER OF ART BY THE NAZIS

Let us begin where so many of the foundation stones of Western civilization are laid—of which the Third Reich might be called the antithesis , even as in self-conception it was the culmination of Western civilization—Rome. As in so many other areas where they offer new turns to earlier developments, the Romans do so in the matter of the plunder of art as a prerogative of victorious warriors and the political, as opposed to merely aesthetic, context of such plunder. I am thinking of Lucius Mummius. After his victory at Corinth, in 146 BC, this rough-hewn Roman general carted the most wonderful of votive decorations and other works of art back to Rome. ⁹ In Rome’s unique contribution to this field of endeavor, Mummius is the first individual known to us by name who plundered artworks as a war-victor. ¹⁰

He is also the first we know by name whose desire for such trophies had little to do with their intrinsic artistic worth: it was in order to impress others (and himself) with the notion that he was a cultured warrior that he carted such booty away. Actually, Mummius was so uncultivated that when, on the capture of Corinth, he was contracting for the transportation to Italy of the masterpieces of painting and sculpture of the greatest artists, he made a stipulation that if pieces were lost the carriers would have to make good by supplying new ones—as if his workers would be able to find, recognize or make them; as if a great work of art has no individuated aesthetic or other kind of value.¹¹

While Mummius was the first wartime plunderer known to us by name, he was certainly not the last. As we follow the unfolding of Western civilization down the centuries, others follow. Pre-eminent among such figures was Napoleon, who emulated the Romans in bringing Egyptian antiquities to Europe—all the way to Paris. In this as in other ways, he saw himself as the continuation and revival of the Caesars, and accordingly cultivated an Empire style that echoed Roman and other august ancient styles. He also took artworks from the Italians and even from Rome itself along the way. He was certainly an equal-opportunity thief, reaching out into Germany and Austria for his booty as well.

In the twentieth century, however, Napoleon had an emulator who exceeded him in art plunder as in general ambitions. Adolph Hitler was similarly imperial in self-conception and modeled the scope of his political intentions after the Roman Caesars. His goal was to create an enduring world-encompassing Reich. Hitler justified his looting of specifically French museums and private houses, in part, by asserting that he was taking back from France what had been removed to France by Napoleon 150 years earlier. But Hitler not only outdistanced his predecessors in sheer volume of theft, he dwarfed all predecessors combined as an art-plunderer.

As in so many other horrifying ways, it is said that one-fifth of the world’s art—hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of precious objects, from silverware to sculpture—changed hands during World War II.¹²

Nazi plundering also differed in being so meticulous and detailed. In the hands of Alfred Rosenberg, whose Institute articulated the Nazi distinctions between superior and inferior races,¹³ and of Herman Goering, whose tastes were broad and whose appetite for objets d’art was insatiable, squads of looters were organized. The process had been an evolving one. In the first place, a rigorous distinction between legitimate and degenerate art was already being shifted into place by the end of Hitler’s first year as Chancellor.¹⁴ What Hitler regarded as defeatist, leftist imagery that had dragged Germany through the Weimar years; works that looked unfinished to his banal eye (such as impressionist or fauvist paintings); and individuals associated with making or exhibiting them, were already being removed from places and positions of prominence by late 1933.

At the Nuremberg rally of 1934, the Fuehrer would refer to modernists such as cubists, futurists, dadaists and the like as full of twaddle. They will see that the commissioning of what may be the greatest cultural and artistic projects of all time will pass them by as if they never existed.¹⁵ In an analogous context, the Nazi Party’s mouthpiece, Goebbels, would ban art criticism by 1936.

From now on, he would assert on November 27, "the reporting of art will the take the place of an art criticism which has set itself up as a judge of art—a complete perversion of the concept of criticism which dates from the time of the Jewish domination of art [my italics]… In the future only those art editors will be allowed to report on art who approach the task with an undefiled heart and National Socialist convictions.¹⁶

