Problems Unique to the Holocaust

Harry James Cargas

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813143644
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del Holocausto

Victims of the Holocaust were faced with moral dilemmas for which no one could prepare. Yet many of the life-and-death situations forced upon them required immediate actions and nearly impossible choices. In Problems Unique to the Holocaust, today's leading Holocaust scholars examine the difficult questions surrounding this terrible chapter in world history. Is it ever legitimate to betray others to save yourself? If a group of Jews is hiding behind a wall and a baby begins to cry, should an adult smother the child to protect the safety of the others? How guilty are the bystanders who saw what was happening but did nothing to aid the victims of persecution? In addition to these questions, one contributor considers whether commentators can be objective in analyzing the Holocaust or if this is a topic to be left only to Jews. In the final essay, another scholar assesses the challenge of ethics in a post-Holocaust world. This singular collection of essays, which closes with a meditation on Daniel Goldhagen's controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners, asks bold questions and encourages readers to look at the tragedy of the Holocaust in a new light.

The Moral Dilemma of Motherhood in the Nazi Death Camps

DAVID PATTERSON

ANY MORAL JUDGMENT of the actions undertaken by inmates of the Nazi death camps must begin with an acknowledgment of our tenuous position as judges in such matters. Those of us who have not seen the inside of the sealed trains, who have not been covered with the ashes of our mothers and fathers and children raining down from the sky, who have not known the collapse of human significance and human sanctity—in a word, those of us who comfortably abide in the world without having known the horror of the anti-world—can hardly presume to peer into these souls under assault and make moral pronouncements upon them. Indeed, those people whom we here consider operate in a realm that is empty of the concepts and categories that normally shape our moral judgment. Why, then, undertake such an inquiry? The aim is not so much to vindicate or to condemn those caught in the dilemma as to approach a deeper understanding of their moral turmoil and its implications for a deeper understanding of the Event itself. For the concern with ethics is ultimately a concern with metaphysics. And an exploration of the moral dilemmas peculiar to the Holocaust reveals the singularity of some of its metaphysical dimensions.

The moral dilemmas and the metaphysical dimensions of the Holocaust converge in the Nazis’ assault on the mothers of Israel, which is an assault on motherhood itself. In November 1941, for example, Emmanuel Ringelblum noted in his diary that “Jews have been prohibited from marrying and having children. Women pregnant up to three months have to have an abortion.”¹ In the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, Germaine Tillion recalls, “the medical services of the Revier were required to perform abortions on all pregnant women. If a child happened to be born alive, it would be smothered or drowned in a bucket in the presence of the mother.”² (Yes, in the presence of the mother!) And in the death camps pregnancy was neither a medical condition nor a blessing from God—it was a capital crime. This onslaught against motherhood, this “conjunction of birth and crime,” Emil Fackenheim rightly points out, “is a novum in history.” It bespeaks a unique aspect of the Holocaust in the murder not only of human beings but of the very origin of human life and of human sanctity. “The very concept of holiness,” argues Fackenheim, “must be altered in response to the conjunction, unprecedented in the annals of history, of ‘birth’ and ‘crime.’”³ And with the unprecedented conjunction of these categories there arises within the death camps a singular, unprecedented moral dilemma, a dilemma that is itself part of the assault on motherhood: is there a moral justification for killing an infant to spare the mother the capital punishment for her capital crime?

To grasp the implications of the dilemma and its metaphysical dimensions, we must understand exactly what is targeted in the destruction of motherhood. To fathom what this destruction meant to these Jewish mothers, we should first consider the significance of the mother in the Jewish tradition. And, since there is no mother without a child, we should also say a few words about the significance of the child within the tradition.

In his commentary on the Torah, Rashi (1040–1105) explains that in Exodus 19:3 the phrase “House of Jacob” designates the women, the wives and mothers, among the Israelites, while “House of Israel” refers to the men.⁴ And why is the House of Jacob mentioned in that verse before the House of Israel? Because, according to the tradition, it is only through the wives and mothers gathered at Sinai that humanity is able to receive the Torah, the very thing that sustains the world. Thus tied to the Torah, which is called the “Tree of Life.” the mother is fundamentally linked to the origin and sanctification of life.

Pursuing this connection further, we note that the first letter in the Torah is beit, which is also the word for “house.” And the notion of a house is associated with the Patriarch Jacob, as Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh points out: “At the level of Divinity, the house symbolizes the ultimate purpose of all reality: to become a dwelling place below for the manifestation of God's presence. Not as Abraham who called it [the Temple site] ‘a mountain,’ nor as Isaac who called it ‘a field,’ but as Jacob who called it ‘a house.’”⁵ Since the Talmud maintains that blessing comes to a man's house only through the wife and mother of the home (Bava Metzia 59a), the sanctity of the home is linked to the wife and mother, who sees to all the affairs of the household. Hence the wives and mothers of Israel are known as the House of Jacob. They are as essential to the center of life as the Temple itself, tied directly to “the ultimate purpose of all reality,” as Rabbi Ginsburgh says. This being the case, we see that, through her tie to the beit in which the Torah originates, the mother is both the foundation of the Torah and the center of the dwelling place. For there is no dwelling in the world without the Word, without the Torah, that comes from God. That is why we refer to God as Hamakom, or “the Place”: God is the place of dwelling. Thus linked to the Creator and the dwelling He makes possible, the mother lies at the origin of Creation and the center of the dwelling.

