THE “FINAL SOLUTION” AND THE JEWISH AND GYPSY “PROBLEMS”

by Ernest VINUREL

Ernest Vinurel is a member of the Bureau of the AJHL (Association des Juifs de l’Holocauste et de Libération — Association of Jews of the Holocaust and Liberation).

Historians of the Shoah find themselves in the situation of the student who rushes into the yeshiva crying “I have found the answer!! Who has read the question?” Historians know the “final solution,” but they have only hypotheses to put forward concerning the “Jewish problem” and the “Gypsy problem” that this “solution” was meant to resolve. We know little about what was said during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, in the course of which a group of German experts worked out the implementation of the “final solution” to these problems, a solution that had been decided upon by the highest authorities of the Third Reich. There was no written record, and the participants who could be questioned, such as Eichmann, were not forthcoming on the subject.

The “problems” themselves were certainly not discussed there, nor the necessity, nor the urgency of the “solution,” for these lay outside the participants’ remit. What began at the Wannsee Conference was only the best, fastest, most efficient means of achieving it. It is fairly certain that the “solution” to the Gypsy problem was raised at the same time as that for the Jews, for their implementation was identical and simultaneous. After my arrival at Auschwitz, I was transferred to Birkenau, to the part of the camp called “Zigeunerlager” [Gypsy camp], where tens of thousands of Roma — men, women, children, and the elderly — were already penned in.

Once the moment of their extermination had been decided, they were, just like the Jews, crammed into the same gas chambers, “passed” through the same chimneys of the crematorium ovens, and their ashes scattered in the same places. We know perfectly well the various stages leading up to the “final solution” as regards the Jewish community, thanks to numerous studies by historians, in particular that of Raul Hilberg, La destruction des Juifs d’Europe (The Destruction of the European Jews), regarded as a reference work. As regards the Gypsy community, nothing or almost nothing has been undertaken to answer the questions posed in connection with the Jews in general: “why and how.” Since the solutions were identical, the problems must also have been identical, give or take.

Why have the Gypsies been so little spoken of?

Why have the Gypsies been so little spoken of? Was it out of indifference or out of a deliberate will to obscure the Gypsy tragedy? Probably both. Out of indifference, because the Gypsies always lived on the “margin” of society (in the literal sense of the word). They would settle outside the built-up areas, for an indeterminate period; they would disappear, move on further off for no apparent reason, amid general indifference. Their arrival or their departure did not disrupt the life of the villages or the towns.

Unlike the Jews, who lived within the built-up areas, who had there their houses, their shops, their workshops, their synagogues, the Gypsies possessed nothing and left no “void” behind them when they disappeared. Moreover, they had no organization with either the will or the capacity to alert public opinion; they did not interest the media; they had no one to take charge of their defense, or to intervene in their favor in however small a way. During and after the war, the Gypsy problem seems to have been deliberately obscured as well. On the plane of History they were “a nuisance.”

Each time an attempt was made to construct some hypothesis or other to answer the question “why” the Jewish genocide, and each time one tried to hoist the “why the Gypsy genocide” onto the same scaffolding, the latter inevitably collapsed. No explanation seems to answer both problems at once. The first question one asks is why “here and now?” Why did the events unfold in the 1930s and why in Germany?

Logically, objectively, of all the countries of Europe, Germany was the country least predisposed to the events, unique in their horror, that became a reality there. We know that during the First World War, contrary to the Second, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies were welcomed by the Jewish population of Poland and Galicia as liberators. Those armies put an end to the oppression of the tsarist regime, organizer of bloody pogroms, which repressed every Jewish political and cultural organization.

The Deutsche Kulturkreis

Indeed it was under the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation that Jewish newspapers, Yiddish literature, and Jewish organizations resurfaced and functioned in complete freedom. It was within what was designated by the term “Deutsche Kulturkreis” [German cultural sphere] that writers from Kafka to Zweig, musicians from Mahler to Kurt Weill, scholars from Einstein to Freud, financiers like the Warburgs and the Oppenheimers, politicians from Rathenau to Liebknecht, were able to make their contribution to the society of their time, more or less unhindered. In his study La déraison antisémite et son langage (Antisemitic Unreason and Its Language), J.-P. Faye, on the basis of testimonies, can assert that in 1925 a Jew was safer in the streets of Berlin than in those of Warsaw. At a time when in most European countries an “ordinary antisemitism” was rife, in Germany antisemitism appeared marginal. Historians still give no satisfactory answer to this “why.” The argument most often advanced is that the number and the standing of the Jews within the German whole, which appeared excessive, out of all proportion, would have prompted their rejection by that society. They would have crossed, to use an expression still in use even today, “the threshold of tolerance” — an abstract notion, unmeasurable, undefinable, unscientific, which explains everything and nothing. This notion, by which one attempts to explain the exclusion and the hatred of the Jew, is absolutely inapplicable to the Gypsies. The latter had no role in any domain of German society, neither in science, nor in the arts, and above all not in finance and industry. And yet Gypsies and Jews shared the same fate. To explain their elimination solely on account of their socio-economic role is therefore not enough, and their problem does not necessarily lead to the final solution.