In the same year that racial distinctions led to the deprivation of citizenship rights for Jews and several other groups, it should not be a surprise that there was an obvious, key flaw (this is hardly the only contradiction in Nazi thought, word or behavior) in Goebbels’ statement. There would indeed be art criticism—harsh criticism—of any and all that did not conform to the aesthetics championed by the Fuehrer and his circle. By 1940, as the Reich expanded, its leaders began to apply the principle of non-rights to the growing circle of occupied territories. By 1941, Rosenberg’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) had been empowered to create a task force to organize wholesale looting throughout countries conquered by the German armies.¹⁷ The ERR staff worked independently of, but in the same places as, the German army, systematically stripping museums and galleries, families and individuals. They sought artworks for the Fuehrer, who preferred eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Northern European landscapes and portraits¹⁸—mostly of decidedly second-rate quality, which suggests that as an art critic and not just an art-plunderer he shared ground with Lucius Mummius; for other important members of the Nazi hierarchy, like Goering, Goebells, Himmler and Von Ribbentrop; for ERR higher-ups; for German museums; or to be traded or sold for other artwork; or, by 1943, to replenish the armament supplies which were beginning to diminish.

But in what can be called the true spirit of Lucius Mummius, the overriding purpose for the accumulation of art was related to status and a sense of political self-assertion. The possession of art was the emblem of being civilized, not barbarous, just as the ability to decree which art was appropriate reinforced the apparently ever-needed sense of being in control.¹⁹

Countless works from French collections were removed and brought back to the fatherland. Avant garde works—Picasso, Braque and the like—considered degenerate by Nazi ideologues, were traded or sold. Slavic works, products of an inferior race which itself was to be enslaved, were by and large destroyed.²⁰ Where Jews and any art that had any Jewish connection were concerned, confiscation for destruction or trading and selling was prescribed.

This method applied not only to works by Jewish artists, but even to works by an admired artist like Rembrandt, which offered an unacceptable, too-Jewish or Jewish-seeming subject: Jacob Wrestling the Angel, or The Jewish Bride, for instance. Jewish ritual objects, of course, were mostly consigned for destruction, like the Jews themselves—though as with nonart possessions and even body parts (such as gold teeth), any Jewish objects of precious metals that could be melted down or otherwise put to use, were confiscated but not destroyed.

By way of further strangeness, the Nazis gathered an enormous number of Jewish ritual objects, paintings, and musical instruments throughout Bohemia and Moravia. Rather than being destroyed, the subjects were preserved for an exhaustive museum planned in Prague, of an extinct race.²¹ Its purpose was also political: the more significant the enemy, the more impressive the victory. The more rich and extensive the range of Jewish ritual objects, the more valid the powerful Nazi effort to destroy the Jews and Judaism.

The Prague showpiece corroborated Hitler’s claim asserted a decade before he achieved power, in Mein Kampf (a claim that did not, of course, originate with him), that the Jews were powerful and a threat to others: the bigger the museum, the more apparent Hitler’s heroism at having saved humanity from that horrific threat. This project was also the other side of Hitler’s sweetest personal ambition—his dream, for which he had himself made numerous sketches during the previous few years—to build the biggest museum (its contents limited to approved art) that the world had ever seen, in Linz, Austria, his hometown, which he would transform into a German Budapest: another part of making a forceful statement that his was a civilized, and not merely a militarily, impressive regime.²²

Precision and volume in this escapade were made possible, in part, by the able and willing assistance that the ERR and its network obtained from various dealers and curators. Lists of precisely who had what, from the handful of artworks in a bourgeois household to the substantial collections of renowned gallerist Paul Rosenberg, were assiduously compiled by an army of accomplices.²³ If the collection of a major French Jewish gallery owner like Rosenberg, or a significant private collector, like the Baron de Rothschild, was hidden, there always seemed to be someone who knew where it was hidden and could aid the Nazi looters in locating it. Dealers like Fruccio Asia from Ancona and Carl Buemming from Darmstadt; the notorious Gustav Rochlitz and equally nefarious Dr Haberstock who shuttled between Berlin and Paris and between Paris and Switzerland—even Dr. Otto Foerster, Director of the Richartz Museum in Cologne (in other words, respected members of the museum community, and not only commercial dealers)—were particularly useful.²⁴

By the end of the war the cultural landscape of Europe had experienced a major earthquake. And there were serious after-tremors, for the plunder of art didn’t end when spoliation by the Third Reich collapsed. On the one hand, the Soviet armies that swept across Poland and into Germany toward the end of the war were accompanied by trophy squads that often took from the Nazis what the Nazis had looted from their victims; the Soviets termed this war reparations.²⁵ With the subsequent closing of the Iron Curtain, tens of thousands of private and public ownership mysteries would lose any chance of being solved, at least until the late 1990s.