Now the Torah is not only in the world; it precedes the world and serves as the basis for the creation of the world. “As the Sages have said,” notes Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, for instance, “before Creation, God looked into the Torah and made the world accordingly. By which it is implied that the Torah is the original pattern, or inner form, of the world: Torah and world are, inseparably, a pair.”⁶ Through her association with the Torah, the mother is bound to Creation itself. Bearing in mind the identification of Jewish mothers with the House of Jacob, we note that this principle is stated in Leviticus Rabbah: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to His world: ‘O My world, My world! Shall I tell thee who created thee, who formed thee? Jacob has created thee, Jacob has formed thee.’”⁷ This ancient truth finds expression in more modern times through the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who states, “Compassion is at the root of all Creation,” for compassion or mercy is at the root of motherhood.⁸ An insight from Emmanuel Levinas comes to mind in this connection. “Rachamim (Mercy),” he points out, “goes back to the word Rechem, which means ‘uterus.’ Rachamim is the relation of the uterus to the other, whose gestation takes place within it. Rachamim is maternity itself. God as merciful is God defined by maternity.”⁹ From the depths of this mercy, human life begins to stir, and with it all of creation unfolds.

In the Zohar this metaphysical significance of the mother in the Jewish tradition finds a mystical expression: “First came Ehyeh (I shall be), the dark womb of all. Then Asher Ehyeh (That I am), indicating the readiness of the Mother to beget all.¹⁰ Begetting all, the Zohar further teaches, the Supernal Mother begets all of humanity: “The [Supernal] Mother said: ‘Let us make man in our image.’”¹¹ This association of the mother with the Creation, moreover, links the mother to the Covenant, since, according to the Torah commentary of the thirteenth-century sage Nachmanides, brit or “covenant,” is a cognate of bara, which means “created.”¹² Because the mother is thus tied to the Covenant of Israel, she is connected to the chosenness of Israel, which in turn distinguishes the greatness of Israel. Therefore it is said in the midrash on the Song of Songs that “the greatness of Israel” may be compared “to a woman bearing child.”¹³ The bearer of Creation and Covenant, the mother bears life into the world, just as she bears life upon the birth of a child. Why? Because, as the bearer of Creation and Covenant, she is the bearer of the Torah, and the Torah, in turn, signifies God's Presence in the world. From that presence life derives its meaning and its sanctity, its substance and its sense.

In this connection the sixteenth-century mystic Yitzhak Luria once asked, “If Binah or Understanding, which is associated with the Mother, is a mental process, why is it said to be in the heart, and not in the head?” To which Aryeh Kaplan replies, “The heart is actually the Personification of Imma-Mother, which is Binah-Understanding, where She reveals herself.”¹⁴ If we may be allowed a moment of our own midrash, we observe that the lamed and beit that end and begin the Torah form the word lev, meaning “heart.” Therefore it is upon the heart that the teaching is to be inscribed (Deut. 6:6), for the heart is the receptacle of the Torah. Thus, says the twelfth-century sage Abraham ibn Ezra, “all precepts written in the Torah, transmitted by tradition, or enacted by the Rabbis aim at perfecting the heart.”¹⁵ Who is personified by the heart, making possible this perfection at the very core of life? The mother: she whom the beit situates at the beginning of the Torah signifies the sum of the Torah in her personification as the lev or the heart of all things.

What, then, comes under assault in the Nazis' calculated destruction of mothers and motherhood? The tradition tells us: God and Torah, Creation and Covenant, everything that sanctifies our dwelling in the world and our bringing life into the world. One can see why the women of the camps would strive so desperately to save the life of a mother; one can see exactly what they struggled to preserve. But what do they kill when they kill a child to save that life?

In Deuteronomy Rabbah Rabbi Judah the Nasi, the redactor of the Mishnah, declares, “Come and see how beloved are the children to the Holy One, blessed be He. The Sanhedrin were exiled but the Shekhinah did not go into exile with them. When, however the children were exiled, the Shekhinah went into exile with them.”¹⁶ Recalling that the Shekhinah, or the Divine Presence, is a feminine entity—indeed, the Talmud suggests that it is a maternal entity (see Kiddushin 31b)—one immediately envisions a loving mother attending to her little ones even as they are sent into exile. Why the extreme urgency of her concern? Because, it is taught in the Talmud, “the world endures only for the sake of the breath of the school children” (Shabbat 119b). For on the breath of the children, both in prayer and at play, vibrates the spirit of the Shekhinah herself. Thus, says the Zohar, “from the ‘breath’ which issues out of the mouth the voice is formed, and according to a well-known dictum, the world is upheld only by the merit of the ‘breath’ of little school children who have not yet tasted sin. Breath is itself mixture, being composed of air and moisture, and through it the world is carried on. Esoterically speaking, the breath of the little ones becomes ‘voice,’ and spreads throughout the whole universe, so that they become the guardians of the world.”¹⁷ Not by might but by spirit the world endures as long as it attends to the “voice” that speaks from within the breath of the children, from the first breath they draw.

