Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

352 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:341
I also spoke briefly of my 1961 Berlin encounter with Dean Heinrich
Grüber and our discussion of God and Auschwitz. My view reduced itself
to a stark either/or: either there is a biblical God of History, covenant and
election, Auschwitz is God’s handiwork, and Hitler is the twentieth century’s
preeminent Nebuchadnezzar—or Auschwitz was the dire consequence
of German power and abject Jewish powerlessness. If the latter is
the case, as indeed I believe it to be, then we live in a universe utterly
devoid of divine providence. Put differently, we live in the world of the
death of God, by which I do not mean atheism—but that is an issue for
another time.
Elie did not attempt a logical rebuttal. Instead, he told tales of faith and
doubt in the Kingdom of Death. Admitting his own doubts, he nevertheless
offered an emotional, overwhelmingly powerful affirmation of faith and
fidelity in a miserably broken world. The issues expressed in that encounter
are as alive today as they were at that first Scholars Conference.
In the essay, I cited Hannah Arendt’s 1951 observation that after
Auschwitz “the only rights an individual has are those he possesses by virtue
of his membership in a concrete community that has the power to guarantee
those rights.” I have long held that position. Clearly, the victims of
the Shoah had no such rights, and paid the ultimate price. I again quoted
Arendt, who wrote that at the end of the war, the Italian government offered
all Jews on Italian soil full Italian citizenship. Almost all declined. They
understood that in times of stress, citizenship as a minority in a European
nation-state might prove as worthless to them as it had to the Jews of
Germany.
The sad wisdom of those Holocaust survivors was validated in a July
8, 2008, interview by Francesco Cossiga, from 1976 to 1992 Italy’s minister
of the interior, prime minister, president of the Senate, president of the
republic, and senator for life. In that interview, published in the Italian daily
Corriere della Sera, Cossiga revealed the existence of an agreement dating
from the early 1970s between prime minister Aldo Moro and Yasser
Arafat’s PLO in which the PLO was granted the freedom to come and go,
as well as stock weapons on Italian soil, in exchange for immunity for
Italy’s domestic and foreign interests. Cossiga admitted that Italian Jews
had been excluded from protection. The results were soon forthcoming. On
October 9, 1982, six terrorists fired on members of Rome’s Great Synagogue,
wounding dozens and killing a two-year-old child; the congregation’s
police protection had been withdrawn several hours before the attack.
There were other such attacks that Cossiga commented on. One of the
worst was the Strage di Bologna, in which 85 were killed and 200 wounded.
Italian authorities blamed neo-fascists, but in his interview Cossiga
acknowledged that the railroad station explosion at Bologna was accidental