On the other hand, albeit on a presumably much smaller scale, it is difficult to know how many thousands of little objects (and occasionally valuable drawings or paintings cut from their frames and rolled up for easy transport)—like small souvenirs removed by tourists from archaeological sites—were brought or sent back to America by GIs, after the war. Perhaps the most stunning instance of this form of souvenir thievery concerned a GI in the 87th division, Lieutenant Joe Tom Meador. He removed twelve priceless liturgical works from a cave near Quedlinberg, Germany, and shipped them back to Texas.²⁶

The tangle of all of this, dumped into the lap of the victorious allies after the war, must have been excruciatingly complex. An initial collecting point was established in Marburg and then a much larger one in Munich, and subsequently other collecting points were added, into which, in theory, everything that the American, British, and French were able to take control of, was sent. By April, 1946, a total of 23,117 items had been logged into Munich, while 5,149 items—lots actually, representing 8,284 objects—had been returned. The Wiesbaden summary of December, 1950 reported that, since the setting in place of the return mechanism, some 340,846 items had been restituted: but again, each item is really a lot, so the number of objects is much higher. For instance, one item listed was a library containing 1.2 million objects; another item contained 3 million. As of that date, there were still some 100,000 items in the storerooms awaiting distribution—and more would come in during the last two years of occupation.²⁷

A Commission—the American branch of it was known as the Roberts Commission—was formed toward the end of the war. It was comprised of a handful of art experts from the United States, England and France, who did their best in the few years of the Commission’s existence to return what they could of innumerable misplaced works of art and artifact to those from whom they had been taken—or to their surviving heirs.²⁸ But given the time and resources available, this primarily meant returning objects to the countries from which they had been taken and leaving it up to the individual governments to restore those objects to museums, galleries, and private families. There was no unified effort to consider the points of origin to which tens of thousands of art-object-trails might ultimately lead back.

Each country, from the USSR to Hungary to France to the United States, differed with respect to the energy and integrity with which restitution efforts were made internally. Eastern Block countries were inclined to nationalize everything, leaving individual former owners with nothing. Certainly a work taken from Hungary and returned to Hungary, for example, would unquestionably be nationalized: the family from which it came would simply be out of luck.²⁹ Austria kept what it wanted from the Rothschild family holdings, while generously allowing surviving family members to leave with a handful of token items.³⁰

France made strenuous efforts to return art initially, ultimately stranding the last 2100 unrestituted paintings in the National Museums for lack of claimants and the resources (or will) to seek them out. Thus a Rembrandt stolen from France—or the work of a third-rate, little-known painter—returned to France might or might not get any further than the French National Museums, whether it came from a Museum, from the collections of Paul Rosenberg, or from some member of the bourgeoisie who possessed a dozen works of art, none of them overly distinctive. The United States simply assumed that no Nazi-plundered art had ended up here. Few people wondered and worried about cultural property that, in the course of the war, with Europe’s art markets functioning in a limited manner, but those in this hemisphere, particularly New York, operating at a feverish pace, had already ended up in American museums and private collections.

One of the interesting aspects of this phenomenon is that the documents recording the return of cultural property to a given country indicate how thoroughly eager the allies were to divest themselves of the property and the responsibility of possessing it. As an object was transmitted by the Americans, for instance, to French or Belgian or Polish hands from one of the sites into which cultural property had been gathered for the purpose of an organized redistribution, the recipient signed a document indicating that s/he would not hold the government of the United States further responsible for the disposition of the object.³¹

Indeed, all of this was happening within the shadow of an ongoing debate as to whether all of the Allies should be conscientiously taking art from the Germans as a form of reparations, as the Soviets were clearly, (if unofficially), already doing. Sumner Crosby of the Roberts Commission observed that a number of his American colleagues favor the use of works of art as a basis for reparations, arguing that the United States does not wish to claim such material recompense as industrial equipment or labor. In fact [my colleagues] say there is little in Germany that the United States wants unless it is art or cultural property. On the other hand, the United States must prove to the world that we have no intention of fulfilling Nazi propaganda and that we are sufficiently civilized not to engage in looting ourselves.³² Given the issues prompting Nazi plunder, there is some irony in the American concern to show that we are civilized in not doing what other victors, since before the time of Lucius Mummius, have done, and in particular in the decision not to plunder those who outdid all plunderers before them, and whose goal in plundering was largely related to their desire to represent themselves as culturally informed and civilized.

