In response to:

The Life of Death from the December 19, 1985 issue

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1987/jan/29/the-life-of-death-an-exchange/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Shahak

STTPML Commentary: There are no “Holocaust Deniers” at STTPML. Quite the opposite: many of us have studied the Nazi and other Holocausts intensely as not only are there lessons to be learned as history does not repeat itself but it does echo, but also some of the same forces responsible for the Nazi and Japanese and Italian Holocausts, and/or their legacies, are still alive and well in the U.S., British and other Western National Security States. To properly honor the memories and barbarism suffered by the victims of Nazism, ALL the victims must be remembered as victim denial–all victims are equal, none is more equal than others–and selective remembrance of certain lessons and not others, not bringing forth all the facts including the uncomfortable ones, are also forms of Holocaust Denial.

To the Editors:

I would like to make three rather extended observations about the essay by Timothy Garton Ash, “The Life of Death” [NYR, December 19, 1985], dealing with the film of Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, and his and Lanzmann’s opinions about the carrying out of the Holocaust and their suggestions as to its “nature.”

I am myself a survivor of the Holocaust: I was born in Warsaw (the subject of a large part of the essay) and was in the Warsaw Ghetto almost till the end; then after various adventures that included a period of time “on the Aryan side,” as it was called then (that is, being hidden by a Polish Catholic family and helped by other Poles). I finished in Bergen-Belsen where I spent nearly two years. I think that being a child of nine to twelve years old during the crucial part of those experiences (1942–1945) helped me to understand them afterward better than could those who were fully grown up; and of course children under such experiences grow up and mature beyond their formal age, without however losing a part of the openness to strange things which is one of the advantages of youth. In numerous talks in Israel with many survivors of similar experiences, of more or less the same age, I have found a confirmation of my opinions.

In the first place I think that Garton Ash and, even more, Lanzmann before him do not want to understand the behavior of those who either tried to lead a “normal” life, disregarding, so to say, the mass murder that went on around them, or of those who actually helped in some secondary capacity to carry out the work of extermination, because both of them limit themselves, completely and absolutely, to the consideration of the Poles and disregard completely, or, one can say in the case of Lanzmann, willfully, the fact that many Jews had exactly the same attitudes. Let us take the Warsaw Ghetto. Before the beginning of the actual extermination in the summer 1942, when of course the extermination of Jews in the other cities was known to many including the children (especially after the news came of the extermination of the Ghetto of Lublin) the life went on exactly as usual, exactly as in Polish Warsaw during the extermination of the Warsaw Jews.
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