Is that breath, then, to be suffocated to save the mother? Is the mother herself not destroyed as a mother with the suffocation of that breath?

One begins to sense the gravity of the moral dilemma that confronted the women in the death camps when they were forced to choose between saving a mother or losing both mother and child. If the mother dies with the child, then perhaps she at least dies as a mother. But if she lives at the expense of the child, does she remain a mother? If not, then the dilemma itself goes into the Nazis' destruction of the mother.

“Mommyyy! Where are you? Mommy!” a voice cries out from the depths of the Event. “They are killing my mother! Everybody, listen! Can't you hear? Oh, Mommy! Oh, God, they are killing my mother!”¹⁸ And another voice, the voice of memory, recalls, “The scent of spring wasn't delicious. The earth didn't smile. It shrieked in pain. The air was filled with the stench of death. Unnatural death. The smoke was thick. The sun couldn't crack through. The scent was the smell of burning flesh. The burning flesh was your mother.”¹⁹ These lines require no commentary. In these voices from the death camps reverberate the outcry of a people and a world overwhelmed by the Nazis' assault on the mother.

This assault on the mother, however, was not initiated in the death camps. It began in the ghetto. On February 5, 1942, for example, Vilna Ghetto diarist Herman Kruk wrote “Today the Gestapo summoned two members of the Judenrat and notified them: No more Jewish children are to be born. The order came from Berlin.”²⁰ Six months later, in his diary from the Kovno Ghetto, Avraham Tory noted, “From September on, giving birth is strictly forbidden. Pregnant women will be put to death.” Recalling the significance of the mother in the tradition, we realize that when a pregnant woman is put to death, more than a mother and her babe are murdered, physically and metaphysically. This point becomes even clearer when on February 4, 1943, Tory laments, “It was terrible to watch the women getting on the truck; they held in their arms babies of different ages and wrapped in more and more sweaters so that they would not catch cold on the way [to their death] !”²¹ Exceeding the horror of slaughtering pregnant women, it seems that the Nazis waited until many of these mothers held their babies in their arms before murdering them and their infants with them.

What are these mothers to say that would declare their love to their little ones as they wrap them in another sweater to keep them from catching cold on their way to the cold and the darkness of a mass grave? There is no reply to such a question; every attempt to reply is transformed into a crescendo of horror. And the horror that overwhelms Tory oozes from the words of Yitzhak Katznelson when he cries out, “These mothers with babes in their wombs! This murderous German nation! That was their chief joy! To destroy women with child!”²² It was their chief joy because it was an expression of their primary aim; it was the joy of those who bask in the satisfaction of a job well done.

Since a mother is a mother by virtue of a certain relation to her child, the assault on the mothers of Israel included an assault on that very relationship, an assault not just on the body but on the being of the mother, an ontological assault. We have seen a variation of this onslaught in Tory's account of the women who wrapped their little ones in sweaters as they were being taken to a mass grave. In his diary Josef Katz records a similar incident, one related to him by a woman from the ghetto in Liepaja. “When the SS surrounded the ghetto,” she told him, “I thought our last hour had struck. I took my little children and dressed them in their woolen socks and their best little dresses. I thought my children should be nice and warm when they go to their deaths.”²³ Nice and warm: one might take this to be an example of the invincibility of a mother's care for her children, but it cannot be understood in such a manner, since a mother's care is a care for life. In the world of humanity a mother dresses her children “nice and warm” for a cold winter's day, not for their last day. Here, then, not just the mother but the loving relation that makes her a mother is twisted out of the world and turned over to the anti-world.

Hence the condition of the orphan becomes the definitive, ontological condition of the Jew. In this condition we see a man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Can Betrayal Ever be Legitimate?
• The Moral Dilemma of Motherhood in the Nazi Death Camps
• Holocaust Victims of Privilege
• Suicides or Murders?
• Holocaust Suicides
• Victims of Evil or Evil of Victims?
• Medicine in the Shadow of Nuremberg
• Is Objectivity Morally Defensible in Discussing the Holocaust?
• Indifferent Accomplices
• Intruding on Private Grief
• Christians as Holocaust Scholars
• Art after Auschwitz
• Reflections on Post-Holocaust Ethics
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index
• A Note on Harry James Cargas