Meanwhile, the Cold War was slowly setting in. This meant not only that cooperation between East and West on this, as on other matters, was coming to be all but eliminated, but that the issue of art restitution—indeed the very memory of the Holocaust—was shifting well off center stage. The atmosphere in the West was not one in which obsessing about stolen art would be favorably received by governments who felt much more threatened by the Communist present than the Nazi past. Indeed, an America in which the State Department’s Operation Paperclip made it possible for former Nazis who were deemed potentially useful against the Soviets to bypass normative immigration procedures to come to this country, was hardly an America in which inquiries into Nazi-plundered art would receive much interest or encouragement.³³

Moreover, survivors themselves were not overly eager to relive the horror of that era: their primary concern was to reshape and move forward with their lives. They were thus less than enthusiastic about wrestling with pre-Holocaust and Holocaust demons, including the reclamation of lost property, however precious in financial or emotional terms. And after the Commission was closed down, the mountains of documents with which it had dealt were classified in the various European and American archives as secret, making it almost impossible for all but the most determined and politically-skilled researcher to obtain information. The Holocaust and its various aspects, as pieces of history, were slipping into a pool of willful forgetfulness.

The pool would widen and deepen for the twenty years that followed and begin to shrink thereafter, for reasons that will later be told.³⁴ The waters of forgetfulness surged through a door opened by the Nazis, who sought to obliterate the very memory of those they sought to destroy (rather than merely destroying them), and to use art as a cornerstone of their political pretensions. That door remains opened more than half a century after the Nazis were defeated. Never before or since in history and art history has art been relocated on such an enormous scale for purposes of ideology and self-aggrandizement. Through the door of Nazi ambitions were forced not only visual art, which has been the focus of this brief prologue, but music and theatre and any other arts that might have served the regime in deluding its victims, deceiving its enemies, and convincing itself that it was other than what it was.

Beyond the vast amount of material that was destroyed, there remains much that is still missing, perhaps hidden. There have also been many objects that have been relocated and, in the last several years, a growing volume of objects that have finally been returned to the places from which they were removed so many decades ago. That story—of the drying of the pool of forgetfulness and the closing and re-opening of the door of Nazi art depredation—is another story for another day.³⁵

TWO

WORDS, GOD AND MEMORY: ELIE WIESEL, NELLY SACHS AND PRIMO LEVI ENGAGE THE INEFFABLE

Among the many paradoxes that define the human being, one particularly relevant to the discussion of the Holocaust is this: that, as a species, we are apparently unique in possessing the capacity for the kind of language—words—which no other possesses. Words carry us beyond the ground level to which other species are limited in their engagement, understanding, and description of the world. Yet words are also enormously limiting because there are so many issues both within and beyond this world for which no number of words is sufficient to do those very things: describe, understand, engage. We speak of God as ultimately ineffable—unspeakable, because what God ultimately is is so different and distant from what we are that neither our experience nor our words can possibly do justice to what God is. Yet we also assume that God is somehow nearer to us than our own breathing; and even that God is somehow like us, since God created us and the creation, we further assume, must be a mirror of the Creator.

Jewish tradition refers to the very Name of God as ineffable—unspeakable, because if a name in some sense encompasses the essence of its bearer, then to know or speak God’s name would be somehow to encompass God’s Being. And that is impossible, at least for anyone other than the High Priest, descendant of Aaron, Moses’ brother, while within the Temple precincts. And the Temple was destroyed nearly two millennia ago. God Itself must be ineffable then, in the sense of indescribable, since we cannot know what God truly is.