The religious aspect of the genocide

As regards the religious aspect of the genocide, one expression keeps recurring, and that is “Kiddush Hashem” (sanctification of the Name). It is found in the “El Malé Rahamim,” the prayer recited at every commemoration of the Shoah. It is also used when referring to the victims of the genocide. The notion of “Kiddush Hashem” means that the victims were placed before the alternative of abjuring their faith or accepting death, and that they would have chosen death. In the time of the Crusades, the Jews of the cities of Worms, Regensburg, Ulm, etc., were dragged into the churches and ordered to accept baptism or be put to death. For those who refused baptism, their death had this meaning; likewise in the fifteenth century, during the Inquisition, the Jews who refused to abjure faced death under the sign of “Kiddush Hashem.”

The one who believed in heaven, the one who did not

Nothing of the sort during the Shoah. When they made us climb into the wagons for Auschwitz, no one asked us whether or not we believed in God. I was there with my father, a Hasid of the Wisznitzer Rebbe, and with our neighbor Harvath, who had just been pulled out of the prison where he was serving his sentence as a “communist agitator.” They were selected together, the old Hasid and the old communist, the one who believed in heaven, the one who did not. I am convinced that my father, in his last moments of lucidity, was reciting the “Shema,” or perhaps “Eli, Eli… lama azavtani” [My God, my God, why have you forsaken me]; as for Harvath, it was a revolutionary song that he was murmuring.

In Hungary there was a category officially designated “Christian Jews,” whom the ecclesiastical hierarchy tried in vain to spare from deportation in the name of the sacred character of the baptism they had received. Can one speak in their regard of “Kiddush Hashem”? The only ones who deserve that title, because they freely chose their death, are Mordechai Anielewicz and his fighters. “Hashem,” the Name, signifies in this instance not God but Man. There was no “Kiddush Hashem” during the genocide, and it is all the more horrible for that, being gratuitous, without reason.

Another explanation advanced by the religious is that the Shoah was a divine punishment, consequent upon the Jews’ abandonment of the teachings of the Torah. To illustrate this thesis, I will cite a parable I heard on Radio J, expounded by a certain Haïm: “Two Jews are talking in a concentration camp. It is normal that I should be here, says one, for I did not observe the Sabbath, nor kashrut, I did not say my prayers, I was a sinner. But you who have always practiced the mitzvot, you were a tzaddik, you were not a sinner — why are you here? I am here for your sins!” My father would therefore have died on account of the sins of Horvath or of my own. That is to say that the Shoah was the repetition of Sodom and Gomorrah.

God, transforming himself from El Malé Rahamim (God of mercy) into El Kana Venokem (God of vengeance), chastised the chosen people for having broken the covenant, having forgotten the practice of the mitzvot, rejected the Torah. According to the theory “of punishment,” more widespread than one might think, the genocide was a “problem” between God and his people, and Nazism played merely the role of executant: the decision was divine. In that case the genocide stands outside place and outside time. It could have unfolded anywhere and at any time, the moment the threshold of “divine tolerance” had been crossed.

By contrast, one cannot detect any religious motivation in the Gypsy genocide. They were not part of the chosen people, they were not the people of the “covenant”; they were not bound to the practice of the mitzvot. Moreover, they professed the same religion as ethnic Germans, and often with even greater fervor. So one cannot have recourse to religious motives either to understand the “why” of the two genocides, Jewish and Gypsy.

The theories of Hannah Arendt.

