NOT SENT

January 25, 2021

Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your telephone call. I hope that you are comfortable and well, and that your days in Portsmouth are constructive. If I don't telephone, it's because of the thought that I might be interrupting much more important conversations with between you and your parents.

I myself am still mired in reflections and meditations about the past, about the 1930's and 1940's of my childhood. I spent several hours yesterday afternoon reading an essay by a literary acquaintance, one Jürgen Hartmann, who earns his living as a public relations officer for a town in Nord-Rhein-Westfalen, but whose avocation is historical research about the Duchy Lippe, the town Oerlinghausen, where both he and my father were born, and most specifically about the synagogue there, concerning which he has written a book which he is trying to get published.

The essay which I read yesterday, however, concerned something else, albeit related: namely the successful involvement by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police) of the Jews themselves in planning and carrying out the deportations to extermination camps which the Nazis considered "the final solution" in their genocide agenda.  The Nazis not only nominated individuals as "Judenräte" (Jewish counsellors) to be ambassadors to the population they were intent on destroying, but even more telling, they encouraged and coerced the formation of a model buraucracy "Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland" (National Coalition of Jews in Germany) whose members were ordered by the Gestapo, on pain of concentration camp incarceration, to select, groom, instruct and otherwise prepare the chosen members of their community for deportation, until in the end, the officials of the Coalition were deported to the extermination camps themselves.

Authors such as Hannah Arendt who have previously described these social phenomena have been very critical of the Jews who enlisted in the Coalition for "betraying" their brothers and sisters. Hartmann, although he is not a professional, is too fervently committed to history, to don the robe of a judge, at least in this venue.  As for myself, I ask myself (and you) whether I should be considered morally delinquent, for my interpretation that the Holocaust has never ended, that we are still in its midst, that we cannot extricate ourselves from it, and that where we are not its victims, we become its participants and we come to share its guilt. 

If I served on a draft board, I would feel responsible for the souls which I crippled by selecting them to become soldiers; if I served on a jury, I could never be persuaded of anyone's guilt, because I know that the government's attorneys are liars, and that the judges are their keepers and protectors. And now the problem compounds itself. I understand that today, in this country, I will not be directly punished for these sentiments, but I understand that they in effect exclude me from a society which functions by virtue of ideals, by the notion that all is well, and if not well now, can be made well in the foreseeable near future, by means of legislation and regulation.

As a keeper of such thoughts I consider myself insane, and if I stay out the insane asylum, its only because I am still sufficiently sane to keep my mouth shut.