Even aspects of our own earthbound reality can defy description. Not only the sublime music of Mozart or Schubert and the exquisite accomplishment of Leonardo’s Last Supper— which we can describe in word after word, and yet fall short of fully capturing. But even more so, the horrors that Stalin foisted on millions of people, the inestimable ugliness that Hitler extended from one end of Europe to the other, the complex shaping of programs of massive, intensive and systematic destruction—and the apparent joy in devising ever crueler ways of disposing of others—defies all the words that we might pile up in an attempt to encompass such events.

And yet—in a more complex paradox—we feel compelled to do so. From the novelistic memoir to the poem to the structural analysis—from Elie Wiesel to Nelly Sachs to Primo Levi—words expressing, engaging, recording, describing, seeking to understand, to somehow encompass the Holocaust, have poured out of an endless array of writers and speakers, particularly in the last thirty years. For various reasons it took twenty years after the catastrophe for words to begin to flow,³⁶ but they swiftly became a torrent by the late 1960s. Wiesel and Levi are among the most significant of writers on this subject, and Nelly Sachs did no less than share the Nobel Prize for literature for her poetry that suffers through it. These writers’ respective approaches are as different as the details of their respective experiences must have been, and yet in particularly important ways they interweave like the strands of a single rope.

Wiesel’s Night records the trauma of having been through several camps in the last year and a half of the War, of having watched (in retrospect) his community and its leadership—notably his father—dupe themselves into imagining first that the stories of genocide were false and then that such stories could in any case never apply to them. It follows the demonically sleep-inducing civility of the Nazis arriving into Szighet and the more simply demonic barbarity of the Nazis receiving Jews arriving into Auschwitz-Birkenau; the last glance of his mother and little sister, who would be gassed shortly after arriving, and the struggle, together with a massively demoralized father, to survive; and ultimately, the numbed moment immediately after his father’s death, so shortly before the liberation and the emptiness of that word—liberation—in the contexts of memory and guilt.

Many issues are engaged by the memoir. The ability of people to believe what they want to believe, and the cruel genius of the Nazis at recognizing and exploiting that facet of the human psyche, feeding detail by detail into the illusion that their intentions are not venomous, or, when the illusion becomes blindingly impossible to believe, substituting a secondary illusion: that one’s choices with regard to how to survive—and that if one makes the right choice, one will surely survive—are both real and clear. The enormous weight that those who manage to survive carry with them out of the camps into freedom. Above all, the unaswerable, tormenting question both during and after the disaster: how can such a catastrophe be taking (have taken) place? How can humans do such extraordinary things to other human beings? Where is (was) God in all of this? What kind of a God would allow such things to happen—not just to adults but to children? Thousands and millions of children. Is there a God?

Arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the young Wiesel hears a few sturdy young fellows [with] knives on them, [who] tried to incite others to throw themselves on the armed guards…. But the older ones begged their children not to do anything foolish: ‘You must never lose faith, even when the sword hangs over your head. That’s the teaching of our sages… ’ (40-1).³⁷ That briefly reported dialogue is the beginning of the author’s wrestling match with the issue of choices (later, on the same page: We did not yet know which was the better side, right or left; which road led to prison and which to the crematory…), of acquiescence/non-acquiescence—and above all of faith.

It is a world that is a twisted mirror of the God that is the object of faith. God is a paradox—simultaneously so distant and so near to believers. In turn, God, as Moses reminds the Israelites, created humans with the paradoxic blessing/curse of choice: See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil… therefore choose life, that you may live, you and your seed(Deut. 30:15-19). Arriving at Auschwitz, the descendants of the Israelites are reminded by an SS officer who was look[ing] us over as if we were a pack of leprous dogs hanging onto our lives that …you have got to work. If not, you will go straight to the furnace. To the crematory. Work or the crematory—the choice is in your hands (47).

The notion of choice is mocked by this harangue, since the diet of the inmates has been calculated to make it all but impossible to work and survive beyond a maximum of eight months.³⁸ The choice is really between immediate death and a certain number of months of intense suffering before death.

It is a world so twisted that benevolent actions can yield a malevolent result even as a wrong action, committed for the right reason, still yields a negative result. Eight days into his Auschwitz experience Wiesel’s father is approached by a relative, Stein, hoping for word about his wife Reizel. Wiesel answers in his father’s stead, lying: Yes, my mother’s had news from your family. Reizel is very well. The children too… (52).