At the opposite pole from explanations of a religious order stands the explanation that claims to be scientific (scientistic, J.-P. Faye would say). The representative of this tendency is unquestionably Hannah Arendt. Just as the Drumonts and the Maurrasians referred to the youthful works of Bernard Lazare, tinged with antisemitism, which he subsequently rejected entirely, so the neo-Maurrasians of every stripe refer to Arendt as “above suspicion” of partiality because of Jewish origin. Paradoxically, the two explanations, that of the religious and that of the scientists, start from the same premise and, by a different — indeed opposite — line of thought, arrive at the same conclusion, namely the inevitable logic of the genocide. Both start from the idea that one must from the outset reject the “scapegoat” thesis, which dispenses with examining the “responsibilities,” or at the very least the co-responsibility, of the victim.

H. Arendt situates herself in the position of the angels of the Divine Comedy, who were neutral in the quarrel between God and Satan. She has sympathy neither for the one side nor for the other. “Sine ira et studio” [without anger and without bias], she writes. The idea of the “scapegoat,” according to her, would mean that the genocide could have struck any minority community at random. “It is tempting to return to an explanation that absolves the victim of all responsibility,” she writes in her study on Antisemitism, then she adds: “this group — the Jews — in becoming the victim of the injustice and the cruelty of the world, does not cease to be CO-RESPONSIBLE.” She proposes to demonstrate that the child selected for the gas chamber was co-responsible along with Mengele. She considers, like Le Pen, that the genocide is only a “detail.” “The persecutions and the Nazi work of extermination could appear to a statistician as an absurd acceleration of a process that was in any case probable.” Arendt claims to be able to situate scientifically the moment that triggered the “final solution,” and for this she makes use of historical analogies, of more than fanciful comparisons.

She identifies the situation and the role of the Jews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with that of the aristocracy of the eighteenth. “Tocqueville shows that the French people hated the aristocrats because the rapid loss of their power was not accompanied by an equivalent decline in their fortune. In the same way, antisemitism grew exacerbated at the moment when the Jews had lost their public functions and retained only their wealth.” It should be noted that Arendt, like antisemitic authors in general, always uses, while denying them all individuality, all personality, the expression “THE Jews” or, more serious, “THE Jew.” “THE cosmopolitan European Jew becomes an object of universal shame on account of his useless wealth.” She sees the Jews in two poles only: that of Jud Süss and that of Shylock. The plutocrat and the usurer. “Wealth without power and a haughty attitude are felt to be the privilege of useless and intolerable parasites,” she writes. If it is intolerable, it is because one could no longer tolerate. There is the “why” whose answer is “the Wannsee Conference.”

As regards the motivations of Hannah Arendt, a student of Jaspers, for endorsing in advance through her writings a whole pack of revisionists, one is reduced to conjecture. One may suppose that the ambiguous relations — and not only on the intellectual plane — that she maintained with Heidegger, and the unambiguous relations that the latter maintained with Nazism, led Arendt to adopt such more-than-questionable positions. To paraphrase Malraux, “to understand is to forgive” — an observation that can also be taken as a warning: in wanting, against all logic, to understand Nazism, in decreeing the co-responsibility of the victim, she was in fact pleading for forgiveness toward Heidegger, who exercised over her a veritable fascination.

But these theses developed about causes and effects — in other words, the role and the attitude of the Jews in society, which would have had their extermination as its result — she does not attempt to apply them to the Gypsies; indeed, it is inapplicable. If the effects are identical for the two communities, that is to say their extermination, there is no possible comparison as regards the causes. The Gypsies were never “holders of power” of any kind, they never held “wealth,” and they never had a “haughty attitude” such as Arendt attributes to the Jews. There is no Gypsy Süss and no Gypsy Shylock, neither in history nor in literature. One may add that there was no hatred toward the Gypsies but contempt, as is proved by the testimony of Höss, commandant of Auschwitz — which did not prevent him, when the orders to exterminate reached him, from striking them down “without hatred and without anger, like a butcher.”

The Marxists and the Shoah.

The Marxists, and in particular the communists, were never able to ingest or digest racism (of which antisemitism — declares A. Memmi — is a racism specific by its object). They entrusted the antiracist struggle (a struggle whose necessity appeared to them only intermittently; at other times they used racism for political ends) to “mass movements” of the MRAP or Antifascist Committee variety. They did not know how to insert it into what they regarded as the “engine of history”: the class struggle. Class against class conformed to Marxist theory, but when the combat took on the appearance of race against race, this phenomenon contradicted the sacrosanct theory. The Stalinist principle was applied: “when reality contradicts theory, it is reality that is wrong,” so reality had to be obscured. This is what they systematically practiced. There was no antiracist education, no antiracist pedagogy; it was considered “off topic” in a way. On the monuments dedicated to the victims of fascism, the dead never appeared as Jews or Gypsies but solely as citizens. In the people’s democracies, more studies were done on the extermination of the American Indians than on that of the Gypsies, for whereas the Indian genocide could be given an explanation with a Marxist connotation — spoliation of lands, appropriation of the riches of the subsoil — for the Gypsy or Jewish genocide there is nothing of the kind. Marxism and Leninism are in the impossibility of giving an explanation consistent with their own theory.

