Auschwitz - 60 Years After: Rabbi Judah Newberger
Liberation - a strange word to utter in the same breath with Auschwitz. Liberation 60 years after. It is true that 60 years ago the Auschwitz extermination camp saw the entry of Soviet soldiers and that, I suppose, technically amounts to liberation. But what arid who was liberated? The surviving wretched refuse of that teeming factory of death? Some even survived their liberation. Some even went on to live.
I submit that liberation is too hopeful, too optimistic a term when we speak about Auschwitz.
What words do we use? What word do we use when some survived and over one million perished? Just there, just in that one factory of death. O it was the biggest. But there was Treblinka with its 800,000 dead, and Bergen Belsen, and Mauthausen, and Chelmno, and . . . a veritable network, the factory system of mass production of horror that defies and defiles even now, 60 years later.
And the countless shtetl communities, and the forests, and the pits, and the Gestapo cellars. So I suppose it is convenient to seize upon Auschwitz: the train tracks approaching the very last stop, the mocking "Arbeit Macht Frei," Work Makes Free, work liberates . . . from life. We need pictures. We need a focus. We need movies. We need Spielberg. If we can seize upon Aushwitz and understand its design, in conception and execution. If we can do that and not step back so appalled. If we can say: What hath Man wrought? What was done here? Why was this permitted? Why didn't what then passed for civilization do something - anything - to stop this?
Answers anybody?
Well if we have come this far, then we know that our work is still cut out for us 60 years later. Auschwitz is evil incarnated, so finely focused that it took the world's collaboration to make it work. If we still do not understand, then we have not yet been liberated.
The Holocaust memorial just dedicated in Germany is an exotic affair of the abstract and the informational. Thousands of stone blocks in a meandering maze. It says nothing or it says everything, depending upon who you are. That is the genius of abstraction. Fortunately it does include an informational display, because the Shoah was not, unfortunately not, a mere abstraction. It was real. If one wishes to know, there are lots of facts.
Sometimes I fear abstractions, flights of poetic invokings of G-D and goodness and evil and motherhood. We need that, but we also need to know. And then, perhaps, we will understand why, 60 years after the greatest act of evil in the annals of humanity, a British university association could find nothing better to do, in its collective academic wisdom, than to boycott Israeli universities and Israeli scholars. Do I dare to utter this in the same breath with Auschwitz and liberation? O yes, I do. Boycott the Jews for daring to live! The arc of evil has not yet reached its end. You see, my brothers and sisters, gathered together this evening on Staten Island in this blessed land in G-D's greater universe, 60 years later we are still not liberated. The stench of Auschwitz - of hatred - of bias - of sheer injustice - of utter lack of empathy with our humanity - still burns strongly in the air. The boycott of Israeli universities is one example among many of the continuing curse of Jewish redundancy, our chutzpah for daring to fight back against those who would finish the job of Auschwitz.
We will be liberated only when we who are called human, all of us on this little globe, can truly look back in anger, and in anguish, and with a supremely justified and righteous indignation. To be a Jew - To be a Human Being - To be a Mensch - is to believe that day will come.