In order to give Stein the hope that will enable him to live another day the formerly scrupulously honest young talmudist lies—or rather, becomes part of the long lie that began before the Nazis arrived in Sighet and continues every step of the way to the gas chamber. It is not only a lie because there had been no word from Reizel since 1940, nearly four years earlier, but because although Stein may survive another day, at the very least he will sooner or later find out the truth (that Reizel and the children are dead) and that will kill him. (And there is irony in the fact that Wiesel has not seen or heard news of his own mother since the day they arrived in Auschwitz, much less having heard from her with news of anyone else.)

Should Wiesel not have committed the small sin of lying in the first place? Or was the extra time he bought for Stein worth the lie? Or was it a worthless investment, since eventually Stein did learn the truth and died from it? No easy answers exist to such questions. And is it mere coincidence, remembered precisely by Wiesel or merely the author’s artistry that records this event on the eighth day after arrival into Auschwitz? If that arrival is, in the negative sense, birth into a new life, (a life in death) then on the eighth day a reborn Wiesel joins the Covenant of Lies that, imposed by the community of Nazism, mocks the community of Israel and its sense of Covenant.

More so, the idea is mocked that ours is a world where an absolutely just and all-powerful God is a certainty. Some talked of God, of His mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathized with Job! I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted His absolute justice. (53) Of course the key difference between Job and Wiesel (and those around him) is that Job ultimately received an answer, even if it was a non-answer answer, (asserting the inappropriateness of Job’s question), from God Itself, out of the whirlwind. For those at Auschwitz, the whirlwind brought only the smell of burning human flesh. With Job, we readers stand like gods above the drama, knowing its conclusion and the rewards that come to the hero for his simultaneous steadfastness of faith and questioning. Wiesel may be like Job in the traits of faith he exhibits but not in hearing a response from God or in receiving the reward of double recompense, by any means.³⁹

This is the reality that Nelly Sachs recognizes in her poem, O The Chimneys:

O the chimneys

On the ingeniously devised habitations of death

When Israel’s body drifted as smoke

Through the air—

Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep,

A star that turned black

Or was it a ray of sun?

O the chimneys!

Freedomway for Jeremiah and Job’s dust—

Who devised you and laid stone upon stone

The road for refugees of smoke?

O the inhabitations of death,

Invitingly appointed

For the host who used to be a guest—

O you fingers

Laying the threshold

Like a knife between life and death—

O you chimneys,

O you fingers

And Israel’s body as smoke in the air!⁴⁰

This is the first poem in her first-published post-Holocaust In the Inhabitations of Death (1946)—which is in essence the beginning of the single book comprised of all of her subsequent books of poetry, held together by a thread of unanswerable questions. Her poetry as a whole may be seen as a response to Theodor Adorno. He wrote that one cannot write poetry after Auschwitz—that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.⁴¹ She says—by implication—that you cannot not write poetry after Auschwitz; you must write poetry after Auschwitz. Words cannot capture it; yet we need to continue marshaling words to try to capture even fragments of it. This is, moreover, from a different angle of concern, what Wiesel is preoccupied with: to capture fragments, to remember fragments, lest the fragments dissipate and only the void of forgetfulness remain.

A void from which even the stench of the chimneys is gone. And so, (Sachs chants:) from the crematorium chimneys rises the smoke to which the body of Israel (six million of the Jewish people) has been reduced—whose eponymous ancestor wrestled with God before his name was changed to Israel. His descendants wrestle with God even, perhaps, in the gas chambers that are the prelude to the reduction of their bodies to smoke—and we can imagine this, can we not, by way of Wiesel’s wrestling matches outside the gas chambers and crematoria?

The smoke rises like the ladder between heaven and earth of Jacob-Israel’s first dream—the angels of the patriarch’s nocturnal experience transformed into the disembodied souls of his charred descendants. It rises like the smoke from a burnt offering: the six million sacrificial lambs are carried to a perverse new altar before a different temple from the Temple before which Jeremiah chastised the descendants of Israel, the ancestors of the Jews of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The smoke rises from the death camp chimneys like that from the Temple destroyed by the Babylonians, as Jeremiah had predicted. But that destruction and the exile that came with it had been predicted by the prophet, and bore a direct relationship to the various sins of faithlessness on the part of his fellow-Judaeans.