One can find no similarity between the Jewish and Gypsy “problems,” on any plane, neither social nor economic, nor religious, nor historical. If one could find at least a single point in common, one might deduce that this was the necessary and sufficient condition from which the implementation of the “final solution” followed. But this is not the case, and one finds oneself in the impossibility of answering the essential question of “why” — essential if we are to be able, in the future, to avoid the repetition of the genocide. Despite everything, there is one common element, present in the two genocides, and that element is racism. This is the necessary and sufficient condition for any phenomenon of genocide in the course of history.

It is not some Jewish or Gypsy problem that lies at the basis of the Wannsee Conference, but the problem of racism. It is the racist who has “problems,” and not the Jewish or Gypsy communities. Moreover, whatever the behavior of the latter might have been, it would have changed nothing in the behavior of the racist. “The pathological excrescence of the antisemite’s brain” — in the words of the Christian philosopher Jacques Maritain — would not have disappeared. Here we come to the thesis of Sartre. Sartre alone answers the troubling question of “why.” In a period of economic prosperity and social peace among racists, “the bonfire of fagots or of stakes where our enemies, or those designated as such, roast keeps a good warmth going for the collective soul” (Albert Memmi). In a period of economic crisis, the racist too enters into “crisis,” into hysteria even, and for the bonfire “stakes” no longer suffice him; he needs fagots, and on the pyre victims, that is to say scapegoats.

Any minority group whatsoever.

Any defenseless minority group can play this role. Any group can play the role of the Jew. The Jew is the one for whom the conditions of “the Jew” are made. The famous phrase attributed to Göring, “It is I who decide who is a Jew!”, has the same meaning. In a period of crisis, of war, “the collective soul” needs a pyre, and it is certain that Nazism, after carrying through the final solution of the Jewish and Gypsy problem, would have sought other “problems” requiring a “final solution” to feed the pyres. J.-P. Faye advances the hypothesis that if all the extermination camps were located in Poland, it is because the Polish Untermenschen were next on the list. The local “authorities” installed by the Germans increasingly took on the characteristics of Judenräte. No ethnic or cultural minority is safe from the consequences of “unreason.” To the classic joke “we must exterminate the Jews and the cyclists! Why the cyclists?”, one can affirm that in a milieu of “car fanatics,” the question would be: why the Jews? Given the probable persistence of the crisis in the world, the generator of “problems,” what can be done? There is pedagogy, education, necessary if only from a moral point of view, but alas, the results cannot be as rapid as the situation and the dangers demand. Racism belonging to the domain of the irrational, rational arguments take hold there only with difficulty. It is not possible to prove to someone who does not like tomatoes that the tomato is not bad.

The State of Israel as a specifically Jewish defense.

Albert Memmi defines the immediate objectives that exposed minorities must have: “each determined category will have to organize specifically the defense of its existence” (De l’antisémitisme — On Antisemitism). One may consider that one of the specifically Jewish defenses is the State of Israel. Every Jew, consciously or unconsciously, whether proclaiming it or denying it, knows in his heart of hearts that Israel constitutes a rampart — fragile, to be sure, but a rampart all the same. At the time of the Entebbe operation, of the Falashas, of the Russian Jews, every Jew, wherever he was, acknowledged “hine lo yanum velo yishan shomer Israel” (for he neither slumbers nor sleeps, the keeper of Israel). But unfortunately, the Gypsies are not on the verge of obtaining a State where they would be protected by laws and a power of their own. Their situation deteriorates constantly. To the old contempt is added hatred. In the countries of Eastern Europe, they are now assaulted, physically hunted down. The Jews, who have the memory of their exclusion, of their persecutions shared down the centuries with the Gypsies, ought to commit themselves more massively and more intensely to their protection. The “Zigeunerlager” of Auschwitz-Birkenau must not fade from memory. □