GRGR: Todorov and Clendinnen on the Holocaust

[Derek C. Maus]

On Tue, 21 Sep 1999, Richard Romeo wrote:

> > In most cases the Jews of the
> > Ghetto sacrificed themselves for a very different reason: to choose
> > the manner and moment of their own deaths, rather than to remain
> > passive victims of systematic extermination.
> > "For Todorov the latter mode of heroism is morally preferable.

> A slight over-generalization.  

Or just plain wrong, depending on whose account you believe. Miron
Bialoszewski's book _Memoir Of The Warsaw Uprising_ and many of the
documentary histories from the time state that the Judenrat had very
little choice in the matter of sacrifice and were forced regularly to make
hideous decisions about which 1,000 of their citizens to turn over to the
Nazis for deportation to the camps. They did what they could in a
situation that had no "preferable" outcome, which is what much of the
literature of the Holocaust claims is the ultimate horror of the whole
event. 

Borowski's stories in _This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen_ also
illustrate this point rather clearly. He claims that the Nazi's grand
scheme in pitting the prisoners against each other in a relatively futile
and irrational battle for survival was to remove the possibility of
heroism entirely, since it made everyone complicit in the killing,
willingly or not. This realization apparently eventually led him to commit
suicide three years after writing his landmark stories. 

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