Who is a "Real" Survivor?

View from a Height had a very interesting post on Yom HaShoah and some problematic things he heard at a drash recently.

First, he brings up the issue of whether Hitler can be seen as a tool of God, and the difficulties in answering in the affirmative. As VFaH puts it,

To put Hitler in the Tisha B'Av context is profoundly disturbing to people who are the close relatives of victims and survivors, because they saw up-close a monster and a pathological people, not the hidden hand of God's will.

Pretty much, or to people who just can't relate to the Orthodox interpretation of great tragedies being contextualized as "Acts of God". While I understand this is how Orthodox Judaism deals with this stuff-"we can't know God's plan, but as an omnipotent and omniscient God it must be his will"- I personally cannot accept this. I realize full well that my beliefs about God and Judaism are far from Orthodox, but this appears to be a basic fallacy to me- a God that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good cannot kill 6 million people. There is no sin I can fathom that can justify such an atrocity, and various attempts to do so by certain Orthodox leaders (the late Satmar and Lubavitch rebbes, specifically) strike me as nothing less than callous and unconvincing. No God worth believing in would kill 1.5 million children because of "Reform Judaism", or "Zionism"- claims which are all the more problematic given that many of the 6 million were "untainted" Orthodox Jews (and it is a relief that many Orthodox Jews, such as Rabbi Norman Lamm, reject this view). The Chabad rebbe once compared the Holocaust to an operation and God as a surgeon- making the Nazis the scalpel. He argued that if one came into an operating room and saw a man cutting into another, without understanding the purpose, one would be horrified.

This is true, and fair. But it is also a pat answer. What did the Jews do, what sin could they have committed that was so monstrous that 6 million of them had to be killed? Again, I point to the presence of children and Orthodox among the victims. What was their crime? God-as-a-surgeon may work for some people, but for me, any suggestion that God was complicit in the Holocaust makes him a monster. I cannot approach it any other way (this is my larger problem with theodicy as a whole).

VFaH's second point is more interesting, evaluating the different ways in which Israelis and Americans view and remember the Holocaust, as well as the victims themselves.

The less obvious problem is that the Yom HaShoah context isn't the Tisha B'Av context. The Tisha B'Av context is essentially passive when it comes to the outside world. It comes from millenia without a country, without a homeland, and without power. It comes from accepting a subordinate role in the world and in history, one where the primary actors are not Jewish, or Jews acting on behalf of non-Jewish powers.
Yom HaShoah, in Israel, is actually called Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. It, along with Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut (stay tuned for next week) stress the importance of taking positive action, as a people and as individuals, to prevent evil and promote good. This means prayer and study, but also means picking up a gun and defending your country and your family. It is a message that is compatible with, but different from, the message of Tisha B'Av.
I'm afraid that the fact that Israel focuses on the Heroes and that American Jews tend to focus on the Martyrs says something unsettling about American Jewry - that we haven't really overcome the Galut, or Exile, mentality. That we are more comfortable seeing the world through the lens of victimhood than the lens of self-reliance. Which pretty much condemns us to relive that experience, too.

The fascinating, and in my mind problematic, part of this interpretation is that it assumes that the problem with how Americans and Israelis remember the Holocaust is not the trend to try to place survivors in specific categories and to establish preferences of one group over another, but the fact that Americans are backing the wrong group. I would agree that the weak Jew/strong Jew dynamic present in US/Israeli interactions is definitely present in who they choose to assign preferred status to- Americans seem more comfortable with concentration camp survivors, while Israelis seem to be more comfortable with those who "actively" resisted- the ghetto fighters, the partisans, etc. Now you even hear of various rabbis who engaged in forms of "spiritual resistance"- Rabbi Menachem Zemba, Rabbi Kalonymos Kalman Shapira, Rabbi Shem Klingberg of Zaloshitz, the Klausenberger rebbe, etc.

This is fine. But we're kidding ourselves if we think that the Israeli desire to venerate the fighting Jew doesn't have serious consequences, both to historical truth, as well as the human subjects it affects and (potentially) distorts.

