Dear Marion,

Our discussion about the historicity, actuality and/or
immediacy of the Holocaust requires further elaboration.
Surely as an historian you must reconsider your
argument that to treat the Holocaust as history
is to remove it from the realm of description, analysis and
adjudication. I thought description and analysis of the
past was what history was all about. And to argue for
judgment in the absence of evidence, i.e. in the absence
of history, is an Alice in Wonderland approach to jurisprudence
which you and I as grateful legatees of the Anglo-American 
tradition of justice should have nothing to do with.

More interesting, and perhaps uniquely objectionable to
you is my comparison of a Harvard Teaching Hospital with a
Nazi Concentration Camp. I've conceded the umbra of hysteria
attending that definition. And yet I can't deny that the
physical injury inflicted by the Teaching Hospital on the
Chinese Cook was incomparably greater than any physical 
injury inflicted on my father in Buchenwald. And I can't
overlook the justification for the injury inflicted on
the Chinese Cook which was given by Dr. Allen and by Dr. Pollen,
and which was implicitly endorsed by Judge Garrity, that the
injury was justified because it was inflicted in a good cause.
This rationalization is the same as the justification given
by our recent Vice-President, speaking for millions of Americans,
for the torture of prisoners, the same justification incidentally 
given by the Nazis for the killing of gypsies, homosexuals,
Communists, Socialists and Jews. All for a good cause.
It is of course also the justification for all the killing
that is done in war for the sake of freedom and peace.

Even today, I remember the plaintive lamentations of my parents
that were the theme of my childhood: How were the Nazi atrocities
possible? Why did no one object? Why did presumably decent people
cooperate? As a child and as an adolescent I was impressed with
this challenge to an extent that I vowed to myself, never to 
succumb to such complicity. Now, thirty-nine years after I brought
my lawsuit, to prove to myself that I would never be a
concentration camp guard, I ask myself whether what I did was vain,
perhaps even hypocritical. In any case, it's now too late for me
to undo what I did.  I don't have all the answers. As a matter of
fact, I don't have any of them.

One key to the understanding of this dilemma is the distinction
between objectivity and subjectivity. Objectively there is a world
of difference between the Harvard Teaching Hospital and the Nazi
Concentration Camp. Subjectively, however, for the individual
potentially enmeshed in the two organizations, that difference
narrows. When I condone or consent to injury thoughtlessly and
deliberately inflicted on an inmate; when for personal advantage,
I lie and deceive in order to conceal that injustice, then
subjectively the differences between my conduct in the camp and
in the hospital vanish. The value and the meaning that flow from
my immediate experience constitute the essence of subjectivity.

A poem of Rilke's seems to me highly relevant. I quoted it in a letter
of September 10. My literary repertoire is limited, and I have no
choice but to repeat myself.

Ernste Stunde.

Wer jetzt weint irgendwo in der Welt,
ohne Grund weint in der Welt,
weint über mich.

Wer jetzt lacht irgendwo in der Nacht,
ohne Grund lacht in der Nacht,
lacht mich aus.

Wer jetzt geht irgendwo in der Welt,
ohne Grund geht in der Welt,
geht zu mir.

Wer jetzt stirbt irgendwo in der Welt,
ohne Grund stirbt in der Welt:
sieht mich an.

Rilke

If your need a translation, please let me know.
I ask you to pardon me for the intensity of this letter, as for
the almost insane intensity of so much else that I write.
Jochen