THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

stories of the Chosen People, the people with a history of its own.For many, the Shoah is the deep abyss between the magnificent Jewish past andthe wretched world that we saw when the gates of Auschwitz were forced open.“The Shoah is a different planet,” K. Zetnik testified at the Eichmann trial. “Wechanted the Yizcor prayer,” wrote a young Israeli girl in a diary on her visit to Polandand the extermination camps, “I was crying, and I saw a group of youngsters fromabroad. They didn’t look Jewish to me. What were they doing here? Why are theydesecrating the holy? . . . In the evening, when we sat and summed up the day’sevents, I did not ask anymore. I said they should have no part in our Auschwitz . . .Everyone agreed.”For the non-Jew, the Shoah is a chapter among chapters, a trauma among theother European traumas. It resides in history alongside Napoleon, Versailles, Lenin,Spain, World War I and the divided Germany after World War II. Historians attemptto join the past’s fractures into a logical sequence, to connect the Jew to the German,the European, and the universal. But the Jewish narrative collects testimonies andmemories, painstakingly adding details. Our facts. Life in the shadow of trauma doesnot allow room for a bigger picture to emerge—that of the universal context ofhatred and its origins, of dictatorship and tyranny, of the history of genocide, not justthe Jewish genocide. “Two people emerged from Auschwitz,” wrote ProfessorYehuda Elkana, a wise man, a Shoah survivor, and an early mentor to me, “a minoritythat claims ‘this will never happen again,’ and a frightened majority that claims: ‘thiswill never happen to us again.’” 6Although the Shoah was, and still is, an opportunity to join the Jewish people withthe other peoples, we have not yet honored the invitation—on the contrary. Whateverthe reason, we joined ranks with the indifferent nations that stand by. How differentare we now from the other nations who stood by while we were being slaughtered?Late in the 1980s, the Israeli writer Boaz Evron wrote the following soberingopinion:I am willing to bet that if we had a border with Nazi Germany, andGermany turned against a minority within it, and we had good traderelations with it, we would have acted as the worst among them. Wewould have collaborated in the hunt of minorities such as the Poles