April 6, 2006
“There is No Remedy Against the Language of Truth”
A Lesson from the Holocaust for Us All
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent
At a second-hand book stall in the Rue Monsieur le Prince in Paris a
few days ago, I came across the second volume of Victor Klemperer’s
diaries. The first volume, recounting his relentless, horrifying
degradation as a German Jew in the first eight years of Hitler’s
rule–from 1933 to 1941–I had bought in Pakistan just before
America’s 2001 bombardment of Afghanistan.
It was a strange experience–while sipping tea amid the relics of the
Raj, roses struggling across the lawn beside me, an old British
military cemetery at the end of the road–to read of Klemperer’s
efforts to survive in Dresden with his wife Eva as the Nazis closed in
on his Jewish neighbours. Even more intriguing was to find that the
infinitely heroic Klemperer, a cousin of the great conductor, showed
great compassion for the Palestinian Arabs of the 1930s who feared
that they would lose their homeland to a Jewish state.
“I cannot help myself,” Klemperer writes on 2 November 1933, nine
months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. “I sympathise with
the Arabs who are in revolt (in Palestine), whose land is being
‘bought’. A Red Indian fate, says Eva.”
( 041511/counterpunchmaga)
Even more devastating is Klemperer’s critique of Zionism–which he
does not ameliorate even after Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews of
Europe begins. “To me,” he writes in June of 1934, “the Zionists, who
want to go back to the Jewish state of AD70 … are just as offensive
as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient ‘cultural
roots’, their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world
they are altogether a match for the National Socialists…”
Yet Klemperer’s day-by-day account of the Holocaust, the cruelty of
the local Dresden Gestapo, the suicide of Jews as they are ordered to
join the transports east, his early knowledge of Auschwitz–Klemperer
got word of this most infamous of extermination camps as early as
March 1942, although he did not realise the scale of the mass murders
there until the closing months of the war–fill one with rage that
anyone could still deny the reality of the Jewish genocide.
Reading these diaries as the RER train takes me out to Charles de
Gaulle airport–through the 1930s art deco architecture of Drancy
station where French Jews were taken by their own police force before
transportation to Auschwitz–I wish President Ahmadinejad of Iran
could travel with me.
For Ahmadinejad it was who called the Jewish Holocaust a “myth”, who
ostentatiously called for a conference–in Tehran, of course–to find
out the truth about the genocide of six million Jews, which any sane
historian acknowledges to be one of the terrible realities of the 20th
century, along, of course, with the Holocaust of one and a half
million Armenians in 1915.
The best reply to Ahmadinejad’s childish nonsense came from
ex-president Khatami of Iran, the only honourable Middle East leader
of our time, whose refusal to countenance violence by his own
supporters inevitably and sadly led to the demise of his “civil
society” at the hands of more ruthless clerical opponents. “The death
of even one Jew is a crime,” Khatami said, thus destroying in one
sentence the lie that his successor was trying to propagate.
Indeed, his words symbolised something more important: that the
importance and the evil of the Holocaust do not depend on the Jewish
identity of the victims. The awesome, wickedness of the Holocaust lies
in the fact that the victims were human beings–just like you and me.
How do we then persuade the Muslims of the Middle East of this simple
truth? I thought that the letter which the head of the Iranian Jewish
Committee, Haroun Yashayaie, wrote to Ahmadinejad provided part of the
answer. “The Holocaust is not a myth any more than the genocide
imposed by Saddam (Hussein) on Halabja or the massacre by (Ariel)
Sharon of Palestinians and Lebanese in the camps of Sabra and
Chatila,” Yashayaie–who represents Iran’s 25,000 Jews–said.
Note here how there is no attempt to enumerate the comparisons. Six
million murdered Jews is a numerically far greater crime than the
thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja or the 1,700 Palestinians
murdered by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist allies at Sabra and Chatila
in 1982. But Yashayaie’s letter was drawing a different kind of
parallel: the pain that the denial of history causes to the survivors.
I have heard Israelis deny their army’s involvement in the Sabra and
Chatila massacres–despite Israel’s own official enquiry which proved
that Ariel Sharon sent the murderers into the camps–and I remember
how the CIA initially urged US embassies o blame Iran for the gassings
at Halabja.
Indeed, it is easy to find examples of one of the most egregious lies
uttered against the 750,000 Palestinians who fled their land in 1948:
that they were ordered by Arab radio stations to flee their homes
until the Jews had been “driven into the sea”–when they would return
to take back their property.
Israeli academic researchers have themselves proved that no such radio
broadcasts were ever made, that the Palestinians fled–victims of what
we would today call ethnic cleansing–after a series of massacres by
Israeli forces, especially in the village of Deir Yassin, just outside
Jerusalem.
So what is there to learn from the second volume of Klemperer’s
diaries? Just after he received word from the Gestapo that he and Eva
were to be transported east to their deaths, the RAF raided Dresden
and, amid the tens of thousands of civilians which the February 1945
firestorm consumed, the Gestapo archives also went up in flames. All
record of the Klemperers’ existence was turned to ash, like the Jews
who preceded them to Auschwitz. So the couple took off their Jewish
stars and wandered Germany as refugees without papers until they found
salvation after the Nazi surrender.
Just before their rescue, they showed compassion to three distraught
German soldiers who were lost in the forests of their homeland. And
even during their worst ordeals, as they waited for the doorbell to
ring and the Gestapo to arrive to search their Dresden home and notify
them of their fate, Klemperer was able to write in his diary a
sentence which every journalist and historian should learn by heart:
“There is no remedy against the truth of language.”
Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of _Pity the
Nation_
( N/1560254424/counterpunchmaga)
. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s collection, _The Politics
of Anti-Semitism_
( unterPunch/CounterPunch_Bookshop.html).
Fisk’s new book is _The Conquest of the Middle East_
( 041511/counterpunchmaga) .