They—or their descendants, at least—could take some comfort in knowing that their punishment, however severe, had been anticipated and was justified. More than that, they could derive some satisfaction from their exilic transformation. They would come to a fuller understanding of God as universal and not ethnocentric and limited; prayer and Torah would become central to Judaean life, rather than priestly service and offerings—and in the end the exile would come to an end, the Temple would be rebuilt, an independent Judaean state would even come eventually back into being. But who would dare attempt to justify the sacrifice of a million children? What growth, what lesson, what fabulous transformation could one find in Auschwitz? What freedomway was on that road—except by further twist, further perverseness: the infamous Work Makes [One] Free that festooned the gateway into the camp, the gateway into hell?⁴²

The chimney smoke swirls with the dust of incalculable suffering—Job’s dust. But whereas in my flesh shall I see God (as the poet quotes before her poem opens, from Job 19:26)—whereas Job could ultimately find reaffirmation for his faith through his suffering (in part, at least, because in the end God responds directly to him)—what vision of God is accorded to his spiritual descendants as they travel the interior of that circular stone road upward? The one thing not permitted The Satan in his game with God was to destroy Job, but destruction was the one certainty for those who wandered that stone road. Does the poet pun again? Did she know that Rudolph Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, jokingly referred to the railroad tracks leading into his world as himmelweg—heaven’s road—since those who arrived in the cattle cars would inevitably finish their journey on the very chimney-road Sachs describes?

Jobian dust appears and reappears in poem after poem, nowhere more affectingly than in one from Sach’s second collection, Eclipse of the Stars. There the Butterfly is addressed with the words:

What lovely aftermath

is painted in your dust.

You were led through the flaming

core of earth,

through its stony shell,

webs of farewell in the transient measure.

Butterfly

blessed night of all beings!

The weights of life and death

sink down with your wings

on the rose

which withers with the light ripening

homewards.

What lovely aftermath

is painted in your dust.

What royal sign

in the secret of the air.⁴³

The butterfly, slight and beautiful, reborn child of the caterpillar—the worm—and playmate of spring and summer, already dead by fall and winter, is also, as Job reminds us, like all of us, returned to dust as in dust she originated. Israel (Jacob) is dust. Job is dust—each having been afforded far more than three score years and ten to live their lives before being transformed—but their descendants who were led through that flaming core, particularly children, had hardly the chance to do that. How lovely or ugly is that lovely aftermath? Who can say except those who have been? But none of those can return to tell us. Are the sufferers the butterfly, blessed and yet overwhelmed by darkness—the night of all beings, weighted and sinking as they soar through the chimneys in emphatic transience?

They who are disguised as dust are hidden royalty: the royalty of righteousness. Painted in their dust are the letters lamed-vav—the mystical Hebrew letters which numerologically equal 36, the number of the Hidden Just Ones because of whom, in each generation, the world survives.⁴⁴ Those descendants of King David, for whom no savior lifts them out of the flaming core of earth, out of its stony shell, are the saviors of the world. Perhaps.

The layered, expanding questions that torment Sachs from her refuge in Stockholm—the last Jewish poet writing in German—pummel Wiesel, again, when the little boy, the pipel at Buna, is being hanged for alleged complicity in gathering armaments with which to attack the Nazi tormentors.

Where is God? Where is He? someone behind me asked[…]

[…]Behind me I heard the same man asking:

Where is God now?

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows… (71)

There is extraordinary irony here, since the image of the pipel hanging on the gallows cannot help but evoke the image of Christ. But where Jesus is, for Christians, an innocent who is also a God who has chosen to be sacrificed to atone for humanity’s sins in Eden, the pipel is merely an innocent, atoning for nobody—unless one were capable of viewing as a sin (for which he may or may not be guilty, in any case) to have gathered arms for use against the Nazis. Or unless he is to be viewed, with all Jews, as guilty of the failure to accept Christ, with all the concomitants of that failure.⁴⁵ In any case, the self-sacrificing Christian God of love and mercy is as conspicuously invisible as the invisible Jewish God whom Christianity sees as a God of wrath.