The fact that in America it is a taboo for someone who lived through the Holocaust to have been a fighteror a killer, is shameful. I hope that this attitude will change, and sense that it is. Americans are becoming more nuanced in their understanding of how different groups of Jews lived out the war years, including fighters and partisans. The publication of various memoirs (link, link) and documentaries seems to confirm this shift.

It also should be noted that the idea that the camp survivor was "passive" is itself a construction and oversimplification. There might have been some passive people in the camps, but in many cases, the mere act of surviving from day to day required an extremely ACTIVE will to live. To say nothing of the appropriateness of us attempting to judge the justification of a starving, exhausted traumatized person being too passive after years of ghettoization and incarceration.

Tom Segev's "Seventh Million" chronicles a number of particularly disturbing episodes in the Labor Zionists' interaction with survivors after the war, both in European DP camps and then later in Palestine. The survivors were too individualistic, they didn't subscribe to party discipline or to Labor principles about settling the land. Some party leaders even blamed the refugees for their own survival, saying that it was their egoism which had allowed them to live through Auschwitz. Ben-Gurion wrote that "had they not been what they were- harsh, evil and egotistical people- they would not have survived, and all they endured rooted out their souls." Zionists saw the Shoah as a confirmation of their claim that there was no future in exile- an almost divine punishment of the Jews who had chosen to remain behind. Survivors who were neither fighters nor Zionists did not fit into the Israeli model of heroism. This was seen at Eichmann's trial in 1962, where Gideon Hauser hammered witnesses, asking them why they had not resisted being pushed onto cattle cars. Hauser also emphasized Jewish resistance, even when irrelevant to Eichmann, wanting the first major public event commemorating the Shoah to be one that reflected the Israeli paradigm of the fighting Jew.

Israel has, in its own way, also contributed to the delegitimization of survivors. If you were not a partisan, if you did not resist in the ghetto, if, God forbid, you actually engaged in some form of collaboration to try to save yourself or the people close to you, you were viewed as a pariah. This was certainly the case with Chaim Arlosoroff and Rudolf Kastner- have things changed today?

The problem with the American and Israeli models of categorization, IMO, is the fact that they are exclusionary, that they limit who can claim to be a legitimate survivor, and in this way, they also dehumanize the very real people that are being discussed in the first place. The fact that former partisans do not feel that they are seen as "real" survivors in the US is deplorable, but I can't imagine that a similar phenomenon doesn't occur in Israel, where the very name of the Memorial Day only seems to recognize/legitimize Martyrs or Heroes. What about the millions of people who were neither?

Let me conclude with a story: As a Jewish genealogist with roots in Eastern Europe, I have spent a fair amount of time poring over Holocaust-era records. I have confirmed that about sixty-five of my relatives were killed by the Nazis, with another eighty-five or so with fates unknown. That is just from two maternal branches. That is just the ones we know about. In viewing pages of testimony from Yad Vashem, I came across several written by a particular relative. I was shocked when, at the bottom of the page, under the question, "Are you a survivor", he had checked off "NO."

I knew a little about this man. He had been a prisoner at Buchenwald- no small potatoes. But compared to his mother and brothers who had wound up at Auschwitz, I supposed he felt he didn't deserve to be considered a survivor- even though in my eyes, he most certainly was.

This is the real danger that comes with the categorizations. The internalization that somehow, there is only one kind of "right" Holocaust experience- if you weren't a fighter or a partisan, or a docile camp inmate, or whatever, you don't count. I think this way of thinking has to change. For those survivors still with us, and for the generations that are still to come. If we want to engage with real questions of action and resistance, let us. Let us probe all the different kinds of resistance, let us investigate every kind of experience that happened during the Shoah. But this endless division into "good" and "bad" survivors or victims will lead nowhere good, and we should be very wary of rewriting other people's history, especially one so painful, in order to make it mesh with our own political ideologies. Not every person in the Shoah was a fighter, a martyr, or a victim, and these labels seem to exclude and invalidate far more than they inform or contextualize.

There were all sorts of kinds of people, and they did all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, not all of them as noble as we might wish. The sooner we all come to realize this truth and stop retroactively using the Shoah for our own ends, the better.