The origins of modern genocide, as well as its long-term consequences, are thus deeply rooted in a history of metaphors of evil or, perhaps, of evil metaphors claiming to be history. The Israeli case presents only one important aspect of the discourse on persecution and victim-hood that has become a central feature of our century. It is no coincidence that, while some Israelis have seen the Palestinians as the incarnation of Nazism, Palestinians have presented themselves as the Jews of the Middle East and some anti-Israeli speakers have compared the Israelis to the Nazis. Whatever the shortcomings of her thesis, Arendt’s argument on the elusive nature of victimhood, complicity, and crime provides an important insight into the larger context of the Holocaust. For it is not only an event that defies conventional interpretations but one that has been appropriated by many groups yet ultimately belongs to us all.
The Holocaust has been used to justify the unjustifiable; it has served as a measuring rod for every other atrocity, trivializing and relativizing what would otherwise be unacceptable; it has created an image of an enemy so monstrous that it can be employed to demonize all other enemies (as being the same) or to let them off the hook (as being not as bad); it has created an image of victimhood so horrific that all other suffering must be diminished in comparison or inflated to fit its standards. Itself the product of the idea of elusive enemies, the Holocaust has by now been repeatedly mobilized to perpetuate victimhood, even as attempts to save its memory from oblivion have been presented as providing an alibi for the avoidance, negation, and continuation of evil everywhere else in the world.
What makes the event so maddening, so frustrating, so resistant to human understanding and to ordinary empathy and emotion is the elusiveness of its perpetrators and victims. The perpetrators are elusive because of the bureaucratic and detached manner in which they organized genocide (even if it was ultimately carried out by run-of-the-mill sadists or quickly brutalized “ordinary men”); the victims are elusive because the vast majority of them disappeared without a trace, and the few who survived for many years found it almost impossible to recount their experience, not only because humanity would not, and could not, accept the sheer horror of the event but also because they themselves were torn between the urgent need to recount the tale and the terror of plunging into infinite despair by evoking it once more. What is so devastating about the Holocaust is that there can never be any acceptable relationship between the crime and the punishment, between what humanity has been able to imagine and what it has wrought upon itself. This was already evident during the postwar trials, where the murderers of thousands, having been given a public hearing, were often let off with the lightest of punishments, while their victims had no voice at all. It was manifested by the necessary normalization of both the perpetrators’ and the victims’ existence, accomplished by repressing the memory and erasing the traces of a past that could not be assimilated into the present. It was, finally, established through the decision that life must continue after the apocalypse. And, as a result of this seemingly inevitable process, much that had been at the root of the original evil has persisted beyond its enactment and extended into the present. Hence the spectacle of victims being accused of complicity in their own destruction, of perpetrators enjoying a prosperous postwar respectability, of shattered, disjointed, and guilt-ridden memories of survivors, for whom the categories of victim and perpetrator as we understand them cannot have the same calming effect, cannot order the past into those convenient distinctions that we wish so much to draw in retrospect. For the final and most tragic legacy of the Holocaust is that even the few who survived know that they could have just as easily joined the endless rows of the “drowned,” yet at the same time they are burdened by the sense that they owe a debt to the murdered they can never repay, the debt of their own lives. This is the atrocity after the event; for while so many perpetrators have neither paid for their crimes nor suffered from guilt, the “saved” are doomed to remain their own unrelenting enemies, struggling with the memory and vision of their death for the rest of their tortured lives.
In his last collection of essays, The Drowned and the Saved, published shortly before his apparent suicide, Primo Levi describes his reaction on hearing from a friend he met after being liberated from Auschwitz that his survival was the work of Providence:
Such an opinion seemed monstrous to me. It pained me as when one touches an exposed nerve, and kindled the doubt I spoke of before: I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another; I might have usurped, that is, in fact, killed. The “saved” of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good, the bearers of a message: what I had seen and lived through proved the exact contrary. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the “gray zone,” the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were none, nor are there certain rules in human matters), but it was nevertheless a rule. I felt innocent, yes, but enrolled among the saved and therefore in permanent search of a justification in my own eyes and those of others. The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died.