The Holocaust Industry (8 page)

The point, of course, is not that anti-Semitism is justifiable, nor that Jews are to blame for crimes

committed against them, but that anti-Semitism develops in a specific historical context with its

attendant interplay of interests. "A gifted, well-organized, and largely successful minority can inspire

conflicts that derive from objective inter-group tensions," Ismar Schorsch points out, although these

conflicts are «often packaged in anti-Semitic stereotypes."
28

The irrational essence of Gentile anti-Semitism is inferred inductively from the irrational essence of

The Holocaust. To wit, Hitler's Final Solution uniquely lacked rationality—it was «evil for its own

sake," «purposeless" mass killing; Hitler's Final Solution marked the culmination of Gentile

anti-Semitism; therefore Gentile anti-Semitism is essentially irrational. Taken apart or together, these

propositions do not withstand even superficial scrutiny.
29
Politically, however, the argument is highly

serviceable.

By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American

Jewry from legitimate censure. Arab hostility, African-American hostility: they are "fundamentally

not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action" (Goldhagen).
30
Consider Wiesel on

Jewish persecution: «For two thousand years . . . we were always threatened.... For what? For no

reason." On Arab hostility to Israel: "Because of who we are and what our homeland Israel represents

— the heart of our lives, the dream of our dreams -when our enemies try to destroy us, they will do so

by trying to destroy Israel." On Black people's hostility to American Jews: "The people who take their

inspiration from us do not thank us but attack us. We find ourselves in a very dangerous situation. We

are again the scapegoat on all sides.... We helped the blacks; we always helped them.... I feel sorry for

blacks. There is one thing they should learn from us and that is gratitude. No people in the world

knows gratitude as we do; we are forever grateful."
31
Ever chastised, ever innocent: this is the burden

of being a Jew.
32

The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred also validates the complementary Holocaust dogma of

uniqueness. If The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of the Jews, the

persecution of non-Jews in The Holocaust was merely accidental and the persecution of non-Jews in

history merely episodic. From every standpoint, then, Jewish suffering during The Holocaust was

unique.

Finally, Jewish suffering was unique because the Jews are unique. The Holocaust was unique because

it was not rational. Ultimately, its impetus was a most irrational, if all-too-human, passion. The

Gentile world hated Jews because of envy, jealousy:
resentment.
Anti-Semitism, according to Nathan

and Ruth Ann Perlmutter, sprang from "gentile jealousy and resentment of the Jews' besting Christians

in the marketplace . . . large numbers of less accomplished gentiles resent smaller numbers of more

accomplished Jews."
33
Albeit negatively, The Holocaust thus confirmed the chosenness of Jews.

Because Jews are better, or more successful, they suffered the ire of Gentiles, who then murdered

them.

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In a brief aside, Novick muses «what would talk of the Holocaust be like in America" if Elie Wiesel

were not its "principal interpreter"?
34
The answer is not difficult to find: Before June 1967 the

universalist message of concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim resonated among American

Jews. After the June war, Bettelheim was shunted aside in favor of Wiesel. Wiesel's prominence is a

function of his Ideological utility. Uniqueness of Jewish suffering/uniqueness of the Jews, ever-guilty

Gentiles/ever-innocent Jews, unconditional defense of Israel/unconditional defense of Jewish

interests: Elie Wiesel
is
The Holocaust.

Articulating the key Holocaust dogmas, much of the literature on Hitler's Final Solution is worthless

as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud.

Especially revealing is the cultural milieu that nurtures this Holocaust literature.

The first major Holocaust hoax was
The Painted Bird,
by Polish émigré Jerzy Kosinski.
35
The book

was «written in English," Kosinski explained, so that "I could write dispassionately, free from the

emotional connotation one's native language always contains.» In fact, whatever parts he actually

wrote - an unresolved question -were written in Polish. The book was purported to be Kosinski's

autobiographical account of his wanderings as a solitary child through rural Poland during World War

II. In fact, Kosinski lived with his parents throughout the war. The book's motif is the sadistic sexual

tortures perpetrated by the Polish peasantry. Pre-publication readers derided it as a "pornography of

violence" and "the product of a mind obsessed with sadomasochistic violence." In fact, Kosinski

conjured up almost all the pathological episodes he narrates. The book depicts the Polish peasants he

lived with as virulently anti-Semitic. "Beat the Jews," they jeer. "Beat the bastards." In fact, Polish

peasants harbored the Kosinski family even though they were fully aware of their Jewishness and the

dire consequences they themselves faced if caught.