As for that God, as Rosh HaShanah arrives, Wiesel writes: "This day I had ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man, Without love or mercy(p. 73)." And as the New Year subsides toward Yom Kippur: …there was no longer any reason why I should fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my bowl of soup, I saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him. And I nibbled my crust of bread (75). But it isn’t that simple, for In the depths of my heart, I felt a great void (75). This is the first intimation for him of the existentialist emptiness that a world in which there is assumed to be no God can be. How many of us can follow Sartre all the way into that void?⁴⁶ For Wiesel, the experience of Night turns that question into one that is both concrete (not abstract) and, as we shall see, life-long. He isn’t Job, ultimately answered and rewarded for clinging to his faith; but neither is he Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov or Camus’ Mersault, for both of whom existence is absurd and the cosmos entirely indifferent to human suffering. Somewhere within Wiesel’s cosmos there is a concerned God.

The question of God underscores all other questions, and follows the protagonist from one end of hell to the other. But the others it subsumes are not insignificant. For in a more immediate sense, whom ought one to blame for this hell? Wherever God is is awfully far away. If it is humankind, that, too, is both a broad abstraction and in any case the consequence of God’s creative impulse (for God created humans and endowed us with free will and certain responsibilities)—and therefore somehow also distant. Even Hitler is a distant abstraction. The Kapo of one’s unit, perhaps. But in the topsy-turviness of such a world, there are even closer individuals, victims who arouse one’s immediate furor. As the Kapo, Idek, begins to beat Wiesel’s father with an iron bar,

I had watched the whole scene without moving. I kept quiet. In fact, I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself, What is more, any anger I felt at that moment was directed, not against the kapo, but against my father. I was angry at him, for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak. That is what concentration life had made of me (61).

For of what use would anger against Idek, much less Hitler, much less humankind, much less God avail him? And one imagines, moreover, that the anger directed toward his father is deeper than that torn and twisted moment, that his father’s failure to be God—to be omniscient, earlier on, rather than to be duped about what was really happening; to be a pillar against whom a boy could lean in the camps rather than a weight leaning against him—helped reinforce Wiesel’s anger. And when his father dies, I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like—free at last! (113)—he, who had adored and venerated his father, who had begun this horrific journey by looking to him as a guide and protector.

This direction of thinking is not without its price. Even earlier, while his father still breathed, and he was advised not to give part of his ration of soup and bread to him, for it’s too late to save your old father, I said to myself. You ought to be having two rations of bread, two rations of soup…. Only a fraction of a second, but I felt guilty (111). When, for the first time in so long, after the Liberation and after surviving food poisoning in the hospital, he sees a mirror, and a corpse gazes back at him, and the look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me (116)—that haunted look includes among the list of its void-filled attributes that of guilt, for having exploded with anger (even if it remained unexpressed inside him) at his father, for having abandoned his father in his heart when his body could not in any case have saved him.

The consequences of this for the narratives written by Wiesel, are profound and long-lasting. In being liberated from the camps, survivors are imprisoned forever in one of two prisons. Either they manage not to think again about their lives before the end of the war, thereby excising large chunks of memory and depriving themselves of one of the most singular of human attributes;⁴⁷ or they can never cease being molested by the questions that Wiesel’s protagonist had first aired in Night. Moreover, the questions take on new and different forms that circle back toward each other again and again with maddening constancy. The question of God becomes the question of humans becomes the question of community and family becomes the question of self becomes the question of God.

One can follow the questions and the guilt, which blossom rather than wilting over time, through the course of Wiesel’s subsequent writing. This occurs most obviously through the second and third volumes of what has come to be treated by publishers and readers alike as a trilogy. For in Dawn we find the same protagonist thinly disguised as the character Elisha wrestling with God and his conscience from a different angle—that of the executioner of a man who deserves to die only because he is on the wrong side of the wrong fence at the wrong time—in which the angle is reinforced in its difficulty by the addition to the equation of Elisha’s specific Holocaust memories. He wrestles with trying to grasp the meaning of being on either side of the killing fence, under any and all conditions. He wrestles with what his parents and teachers who reared him would think of his taking a life, in spite of the circumstances of Palestine-Israel’s need to assert itself, especially in the wake of the Holocaust, and because of the circumstances of the Holocaust through which he lived and they died.

Put another way, he wrestles with what it means to be human in two of