Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

Homeland/Home 3
medical experiments were done on Gypsy children in Auschwitz and all of
those children died. Living without written language, Gypsies have no
written history and no written memory. The past—Auschwitz, for instance—
comes into songs; but facts and the landscape of experience get
lost. Without writing, memory becomes narrowed, smaller; isolation puts
the Gypsies far outside the great conversation, ongoing through centuries,
about meaning, hope, and homeland. Wanderers, vagrants throughout
Europe— the cohesiveness and integrity of the Gypsy way of life destroyed
by the Nazis— the children operate in gangs to rob tourists or
anyone vulnerable, circling an individual to get the money, sometimes
beating or killing the victim. The Gypsy women beg on the streets of
Paris, Vienna, Rome, Berlin. Can a people survive without memory; or
without writing; or without history; or without recognition under international
law, these survivors of genocide? Can a people survive stateless,
with no homeland— ou topos, Utopia, no place?
After Hitler’s war, the. Jewish survivors also had no place. “I thought
about all that could be said regarding these two words: return, repatriation,
” writes Jorge Semprun in Literature or Life? “The second one made
no sense when applied to me, of course. First of all, I hadn’t returned to
my homeland, in coming back to France. And then, if you thought about
it, it was clear that I would never again be able to return to any homeland.
I had no native country anymore. I would never have one again. Or else
I’d have several, which would amount to the same thing. Can you die—
think about it— for several countries at once? ”12
The Jews had not known, before the war, that they were stateless, with
no meaningful citizenship, with no country. As Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
writes in Original Sins: Reflections on the History o f Zionism and Israel, “A
Jewish community existed in Germany without interruption for 1, 700
years before World War II. Jews settled in the fortified cities built by the
Romans on the west bank of the Rhine. In Cologne there was a well-organized
Jewish community in 321 C . E. and the Rhine Valley was the center
of a glorious cultural tradition. ”13 Arguing for the maintenance of a
convent for Polish Catholic nuns at Auschwitz (against Jewish opposition),
Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski writes about the long history of Jews in
Poland: “The Jews lived in Poland side by side, rather than together with
the Poles, and therefore many Poles could and did regard them as a nation
within a nation. The description of the Jewish community, which had
lived in Poland continuously for 800 years, as 'alien’ can be understood
only in such a context. ”14Nevertheless, Jews and Poles had a lot in com­