In the
New York Times Book Review,
Elie Wiesel acclaimed
The Painted Bird
as «one of the best"

indictments of the Nazi era, "written with deep sincerity and sensitivity." Cynthia Ozick later gushed

that she «immediately" recognized Kosinski's authenticity as "a Jewish survivor and witness to the

Holocaust." Long after Kosinski was exposed as a consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel continued to

heap encomiums on his "remarkable body of work."
36

The Painted Bird
became a basic Holocaust text. It was a best-seller and award-winner, translated into

numerous languages, and required reading in high school and college classes. Doing the Holocaust

circuit, Kosinski dubbed himself a "cut-rate Elie Wiesel." (Those unable to afford Wiesel's speaking

fee - "silence" doesn't come cheap - turned to him.) Finally exposed by an investigative newsweekly,

Kosinski was still stoutly defended by the
New York Times,
which alleged that he was the victim of a

Communist plot.
37

A more recent fraud, Binjamin Wilkomirski's
Fragments
,
38
borrows promiscuously from the

Holocaust kitsch of
The Painted Bird.
Like Kosinski, Wilkomirski portrays himself as a solitary child

survivor who becomes mute, winds up in an orphanage and only belatedly discovers that he is Jewish.

Like
The Painted Bird,
the chief narrative conceit of
Fragments is
the simple, pared-down voice of a

child-naif, also allowing time frames and place names to remain vague. Like
The Painted Bird,
each

chapter of
Fragments
climaxes in an orgy of violence. Kosinski represented
The Painted Bird
as "the

slow unfreezing of the mind»; Wilkomirski represents
Fragments
as "recovered memory."
39

A hoax cut out of whole cloth,
Fragments
is nevertheless the archetypal Holocaust memoir. It is set

first in the concentration camps, where every guard is a crazed, sadistic monster joyfully cracking the

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skulls of Jewish newborns. Yet, the classic memoirs of the Nazi concentration camps concur with

Auschwitz survivor Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner: "There were few sadists. Not more than five or ten

percent."
40
Ubiquitous German sadism figures prominently, however, in Holocaust literature. Doing

double service, it "documents» the unique irrationality of The Holocaust as well as the fanatical

anti-Semitism of the perpetrators.

The singularity of
Fragments
lies in its depiction of life not during . but after The Holocaust. Adopted

by a Swiss family, little Binjamin endures yet new torments. He is trapped in a world of Holocaust

deniers. "Forget it — it's a bad dream," his mother screams. "It was only a bad dream.... You're not to

think about it any more." "Here in this country," he chafes, "everyone keeps saying I'm to forget, and

that it never happened, I only dreamed it. But they know all about it!"

Even at school, "the boys point at me and make fists and yell: 'He's raving, there's no such thing. Liar!

He's crazy, mad, he's an idiot.' " (An aside: They were right.) Pummeling him, chanting anti-Semitic

ditties, all the Gentile children line up against poor Binjamin, while the adults keep taunting, "You're

making it up!"

Driven to abject despair, Binjamin reaches a Holocaust epiphany. "The camp's still there — just

hidden and well disguised. They've taken off their uniforms and dressed themselves up in nice clothes

so as not to be recognized.... Just give them the gentlest of hints that maybe, possibly, you're a Jew —

and you'll feel it: these are the same people, and I'm sure of it. They can still kill, even out of

uniform."

More than a homage to Holocaust dogma,
Fragments is
the smoking gun: even in Switzerland —

neutral Switzerland — all the Gentiles want to kill the Jews.

Fragments
was widely hailed as a classic of Holocaust literature. It was translated into a dozen

languages and won the Jewish National Book Award, the
Jewish Quarterly
Prize, and the Prix de

Memoire de la Shoah. Star of documentaries, keynoter at Holocaust conferences and seminars,

fund-raiser for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wilkomirski quickly became a

Holocaust poster boy.

Acclaiming
Fragments
a "small masterpiece," Daniel Goldhagen was Wilkomirski's main academic

champion. Knowledgeable historians like Raul Hilberg, however, early on pegged
Fragments
as a

fraud. Hilberg also posed the right questions after the fraud's exposure: "How did this book pass as a

memoir in several publishing houses? How could it have brought Mr. Wilkomirski invitations to the

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as recognized universities? How come we have no

decent quality control when it comes to evaluating Holocaust material for publication?"
41

Half-fruitcake, half-mountebank, Wilkomirski, it turns out, spent the entire war in Switzerland. He is

not even Jewish. Listen, however, to the Holocaust industry postmortems:

Arthur Samuelson (publisher):
Fragments
"is a pretty cool book. . . It's only a fraud if you call it

non-fiction. I would then reissue it, in the fiction, category. Maybe it's not true — then he's a better

writer!"

Carol Brown Janeway (editor and translator): "If the charges . . . turn out to be correct, then what's at

issue are not empirical facts that can be checked, but spiritual facts that must be pondered. What

would be required is soul-checking, and that's an impossibility."

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There's more. Israel Gutman is a director of Yad Vashem and a Holocaust lecturer at Hebrew

University. He is also a former inmate of Auschwitz. According to Gutman, "it's not that important"